Hannah Altehenger

Given the current and future suffering associated with human-made climate change and the lack of political action in response to it, it seems only natural to feel despair. However, despair has a bad reputation among climate ethicists and in the wider public. In this paper, we will push back against this view and argue that there is considerable value in climate despair. More specifically, we shall maintain that climate despair can be valuable in two respects. First, it is epistemically valuable because it constitutes a particularly apt way of recognizing the severity of what has already happened and is likely to happen because of human-made climate change, and because it can provide a “reflective break” that allows us to rearrange our values and find new strategies to tackle climate change. Second, climate despair can have various valuable expressive and signaling functions. Most importantly, perhaps, it can send the message that the despairing person cares about important moral values and norms, and remind us all of how big a moral problem climate change, in fact, is.

Self-control is generally regarded as a valuable capacity. However, the value of _directly resisting temptations_ (a central part of our commonsense notion of self-control) has recently come under attack. Directly resisting temptations – as opposed to avoiding them – has been claimed to have several drawbacks, such as being an inefficient way of dealing with temptations, not contributing to an agent’s well-being, or even causing harmful “mental fragmentation.” In fact, some claim that most or all of the values of self-control can be achieved, not by struggling to directly resist temptations, but rather by steering clear of them. In this paper, we seek to push back against this trend. We argue that there are specific values attached to directly resisting temptations that cannot be secured by avoiding them. Drawing on recent psychological evidence, we suggest that a significant part of the value of ‘direct resistance’ is grounded in the fact that it involves _the exertion of effort_. Due to this feature, we contend, directly resisting temptations can both make our activities feel more meaningful and provide us with a valuable form of self-knowledge.

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the topic of moral responsibility for ‘non-ideal’ agents. And yet, one important type of ‘non-ideal’ agent, the narcissistic agent, has not received much attention. In this paper, I seek to fill this gap. My focus is on psychological entitlement, a feature that has been largely overlooked. I argue that this feature impairs narcissistic agents’ moral competence. This is because it both causes them to form distorted moral assessments in a wide range of situations and impairs their ability to use feedback from others to correct these distortions. I conclude that narcissistic agents have mitigated responsibility owing to their impaired moral competence. As I furthermore show, this does not entail that we simply need to accept the damage they do. Rather, we may take steps to protect ourselves against the destructive effects of narcissistic entitlement, both on a personal and on a societal level.

AI systems, like self-driving cars, healthcare robots, or Autonomous Weapon Systems, already play an increasingly important role in our lives and will do so to an even greater extent in the near future. This raises a fundamental philosophical question: who is morally responsible when such systems cause unjustified harm? In the paper, we argue for the admittedly surprising claim that some of these systems can themselves be morally responsible for their conduct in an important and everyday sense of the term—the attributability sense. More specifically, relying on work by Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder (In Praise of Desire, OUP 2014), we propose that the behavior of these systems can manifest their ‘quality of will’ and thus be regarded as something they can be blameworthy for. We develop this position in detail, justify some of its crucial presuppositions, and defend it against potential objections.

Although it seems commonsensical to say that one cannot merely have too little, but also too much self-control, the philosophical debate has largely focused on failures of self-control rather than its potential excesses. There are a few notable exceptions. But, by and large, the issue of having too much self-control has not received a lot of attention. This paper takes another careful look at the commonsensical position that it is possible to have too much self-control. One key insight that will emerge is that there are certain important confusions surrounding this view. Once these are removed, however, we are led to the conclusion that there need not be anything intrinsically problematic about being a paragon of self-control.

As Christian List (2021) has recently argued, the increasing arrival of powerful AI systems that operate autonomously in high-stakes contexts creates a need for “future-proofing” our regulatory frameworks, i.e., for reassessing them in the face of these developments. One core part of our regulatory frameworks that dominates our everyday moral interactions is blame. Therefore, “future-proofing” our extant regulatory frameworks in the face of the increasing arrival of powerful AI systems requires, among others things, that we ask whether it makes sense to extend our blaming practices to these systems. In the paper, we argue for the admittedly surprising thesis that this question should be answered in the affirmative: contrary to what one might initially think, it can make a lot of sense to blame AI systems, since, as we furthermore argue, many of the important functions that are fulfilled by blaming humans can also be served by blaming AI systems. The paper concludes that this result gives us a good pro tanto reason to extend our blame practices to AI systems.

Prima facie, it seems highly plausible to suppose that there is some kind of constitutive relationship between self-control and the self, i.e., that self-control is “control at the service of the self” or even “control by the self.” This belief is not only attractive from a pre-theoretical standpoint, but it also seems to be supported by theoretical reasons. In particular, there is a natural fit between a certain attractive approach to self-control—the so-called “divided mind approach”—and a certain well-established approach to the self—the so-called “deep self” approach. I argue, however, that this initial impression is misleading: on closer inspection, the combination of the divided mind approach to self-control with the deep self approach fails to provide us with a theoretical foundation for the claim that self-control is constitutively linked to the self. I show that, in an interesting twist, combining these two approaches actually supports the opposite claim, leading us to the view that self-control and the self can come apart, and, more specifically, that we sometimes exercise self-control without our self or even against our self.

Most of us have had the experience of resisting our currently strongest desire, for example, resisting the desire to eat another cookie when eating another cookie is what we most want to do. The puzzle of synchronic self‐control, however, says that this is impossible: an agent cannot ever resist her currently strongest desire. The paper argues that one prominent solution to this puzzle – the solution offered by Al Mele – faces a serious ‘mismatch problem’, which ultimately undermines its plausibility. It is furthermore argued that this problem can be avoided if we adopt a ‘divided mind’ solution instead.

According to a widely endorsed claim, intentional action is brought about by an agent’s desires in accordance with these desires’ respective motivational strength. As Jay Wallace has argued, though, this “hydraulic model” of the aetiology of intentional action has a serious flaw: it fails to leave room for genuine deliberative agency. Drawing on recent developments in the debate on self-control, the article argues that Wallace’s criticism can be addressed once we combine the hydraulic model with a so-called “divided mind” account of self-control.

In Being Realistic About Reasons,T.M. Scanlon develops a non-naturalistic realist account of normative reasons. A crucial part of that account is Scanlon’s contention that there is no deep epistemological problem for non-naturalistic realists, and that the method of reflective equilibrium suffices to explain the possibility of normative knowledge. In this critical notice we argue that this is not so: on a realist picture, normative knowledge presupposes a significant correlation between distinct entities, namely between normative beliefs and normative facts. This correlation calls for an explanation. We show that Scanlon does not have the resources to offer such an explanation.