Michael Bruckner

Pragmatic theories of epistemic normativity ground norms of belief formation in true belief’s instrumental value as a means to promoting our desires. I argue that advocates of this view face a dilemma: either they agree that epistemic norms prescribe truth-conducive procedures of belief formation, which is untenable against the backdrop of their theory, or they dismiss the truth-conduciveness criterion and thereby render themselves incapable of explaining an intuition that most of us share: in cases where false beliefs generate the same pragmatic output as true ones, truth-conducive procedures of belief formation are still preferable to fallacious ones. After establishing this objection, I make a case for the position that regards the intrinsic value of true belief as the source of epistemic normativity by showing how it meets the challenge that pragmatism falls victim to.

The eternal anger puzzle invites us to explain how fitting anger about a past event (e.g., an injustice, a betrayal) can cease to be fitting, even though the reason that makes it fitting is constituted by an unchangeable fact about the past. The responses that receive the most attention tend to require revisions to philosophical orthodoxy or pre-theoretical intuition. They attribute fittingness-regulating powers to processes that are not standardly presumed to have them, change the directionality of anger from looking backward to looking forward or sideways, bite the bullet and affirm that all fitting anger remains fitting forever, or deny that the puzzle’s explanandum can be explained at all. I defend a more conservative solution. According to it, backward-looking anger simply ceases to be fitting when and because its duration makes it disproportional to how infuriating its object was. I argue that this solution follows from assumptions that no party to the debate can easily reject. I also highlight virtues that adjudicate in its favor. Chief among them are that it respects the puzzle’s own terms and that it stays true to the trend of explaining facts about fittingness by reference to qualities that reside in the attitudes’ objects.

‘Semantic externalism’ is the view that the thought and speech of internally identical subjects can have different contents, depending on facts about their environments. ‘Semantic internalism’ is the negation of this view. The details of these two views depend on the definition of ‘internal identity’. Katalin Farkas has shown that the traditional definition of internal identity as physical identity is too permissive: it misclassifies certain bodily states as internal. She has proposed defining internal identity as phenomenal identity instead. In the critical part of my paper, I argue that Farkas’s proposal fails for being too restrictive: it misclassifies non-conscious mental states, most notably dispositional belief, as external. I consider two interpretations of Farkas’s proposal but conclude that neither succeeds, because each requires internal features to influence the subject’s phenomenal life in a way in which dispositional belief does not. In the constructive part of my paper, I consider dispositional identity as an alternative definition of internal identity. I argue that the dispositional-identity definition avoids the phenomenal-identity definition’s shortcoming and retains its main attraction, viz., that of securing the subjective indistinguishability that obtains between Twin Earth duplicates. My argument that it does the latter, however, faces potentially decisive obstacles. Thus, I retreat to a disjunctive proposal: internal identity should be defined either as dispositional identity or as dispositional-plus-phenomenal identity. I conclude by defending my proposal against a different charge that may be levelled against it, viz., that of misclassifying Cartesian dualism as an externalist theory of the mind.

Als biozentrisch werden Positionen der ökologischen Ethik bezeichnet, in denen für eine moralische Anerkennung aller Lebewesen gestritten wird. Mit seiner Lehre von der Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben wird Albert Schweitzer als erster Repräsentant eines systematischen Biozentrismus in Anspruch genommen. Während sich bei Schweitzer vor allem Mahnungen zu einer Achtung der belebten Natur finden, hat sich in der ökologischen Ethik eine Debatte um den Biozentrismus als eine systematische Variante einer an den Interessen natürlicher Lebewesen orientierten Ethik entwickelt. In der Familie tierethischer Positionen nimmt der Biozentrismus dadurch eine Sonderstellung ein, dass er nicht nur Tieren, sondern der Gesamtheit der Lebewesen moralischen Respekt zuerkennt. Dies beinhaltet sowohl einzelne pflanzliche Organismen wie auch Gruppen von Organismen bis hin zu Spezies von Lebewesen und Ökosystemen.