N. L. Engel-Hawbecker

Objectivism holds that what someone should do is determined by their situation as it in fact is—not as it appears to be according to their beliefs or evidence. A popular objection holds that objectivism cannot explain why, in cases like the Miners Puzzle, even conscientious people would decide to do what objectivism predicts they could easily know to be wrong. I argue that objectivists can accommodate such decisions as being blamelessly akratic. I argue for this by drawing on an analogy with Huckleberry Finn’s blameless akrasia, and by drawing on distinctions that are now common in the philosophy of action but still neglected in these discussions. Such distinctions pave the way for the possibility of conscientious akrasia.

A central debate in the philosophy of love is whether people can love one another for good reasons. Reasons for love seem to help us sympathetically understand and evaluate love or even count as loving at all. But it can seem that if reasons for love existed, they could require forms of love that are presumably illicit. It might seem that only some form of wishful thinking would lead us to believe reasons for love could never do this. However, if we focus on why reasons for love as such motivate us to love, we find evidence that reasons for love as such do not require or even justify it: all they do is favor it. This result is fine, however, since love never stands in need of justification. We would think otherwise only if we somehow conflate reasons and justifications, or value and permissibility. We must give up such background assumptions if we are to appreciate reasons for love.