Thomas A. Yates

“I’m not religious” is oft-heard on the lips of naturalists. But are they committed to taking that stance? In their 2025 book Religious Naturalism, John Bishop and Ken Perszyk join the growing number of self-confessed naturalists whose answer is “definitely not.” You can consistently hold that “nature is all that there is” and yet that nature justifies religious attitudes and practices (and maybe even religions themselves). Bishop and Perszyk’s primary aim in their book is to show how there could be forms of religious naturalism that are “live” and “worthwhile” options for contemporary faith “ventures” that go beyond the empirical evidence (pp. 3, 20). Although they do not try to “prove that any of them are true or likely to be true” (p. 4), they do in the end propose a version of “robust religious naturalism” which they have defended in earlier work (see especially Bishop & Perszyk, 2023), called “euteleology,” according to which the natural world exists to fulfil an “inherent purpose” to “realize” an “integrative supreme good” (p. 36). Whilst they locate alternative types of religious naturalism “in conceptual space” (p. 3), their focus is less on evaluating those alternatives than on specifying the general “content” for worthwhile forms of religious naturalism. They focus especially on the two “poles” of “religiousness” and “naturalism” (p. 4) and then on the possibility of forms of “robust” religious naturalism (such as their own) that posit an “overall cosmic purpose” (p. 25). This means that if you are looking for a detailed summary of these alternatives and their distinct motivations (apart from their own euteleological religious naturalism), you’ll need to look elsewhere. But the book does what it sets out to achieve; it excels at laying the groundwork for any respectable form of religious naturalism.

Is there a place for blame in healthcare? An interesting exchange on this question took place between Daniel Tigard and Elizabeth Duthie, Ian Fischer and Richard Frankel in 2019. In his central appeal to self-blame, I argue that Tigard was successful—and actually did not go far enough—in identifying a place for ‘notions of blame’ in healthcare. However, I contend that his critics were right to disavow the culture of blame and his notion of taking the blame for unavoidable harm. I argue that even outside a culture of blame, there can still be a (minor) place for blaming others as well as ourselves for avoidable medical errors (even the first-time unintentional ones).

I argue that tracing theorists of culpability for ignorant wrongdoing should reject the widely accepted principle that culpability for ignorant wrongdoing should always be traced through culpability for the ignorance itself. Two kinds of cases are considered in which culpability for ignorant wrongdoing ultimately traces back to culpability for a benighting act, but where it appears that culpable ignorance is not part of the explanation of the ignorant wrongdoing's culpability. These are (1) cases in which the ignorant wrongdoing is a foreseeable consequence of a culpable benighting act and yet the ignorance is an unforeseeable consequence of that act (making the ignorance blameless), and (2) cases in which the ignorance is the foreseeable consequence of a culpable benighting act (making it culpable) but where the connection between the ignorance and the foreseeable wrongdoing from it is itself unforeseeable. I contend that culpability for the ignorant wrongdoing in neither kind of case requires an appeal to culpable ignorance. Both kinds of cases appear to involve causal deviance. However, I draw upon recent work on causal deviance to argue that any causal deviance in these cases does not fully excuse given the lack of intervening causes.

Have you ever felt that moral theories like Kantianism or Utilitarianism involve “a kind of forcing of the issue; a kind of reluctance to let things have their natural shape” (p. 79)? Have you ever thirsted for more than can be provided by the “dominant” philosophical culture’s “spiritual desert: a wilderness… with little in it to console us… [or] nourish the psyche” (pp. 228-9)? Well then, Sophie Grace Chappell’s Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience is the book for you. Prepare yourself for a refreshing take on moral philosophy, maybe even an epiphany.

Capacitarianism says that an agent can be non-derivatively blameworthy for wrongdoing if at the time of their conduct the agent lacked awareness of the wrong-making features of their conduct but had the capacity to be aware of those features. In this paper, I raise three objections to capacitarianism in relation to its verdict of the culpability of so-called “slips” and use these objections to support a rival (“accessibility internalist”) view which requires awareness of wrong-making features for non-derivative blameworthiness. The objections are that (1) the rival internalist view is just as capable of explaining the culpability of paradigm cases of slips; (2) there are some cases of slips without dispositional awareness of wrong-making features that capacitarians wrongly deem culpable; and (3) capacitarianism cannot adequately ground the reasonable expectation to avoid slips (as Fernando Rudy-Hiller has argued). I then argue that an internalist can simultaneously ground a reasonable expectation to avoid slips and account for slips’ culpability by pointing to the satisfaction of a novel epistemic condition: it is (dispositionally) obvious to the slipping agent that they need to pay enough attention to what they are doing, and how to pay enough attention, to reliably achieve the goal that they have set out to achieve.