Taylor Koles

Suppose some uncoordinated group of agents causes tremendous harm, but none of the individuals could have meaningfully changed this result by acting differently. These “collective harm” cases have been the subject of extended philosophical discussion, but this paper argues that there are really two different, if connected, puzzles presented by such cases: (1) a puzzle about how to characterize the moral injury to those who suffer this harm (the “wrongness puzzle”) and (2) a puzzle about why agents may do something wrong in participating in producing this harm (the “participation puzzle”). This paper elaborates these puzzles, defends the idea that they are different from each other, and offers solutions to them both. The core idea is that an application of the distinction between ideal and nonideal theory can shed light on both puzzles; the injury experienced by the victims of collective harm is to be understood in terms of the shortfall they suffer from how they would fare if ideal circumstances obtained, and participation in collective harm is wrong when it involves reasoning that fails to appropriately apply ideal moral rules to nonideal situations.

Collective harm cases are cases in which the actions of a number of people result in a morally significant outcome, but no individual’s actions seem to make a difference to the occurrence of that outcome. This paper argues against the “Instrumentality Thesis,” advanced by Nefsky, on which any successful approach to collective harm cases must be instrumental in the sense that the reasons which it gives against participating in collective harm must involve that action’s influence on the outcome. First, I argue that Nefsky’s own account of collective harm, based on the notion of a “non-superfluous cause,” does not succeed as an instrumental approach. Second, I argue that Nefsky’s objections to non-instrumental views fail, and that we have good reason to think that a successful account of collective harm problems will be non-instrumental in character.

Saul’s Dogwhistles and Figleaves gives an account of dogwhistles, which, as Saul’s wide range of examples shows, is easy to apply to a great deal of problematic speech that philosophers of language have been interested in. This paper raises the worry that this account applies too easily to speech received by bigoted audience members. While Saul is quite right to be interested in the ways that speakers can unwittingly dogwhistle, her definition also applies to speech that primes problematic attitudes because of idiosyncrasies in the audience and not because there is something wrong with what the speaker said. In particular, Saul’s account will frequently treat anodyne speech acts by discriminated-against individuals as dogwhistles simply because they will make problematic attitudes more salient for bigoted audience members. Section one presents this problem for Saul’s account of dogwhistles, and section two proposes a solution. Section three gives a methodological defense of narrowing the account in this way.

Longstanding philosophical debate over the semantics of proper names has yet to examine the distinctive behavior of deadnames, names that have been rejected by their former bearers. The use of these names to deadname individuals is derogatory, but deadnaming derogates differently than other kinds of derogatory speech. This paper examines different accounts of this behavior, illustrates what going views of names will have to say to account for it, and articulates a novel version of predicativism that can give a semantic explanation for this derogation.