Rosalind Simson

In order to preserve and ensure the vitality of freedom and democracy in democratic societies, it is important that citizens reflect deeply on the meaning of freedom and the conditions necessary to sustain it. The idea for this volume arose from discussions at the February 2019 annual meeting of the Georgia Philosophical Society held at Mercer University on the theme of "Freedom and Society," and drafts of many of the chapters were first presented there. Including contributions from both early-career and well-known scholars, the chapters are tied together by questions about the nature of political freedom and autonomy in democratic societies and about the ways in which the enactment of democratic freedom depends on awareness of and engagement with freedom's underlying conditions. These conditions include social responsibility, creative innovation, and strong democratic institutions. Other recurring themes in the volume include the pitfalls of atomistic models of autonomy and the importance of giving due consideration to intersubjectivity, embodiment, and plurality as integral elements of a free society. Countering models centered exclusively on negative freedom, (i.e. freedom from constraints imposed by others), several chapters highlight the crucial roles of social responsibility and creativity in confronting obstructions to freedom, such as systemic racism and other challenges currently facing democracies. Finally, several chapters emphasize the fundamental importance of strong and just democratic institutions as the primary means of reliably expressing the will of the people.

This paper uses the debate about whether capital punishment deters homicide as a case study for examining the claim, made by many feminists and others, that the traditional ideal of objectivity in seeking knowledge is misguided. According to this ideal, knowledge seekers should strive to gather and assess evidence independently of any influences exerted by either their individual and societal circumstances or their moral values. This paper argues that, although the traditional ideal rests on some valid precepts, it is neverthelesss untenable. the author goes on to propose an alternative epistemological ideal – one that retains these valid precepts but also recognizes an important and legitimate role for people's circumstances and moral values in their efforts to find knowledge

"Evidentialism" is the view that a person's epistemic justification for a doxastic attitude is determined entirely by his or her evidence for the content of that attitude. This paper has two goals. The first is to argue that values and circumstances properly influence epistemic justification, and that evidentialism is therefore untenable, even as an epistemic ideal. The second is to outline a nonevidentialist theory of epistemic justification that avoids the common objection that nonevidentialist theories fail to preserve important distinctions between epistemic justification, on the one hand, and moral and prudential justification, on the other hand