Harjit Bhogal

Philosophers have had a lot to say about moral blameworthiness, but much less about moral praiseworthiness. In this book, Zoë Johnson King bucks the trend: she offers a conceptual framework with which to theorize about praiseworthiness in its own right, and a comprehensive theory of the types of thing for which people can be praiseworthy and the substantive conditions under which they are praiseworthy for things of each type. Johnson King argues that what people are fundamentally praiseworthy for—what makes them good people, to the extent that they are—are what they care about and what they try to do. She then argues that people can also be praiseworthy for what they successfully do and bring about to the extent that their actions are deliberate and are coming from a good place. In developing this account, Johnson King draws on resources from moral metaphysics, moral epistemology, moral metasemantics, and philosophy of action, as well as from the philosophical literature on agency and responsibility. She then uses her account to shed light on some practical issues concerning improving one’s own praiseworthiness by working on oneself, the prevalence of moral luck, and the impact of oppression and injustice on praiseworthiness. The final chapter turns from praiseworthiness to the ethics of praise: Johnson King takes the backlash against praise of essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study that illustrates an array of pitfalls around which one must delicately skirt when attempting to praise the praiseworthy.

I provide a new account of what it is for the laws of nature to govern the evolution of events. I locate the source of governance in the content of law propositions. As such, I do not appeal to primitive notions of ground, essence, or production to characterize governance. After introducing the account, I use it to outline previously unrecognized varieties of governance. I also specify that laws must govern to have two theoretical virtues: explanatory power as well as a theoretical virtue I call expansiveness. A theory is expansive, roughly, when it can do more with less.

Humean reductionism about laws of nature is the view that the laws reduce to the total distribution of non-modal or categorical properties in spacetime. A worry about Humean reductionism is that it cannot motivate the characteristic modal resilience of laws under counterfactual suppositions and that it thus generates wrong verdicts about certain nested counterfactuals. In this paper, we defend Humean reductionism by motivating an account of the modal resilience of Humean laws that gets nested counterfactuals right.