E. E. Sheng

"Do our minds … depend on other minds?" In Socializing Minds, Martin Lenz challenges the view that an affirmative answer to this question—"the idea that our minds are intersubjective or social"—is "a fairly recent one, developed against the individualism of early modern philosophers" (1). In three case studies on Spinoza, Locke, and Hume (the book's three chapters), Lenz argues that each held an intersubjective model of the mind: Spinoza the "metaphysical model," Locke the "linguistic model," and Hume the "medical model." The three case studies are framed by an introduction setting out the book's conceptual framework and the historiography that it challenges, and a conclusion. To its author's knowledge the first... Read More.

What is it for a realist metaethical theory to be agent-focused? Is Huang’s metaethical realism agent-focused, as he claims? After dismissing as unviable some other ways of making sense of distinctively metaethical (rather than first-order) agent-focused-ness, this commentary explores the thought that for a realist metaethical theory to be agent-focused is for it to ground the realist metaphysical and semantic status of moral evaluations of actions in the realist metaphysical and semantic status of moral evaluations of agents. I argue that Huang’s theory is not—and, given his motivations, need not be—one of this kind, but rather is simply the conjunction of an agent-focused first-order ethical theory with a realist metaethical theory that isn’t distinctively metaethically agent-focused in any interesting way.

The history of the thesis of the guise of the good between Kant and Anscombe is not well understood. This article examines a notable disagreement over the thesis during this period, between Green and Sidgwick. It shows that Green accepts versions of the thesis concerning action and desire in one sense of 'desire', and that Sidgwick rejects the thesis concerning both action and desire. It then considers why Green accepts the thesis, and assesses Sidgwick's criticism of Green. Despite the appearance of a mere clash of intuitions, an interesting rationale for the thesis can be found in Green’s theory of free will and moral responsibility, of which I defend a broadly compatibilist interpretation.

This essay defends the moral permissibility, as a form of punishment, of banishment, namely the exclusion by a state of a citizen from its territory. I begin by outlining the prima facie case for banishment, consider for whom it may be appropriate, and acknowledge constraints on its permissibility. I then defend banishment against the main objections in the literature to banishment or the related measure of denationalization (stripping citizens of their citizenship): impermissible permanency; excessive severity; ineffectiveness; unfairness to those who are punished and the creation of two classes of citizens; unfairness among states; and that banishment without denationalization is incompatible with the nature of citizenship. I adopt a ‘cantilever strategy’: if incarceration is permissible notwithstanding a certain objection, so is banishment. In concluding, I sympathetically discuss the view that, despite the moral permissibility of banishment, the power to banish should not be instituted because of the risk of abuse.

De Clercq (2012) proposes a strategy for denying purported graph-theoretic counterexamples to the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII), by assuming that any vertex is contained by multiple graphs. Duguid (2016) objects that De Clercq fails to show that the relevant vertices are discernible. Duguid is right, but De Clercq’s strategy can be rescued. This note clarifies what assumptions about graph ontology are needed by De Clercq, and shows that, given those assumptions, any two vertices are weakly discernible, and so are not counterexamples to the version of PII that requires only weak discernibility.