Sarah Köglsperger

The reliabilist sometimes, contrary to our intuitions, has to confer justification on beliefs acquired via brain lesions or clairvoyance. This is the problem of strange and fleeting processes. Here, I attempt to find a solution to the problem. After rejecting a few attempts that seemingly lead us astray, I posit that strangeness has to do with mysterious ascriptions of propensities to produce true beliefs. Then, once we adopt a more appropriate understanding of strangeness, I argue that fleetingness becomes a non-issue. If correct, the approach taken in this article allows the reliabilist to forgo adding a necessary condition on justification that specifies a reliable belief-forming process’s circumstances, the type of world it belongs to, or its evolutionary origins.

Functionalists hold that the territorial rights of states are grounded solely in their successful performance of their morally mandated functions. In this paper, I defend a distinctive functionalist view of the right of territorial jurisdiction. I develop this view over the course of considering a variety of objections to functionalism that arise from reflection on cases of non- violent and otherwise rights-respecting annexation. Functionalism’s critics argue that it is committed to counterintuitive implications in these cases, as it is unable to explain why the usurper states do not gain rights over the territory they take over. Against these critics, I argue that functionalism can in fact deliver intuitively plausible verdicts regarding: (a) the territorial rights of unsuccessful states; (b) the morality of military occupation; and (c) the appropriate response to past territorial injustices.