Rebecca Chan

Although the podcast has become a major content medium in popular culture, few philosophers have incorporated it as an assignment in the classroom and even fewer have discussed it in the pedagogical literature. We aim to address this lacuna. Drawing on our own experience, we describe the basic design of the podcast assignment, discuss some of its advantages compared to other assignments (especially the traditional essay), and consider how the basic design of the assignment can be adapted to fit the specific needs of your course.

Chapter 5 introduces the concept and explores the permissibility of _moral indulgences_. Roughly speaking, an agent is morally indulgent when they do something that, absent a defeater, is wrong, and, in order to offset this, do something that is supererogatory and more good than the bad action was bad. The chapter proceeds to explain why and when being morally indulgent is permissible. For some cases, being morally indulgent appears permissible (as when one buys a large carbon offset after polluting more than one’s fair share), while for others, it appears impermissible (as when murdering one but, otherwise unrelatedly, saving two to make up for it). The explanation for when being indulgent is permissible appeals to universalizability of the sort found in forms of Kantianism, contractualism, and rule consequentialism. Finally, the chapter explores the implications for what God should do, and why, if there are no unsurpassable possible worlds.

In The Right to Know, Lani Watson forcefully argues in favor of recognizing epistemic rights to all humans. In this paper, we apply Watson’s framework to three hard cases. First, we consider interpersonal relationships and suggest that there is room to explore how epistemic rights bear on, e.g., whether parents can permissibly lie to or mislead their children by asserting the existence of Santa Claus. Second, we turn to social media platforms and contend that Watson’s framework is compatible with contrasting moderation policies and transparency requirements. Third, we examine a foundational case of legal ethics—the buried bodies case—which raises the question of how professional and moral duties might be weighed alongside Watson’s epistemic ones. In exploring these cases, we hope to incite practically minded philosophers to reflect upon the implications of Watson’s theory for contemporary debates in applied ethics and political philosophy.

This book is devoted to applied ethics. We focus on six popular and controversial topics: abortion, the environment, animals, poverty, punishment, and disability. We cover three chapters per topic, and each chapter is devoted to a famous or influential argument on the topic. After we present an influential argument, we then consider objections to the argument, and replies to the objections. The book is impartial, and set up in order to equip the reader to make up her own mind about the controversial topics covered.

Appealing to self-interest is a common way of justifying the rationality of religious faith. For instance, Pascal’s wager relies upon the expected value of choosing the life of faith being infinite. Similarly, many contemporary arguments for the rationality of faith turn on whether it is better for an agent to have faith rather than lack it. In this paper, I argue, contra Pascal, that considerations of self-interest do not make choosing faith rational because they fail to take into account the way the self is transformed by faith.

Transformative experiences are epistemically and personally transformative: prior to having the experience, agents cannot predict the value of the experience and cannot anticipate how it will change their core values and preferences. Paul (2014, 2015) argues that these experiences pose a puzzle for standard decision-making procedures because values cannot be assigned to outcomes involving transformative experience. Responding philosophers are quick to point out that decision procedures are built to handle uncertainty, including the uncertainty generated by transformative experience. My paper enters here and contributes two points. First, religious experiences are transformative experiences that are especially resistant to these responses. Second, a procedure that appeals to voluntarist reasons—reasons arising from an act of the will—can allow an agent to rationally decide to undergo or avoid an outcome involving transformative experience. Combining these two points results in some interesting implications with respect to practical aspects of religion.