Joshua Glasgow

A long-standing and passionate divide among sports fans concerns whether the team’s success or failure can justifiably impact the fan’s loyalty. May one be a fair-weather fan or even a foul-weather fan, or one must be a more loyal, “all-weather” fan who will root for the team regardless of whether it experiences success or failure? Recent arguments contend that fair- and foul-weather fandom are virtuous in certain ways that all-weather fandom is not. This article defends the all-weather fan along two dimensions. First, it argues that the virtues of the fair- and foul-weather fan, including moral resistance, humility, and resilience, are also available to the all-weather fan. Second, all-weather fandom is shown to enjoy special virtues. In addition to already established virtues such as loyalty, this article articulates a previously unexplored virtue of the all-weather fan: by aligning the fan’s first-order allegiance to the team with a second-order commitment to the first-order allegiance itself, the all-weather fan’s vulnerabilities are vertically integrated. In this way, all-weather fandom looks much like the fullest forms of friendship and love.

Many think that, in addition to what happens to us in any given moment, our overall well-being can also be affected by what happens to us across individual moments. One explanation of this phenomenon is that things simply getting better for us is good for us, while things getting worse for us is itself bad for us. While this view has received earlier defenses, it has also received a series of criticisms over roughly the last decade. This chapter responds to those critiques in defense of the view that the “mere shape” of a life or other episode has value or disvalue for us. Topics discussed include how to make room for narrative and hedonic value on such a picture; whether to locate the value of the overall episode in one particular moment or holistically; which episodes of this sort are relevant for lifetime well-being; and how this view is compatible with temporally neutrality.

This chapter investigates how we can be responsible for actions and attitudes from which we are fully alienated. Such attitudes include the implicit biases that many good-hearted people wholeheartedly disavow but nonetheless seem to harbor. Several theories are examined, including among others the real-self theory proposed by Harry Frankfurt, the views of T. M. Scanlon, and Nomy Arpaly’s account. Extant theories seem unable to accommodate certain compelling intuitions. To accommodate these considered judgments, the variantist thesis advanced in this chapter is that responsibility can shift depending on the content of the action or attitude, and more fundamentally on the harm done in or by the act or attitude in question.

Die fünf Bände enthalten die überarbeiteten Fassungen aller Haupt- und Sektionsvorträge des IX. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, der im März 2000 an der Berliner Humboldt-Universität stattfand. Die Beiträge gliedern sich in die folgenden Sektionen: Der vorkritische Kant, Kants Theoretische Philosophie, Kants Praktische Philosophie, Kants Ästhetik, Kants Religionsphilosophie, Kants Geschichtsphilosophie, Kants Rechts-, Staats- und Politische Philosophie, Kants Anthropologie, Kants Naturphilosophie und das Opus postumum, Kants Logik, Kant und die Aufklärung, Kant, Deutscher Idealismus und Neukantianismus, Kant und die Folgen. Zu den Autoren zählen u.a. Manfred Baum, Mario Caimi, Konrad Cramer, Jean Ferrari, Eckhardt Förster, Michael Friedman, Simone Goyard-Fabre, Paul Guyer, Gary Hatfield, Agnes Heller, Dieter Henrich, Otfried Höffe, Wolfgang Kersting, Béatrice Longuenesse, Onora O'Neill, Robert Pippin, Gerold Prauss und Michael Wolff.

Why should we strive to be important? Does it make our lives go better if we are especially significant? This book argues that the common impulse to seek exceptionally high levels of significance is misguided. One reason why is that we cannot reach cosmic significance. We do not have the size, duration, or power that would allow us to be that important. Even the value that we do contribute to the universe, our loving and rationality and pain and pleasure, are in short supply. So our significance has built-in limitations. What is more, being exceptionally significant would not be to our personal benefit: it does not advance our well-being, our meaning in life, or any other of our interests. In fact, we have ample reason to embrace our modest levels of mattering: if we do not matter very much, then we are liberated to go about our lives without worry, to the same extent. We should thus feel good about our unexceptional lives. This book is a celebration of being ordinary.

This article summarizes the main arguments of the book The Solace: Finding Value in Death through Gratitude for Life. The main themes discussed include how death can be bad, in a concurrentist-deprivationist way, for the one who dies, and how gratitude can sometimes be holistic and target even bad objects, when those bad objects are part of what are identifiedas meaningful goods. Since life is one of those meaningful goods, and since death is a part of life, we can find value in death. Rationally affirming that value takes the form of solace rather than of other affirmations like gratitude.

It is widely thought that we have good reason to try to be important. Being important or doing significant things is supposed to add value to our lives. In particular, it is supposed to make our lives exceptionally meaningful. This essay develops an alternative view. After exploring what importance is and how it might relate to meaning in life, a series of cases are presented to validate the perspective that being important adds no meaning to our lives. The meaningful life does need valuable projects, activities, and relationships. But no added meaning is secured by those projects, activities, and relationships being especially significant. The extraordinary life has no more meaning than the ordinary life.

This chapter examines when a word’s meaning can change. On the view explored here, the meaning of a term is fixed by language users having certain dispositions to use the term in certain ways. Consequently, meanings change—concepts shift—when the relevant dispositions change. After the view is articulated, it is put to use defending descriptivism from some recent objections. Finally, this chapter examines the extent to which terms really replace meanings at all—conceptual revolution—or just have their meanings and references change shape—conceptual evolution.

Mourning the loss of loved ones can be one of the hardest things we go through. But what if we changed the way we thought about it, and learned to find positive value in death as part of life? This book examines how we can take solace in the fact that we and our loved ones will die, surprising or impossible as that may seem. Along the way, it investigates the nature of gratitude, how good and bad relate, and enduring theories surrounding death. Based on philosopher Joshua Glasgow's experience confronting his mother's battle with cancer, and his search for a meaningful, comforting way to think about it, the book will appeal to readers who confront the loss of loved ones and those who worry about their own death--in other words, everyone.

© Mind Association 2018This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...It starts when someone, often a highly visible someone, challenges a widely used and commonly accepted idea. In stage two, defenders of conventional wisdom recruit complicated and unexpected theories to save common sense. Statistics may be involved. Jargon is likely. In the third stage, the common-sense-preserving theories are themselves critiqued. At this point, some may rekindle the proposal to eliminate the idea. Others recommend previously unnoticed compromises.And then it happens. In the tangled woods of mature academic discourse, one or two lonely thinkers howl above the blowing winds: ‘Wait!’ they cry, ‘That original, basic folk theory wasn’t so bad to begin with!’A few decades ago, the idea of race entered this familiar cycle. K. Anthony Appiah and Naomi Zack argued, for very different...

Despite all the attention given to Kant’s universalizability tests, one crucial aspect of Kant’s thought is often overlooked. Attention to this issue, I will argue, helps us resolve two serious problems for Kant’s ethics. Put briefly, the first problem is this: Kant, despite his stated intent to the contrary, doesn’t seem to use universalization in arguing for duties to oneself, and, anyway, it is not at all clear why duties to oneself should be grounded on a procedure that envisions a world in which everyone wills the contrary of those duties. The second, more global problem is that if we follow Barbara Herman in holding that Kantian ethics can provide a structure for moral deliberation, we need an interpretation of the universalization procedure that unproblematically allows it to generate something like prima facie duties to guide that deliberation; but it is not at all clear that we have such an interpretation. I argue here that if we expand our limited way of thinking about universalization, we can solve the first problem and work towards a solution to the second. We can begin by recalling that Kant’s ‘Law of Nature’ formulation (FLN) of the Categorical Imperative obligates us to ‘act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature’ (G, 421).

Recently the idea that race is biologically real has gained more traction. One argument against this claim is that the populations identified by science do not sufficiently map onto the concept of race as deployed in the relevant racial discourse, namely folk racial discourse. Call that concept the concept of race-f. Robin Andreasen (2005) argues that this "mismatch" criticism fails, on a variety of grounds including: ordinary folk semantically defer to scientists; scientists can disagree about facts; historians disagree about the origins of the term 'race'; 'race' has had a diversity of meanings; some of those meanings privileges geography over visible traits; and that the scientific definition of 'race' is autonomous from the folk definition of 'race.' It is argued here that all of these responses to the mismatch criticism do not succeed, and that the last in fact vindicates it. Similar arguments to the last, autonomy argument, are also examined.

We ordinarily think that, keeping all else equal, a life that improves is better than one that declines. However, it has proven challenging to account for such value judgments: some, such as Fred Feldman and Daniel Kahneman, have simply denied that these judgments are rational, while others, such as Douglas Portmore, Michael Slote, and David Velleman, have proposed justifications for the judgments that appear to be incomplete or otherwise problematic. This article identifies problems with existing accounts and suggests a novel alternative theory: what best accounts for our preference for an uphill over a downhill life (and many other episodes) is that losses of momentary value are themselves bad and gains in momentary value are themselves good

Contemporary Kant scholarship generally takes 'humanity' in Kant's ethical writings to refer to beings with rational capacities. However, his claims that only the good will has unqualified goodness and that humanity is unconditionally valuable suggests that humanity might be the good will. This problem seems to have infiltrated some prominent scholarship, and Richard Dean has recently argued that, in fact, humanity is indeed the good will. This paper defends, and tries to make sense of, the more conventional view that humanity and the good will are distinct

Sometimes we descriptively name that which we condemn. “Hate crime” is such a name: it not only identifies the crime, it also refers to what we think is morally unique about the crime—its hatefulness morally sets it apart from other actions. On one theory of terrorism, “terrorism” is a similar name. What is morally special about terrorism, according to this view, is built right into the name itself: it aims to terrorize. C all this the straightforward analysis of terrorism. The straightforward view is inconsistent with a number of recent attempts to identify what, if anything, is morally distinctive about terrorism. Some are skeptical that terrorism really should be thought of as morally unique, on the grounds that its morally relevant properties are exhausted by more general qualities, such as causing harm, being coercive, or violating autonomy. David Rodin, for example, believes that there is no morally relevant quality typically displayed by terrorism that is not also found in acts of conventional war. Others do think that terrorism is morally distinctive, but they nonetheless conclude that its morally distinctive feature is something other than its aim of producing fear. For example, we will see below that Robert Goodin, Jeff McMahan, and Samuel Scheffler maintain that the morally distinctive feature of terrorism is not the aiming to cause fear itself, but an intention to use that fear to bring about certain further effects. For Scheffler the unique problem lies in terrorism’s use of fear to undermine order in the society that the terrorist targets; for Goodin it is the terrorist’s use of fear for sociopolitical ends that is especially troubling; McMahan, finally, holds that the morally special aspect of terrorism is that it is the intentional harming of innocent people in order to intimidate and coerce others.