Leonardo Moauro

This paper defends a projectivist reading of Spinoza’s theory of evaluative judgment—his account of how we come to form judgments of good and evil. Projectivism, roughly, states that although we represent value as an objective feature of the world, this representation in fact originates in some non-perceptual feature of cognition. Spinoza states clearly that our judgments of value depend, in some sense, on our desires. I argue that the phenomenon of projection explains this dependence: we project our desires onto things and thus represent them as good and evil. The paper develops this thesis to a full extent, offering a historically informed account of projectivist views, delineating Spinoza’s account of the mechanism of projection, locating the place of the affects within this account, and squaring this all with the role Spinoza seems to grant to reason in the cognition of value.

Spinoza claims that the good is what leads us to perfection. Yet he also affirms that whether we judge something to be good depends on whether or not we desire it. It is thus unclear whether Spinoza ultimately analyzes value in terms of perfection or in terms of desire. This is a well-known debate in the literature, but its dialectical complexity is underappreciated. Defenders of the first interpretation must explain not only why Spinoza might analyze the good in terms of perfection, but also why he claims that our judgments of value depend on our desires. They standardly argue that, for Spinoza, our desires offer epistemic justification for these judgments. In this paper, however, I argue that this reading fails. My argument supports the views on which desire plays a role in Spinoza’s account of the nature of value itself, and not merely in his value epistemology.

Spinoza is often described as an ethical perfectionist—one who accepts an account of the good centered on the development of our natural capacities. Perfectionists typically accept a perfectionist theory of value, in which the properties of good and evil are grounded in a normative property of perfection. Yet I argue that Spinoza rejects a perfectionist theory of value because he believes it conflicts with the doctrine of necessitarianism. This leads him to conclude that attributions of perfection in ethical contexts must be regarded as fictions. If Spinoza is indeed an ethical perfectionist, his perfectionism must be grounded in a theory of value that is not itself perfectionist.

Matthew Leisinger (2020) argues that previous interpretations of John Locke’s account of akrasia (or weakness of will) are mistaken and offers a new interpretation in their place. In this essay, we aim to recapitulate part of this debate, defend a previously articulated interpretation by responding to Leisinger’s criticisms of it, and explain why Leisinger’s own interpretation faces textual and philosophical problems that are serious enough to disqualify it as an accurate reconstruction of Locke’s views. In so doing, we aim to shed further light on Locke’s views on the various ways in which humans are prone to err in their pursuit of happiness.

In the Ethics, Spinoza famously rejects freedom of the will. He also offers an error theory for why many believe, falsely, that the will is free. Standard accounts of his arguments for these claims focus on their efficacy against incompatibilist views of free will. For Spinoza, the will cannot be free since it is determined by an infinite chain of external causes. And the pervasive belief in free will arises from a structural limitation of our self-knowledge: because we are aware of our actions but unaware of their causes, we suppose that we alone must be responsible for them. Yet I argue that the standard accounts miss a further element of Spinoza’s arguments that also targets compatibilist views on which free will is consistent with a specific kind of determination—namely, self-determination in accordance with our value judgments. For Spinoza, we are misled not only in supposing that our actions lack external determination but also in thinking that they are determined by our representations of value. In fact, our actions are determined by our appetites, which are blind to our value judgments. And the pervasive belief that our actions are determined by such judgments arises from the projection of value onto the objects we seek. As he denies us free will, then, Spinoza also denies us a capacity central to agency—the capacity to determine our actions in accordance with our ideas of the good. This makes his arguments against free will more consequential, and more radical, than commonly assumed.

Starting in the second edition of the Essay, Locke becomes interested in the phenomenon of akrasia, or weakness of will. As he conceives it, akrasia occurs when we will something contrary to what we acknowledge to be our greater good. This commitment represents an important shift from the first edition of the Essay, where Locke argues that the will is always determined by a judgement of our greater good. But traces of the first-edition view are present even in the second edition, so much so that it is unclear whether Locke is entitled to an explanation of akrasia at all. In this essay, we propose a new interpretation of Locke’s account of akrasia, one that mediates between his seemingly conflicting commitments. We believe that this interpretation represents an improvement over past interpretations, which make Locke’s conception of akrasia too weak to do the work he intends for it. Moreover, getting Locke’s account of akrasia right allows us to gain clarity on his view of the will, a subtle and ultimately quite plausible part of his moral psychology.

The nature of our obligation to obey the law has consistently been an important object of philosophical dispute. Fair play based theories of obligation purport to show that it is unfair for us to benefit from an organizational scheme (such as the state) without contributing our fair share to the provision of goods. George Klosko is a major proponent of this approach. I develop his particular version of the argument from fair play into a defensible theory of citizens’ obligation to obey the laws of their state.