Marcel Jahn

Both scientists and philosophers have increasingly focused on the prospect of moral neuroenhancement—the use of neurotechnologies or psychoactive substances to facilitate moral improvement. Recent scholarship distinguishes between two main approaches: direct moral neuroenhancement, which seeks to implant specific moral beliefs, motives, or behaviors, and indirect moral neuroenhancement, which aims to enhance capacities such as moral reasoning, conceptual understanding, or self-control, enabling individuals to arrive at better moral judgments through their own deliberation. Several philosophers have argued that the direct approach is ethically impermissible, as it risks undermining moral autonomy and suppressing valuable disagreement. The indirect approach, by contrast, is taken to avoid these concerns and is widely regarded as ethically permissible or even required. In this paper, we introduce a novel challenge for the project of moral neuroenhancement—the discernibility challenge: for any given intervention, it is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to determine whether it truly qualifies as indirect rather than direct. We demonstrate this by examining a range of experimental designs intended to discern between these two types of interventions, arguing that the evidence they produce is ultimately insufficient for this task. The discernibility challenge, we propose, exposes a profound epistemic uncertainty with notable implications for the ethical permissibility of moral neuroenhancement: if we cannot reliably distinguish permissible (indirect) from impermissible (direct) interventions, we lack a crucial epistemic basis for ethically justifying their use.

Philosophers are increasingly recognizing models as vital tools for conducting normative inquiry, emphasizing their relevance in fields like normative ethics, formal epistemology, decision theory, computer science, and economics. Yet, the current discourse on such normative models rests on a crucial oversight: virtually all scholars in the field fail to acknowledge that normative models – depending on their precise role – require very different treatment and pose unique theoretical problems. To rectify this shortcoming, this paper proposes a typology that classifies normative models according to the aims they serve. We distinguish four types: characterizing, analytical, testing, and justifying normative models. The typology offers several theoretical benefits. First, it allows scholars to more effectively utilize a modeling methodology in normative inquiry. Second, it helps to uncover the unique theoretical challenges that different types of models pose. Third, the typology provides the foundation for a more productive debate on the success conditions of normative models.

In many situations, there is not a single action we ought to do, but rather a range of permissible options from which we can choose. Although this normative latitude arises in countless decisions – from minor choices to those that profoundly shape our lives – existing philosophical accounts have not adequately captured its prevalence and significance. As the first book-length treatment of the subject, this monograph seeks to offer a comprehensive theory of normative latitude. Its central claim is that latitude frequently arises when the reasons for and against different options stand in a special comparative relation called parity. The book demonstrates that parity is far more widespread than previously recognized and identifies several overlooked conditions under which parity emerges. It also explores how an agent’s epistemic perspective and the diachronic structure of decision-making are crucial to explaining why latitude is so prevalent. Overall, the book provides novel insights into the normative structure of our practical decision-making and will appeal to anyone interested in theories of practical rationality, normative reasons, and the philosophy of action.

Perspectivism about reasons is commonly understood as the view that normative reasons depend on an agent's epistemic perspective: a fact counts as a reason only if it is epistemically accessible to the agent. This paper argues that perspectivists' near-exclusive focus on an agent's epistemic perspective obscures another important dimension of perspective dependence – namely, that reasons can also depend on an agent's rational perspective. Specifically, I propose that, in addition to epistemic accessibility, a further necessary condition for a fact to qualify as a reason is its rational accessibility – that is, the agent must have decisive reason to access the fact. Recognizing the rational accessibility of reasons offers considerable theoretical leverage: it substantially improves the two leading perspectivist accounts, with notable implications for the broader dialectic, and it promises to illuminate central normative phenomena, such as key instances of normative latitude.

The global commons have come to play an increasingly prominent role in the field of international security as scholars seek to better understand the causes and consequences of interstate cooperation, competition, and conflict in political spaces that lie beyond sovereign jurisdiction. In this piece, we make the case that by grouping all extraterritorial spaces into a single, not further differentiated conceptual category, the notion of the “global commons” as it is presently employed obscures important variation in the way these spaces are governed. Specifically, we argue that there exist two distinct types of spaces that legally do not belong to any one state: those that all states are effectively able to freely use for their own strategic purposes; and those that are de facto dominated and thus defy the ideal of universal accessibility their status as a global common supposedly entails. The updated conceptual framework we develop in response—which explicitly distinguishes between two distinct types of extraterritorial spaces—promises to advance security studies research on the global commons in several ways: it helps scholars avoid the issue of causal heterogeneity which current conceptual foundations introduce into causal analysis; it facilitates normative discussions about the global commons and their political future; and it produces novel insights into the governance problems policymakers will confront when seeking to maintain states’ access to extraterritorial spaces in the new age of great power competition.

Political methodologists have long sought to develop standards that can guide political scientists in the process of concept formation. Yet, the methodology literature has struggled to provide satisfactory solutions to the fundamental problem of conceptualization: for any given concept, there are a large number of attributes one could postulate as its defining characteristics, and it is unclear how to adjudicate between different possible definitions. We leverage the fact that the theory within which a concept appears places important restrictions on concept formation: conceptualizations entail ontological claims that need to be consistent with those of the theories in which they appear.

In this paper, we explicate an underappreciated distinction between two conceptions of valuing. According to the first conception, which we call the surface-account, valuing something is exclusively a matter of having certain behavioral, cognitive, and emotional dispositions. In contrast, the second conception, which we call the layer-account, posits that valuing is constituted by the presence of certain representational mental states underlying those dispositions. In the first part of the paper, we introduce the distinction in proper detail and show that the accounts have different implications regarding the valuings of agents. In the second part, we situate the accounts within the extant philosophical literature. First, we relate them to the recent debate between so-called dispositionalists and representationalists about the nature of beliefs and point out that this debate can help anticipate some of the main dialectical fault lines to be expected between surface- and layer-theorists. Second, we examine the contemporary meta-ethical debate on conceptualizing valuing, indicate that scholars have largely ignored the distinction introduced here, and outline that this oversight has substantial theoretical costs: as we show, key arguments within the meta-ethical debate require thorough re-evaluation in light of the proposed distinction. The third part of the paper illustrates the theoretical leverage of the distinction for practical research by exploring its implications for behavioral welfare economics.

There seems to exist a general consensus on how to conceptualize cooperation in the field of international relations (IR). We argue that this impression is deceptive. In practice, scholars working on the causes of international cooperation have come to implicitly employ various understandings of what cooperation is. Yet, an explicit debate about the discipline's conceptual foundations never materialized, and whatever discussion occurred did so only latently and without much dialog across theoretical traditions. In this paper, we develop an updated conceptual framework by exploring the nature of these differing understandings and situating them within broader theoretical conversations about the role of cooperation in IR. Drawing on an array of studies in IR and philosophy, our framework distinguishes between three distinct types of cooperative state interactions – cooperation through tacit policy coordination (‘minimal’ cooperation), cooperation through explicit policy coordination (‘thin’ cooperation), and cooperation based on joint action (‘thick’ cooperation). The framework contributes to better theorization about cooperation in two main ways: it allows scholars across theoretical traditions to identify important sources of disagreement and previously unnoticed theoretical common ground; and the conceptual disaggregation it provides grants scholars crucial theoretical leverage by enabling type-specific causal theorization.

In this paper, we explore an under-investigated question concerning the class of formal models that aim at providing normative guidance. We call such models normative models. In particular, we examine the question of how normative models can successfully exert normative guidance. First, we highlight the absence of a discussion of this question – which is surprising given the extensive debate about the success conditions of descriptive models – and motivate its importance. Second, we introduce and discuss two potential accounts of the success conditions of normative models. Our tentative conclusion is that the second account is more promising.

In this paper, I argue that the disjunction elimination rule presupposes the principle that a true disjunction contains at least one true disjunct. However, in some contexts such as supervaluationism or quantum logic, we have good reasons to reject this principle. Hence, disjunction elimination is restricted in at least one respect: it is not applicable to disjunctions for which this principle does not hold. The insight that disjunction elimination presupposes the principle that a true disjunction contains at least one true disjunct is applied to two arguments which argue for this very principle. I show that these arguments are rule-circular since they rest on disjunction elimination. I claim that rule-circularity better explains why the arguments fail than the explanations provided by Rumfitt (2015), which, for instance, rely on controversial principles about truth.