Todd R. Long

Utilizing two cases (_Family Policy_ and _Manipulated Family Policy_), this chapter provides additional arguments to earlier work by the author of this chapter “Moderate Reasons-Responsiveness, Moral Responsibility, and Manipulation,” for the conclusion that we can be morally responsible for our actions even if the information we rely on has been manipulated so severely that we would not have performed the actions if the manipulation had not occurred. It defends this view from broadly epistemic objections to the previous work made by John Martin Fischer, Christopher Franklin, and James Steadman. These objections claim either that information manipulation precludes moral responsibility because (i) information manipulation results in practical reasoning on the basis of _false information_, or (ii) information manipulation _reduces the epistemic control_ one has over one’s practical reasoning. In explaining why the objections fail, the essay addresses the problem of relying on “intuitions” about moral responsibility: because “morally responsible” is a term of art, theorists should provide theoretical reasons for its use.

John Locke was a British philosopher, medical researcher, and Oxford academic whose substantial contributions to political theory and philosophy made him a prominent and influential Enlightenment thinker. In his monumental An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke attempted to find the limits of human understanding with respect to a wide range of topics, including personal identity across time. Although Locke knew how counterintuitive it would seem to say that personal identity across time is not sameness of thinking substance (material or immaterial) across time, his major contribution was in illuminating how important psychological continuity is for our deserving praise, blame, reward, or punishment. In this essay I critically explore and expand upon Locke’s arguments for his view that, regardless of what our consciousness attaches to, nothing but a relation of first-person consciousness (via memory) unites thinking beings across time into one and the same person, and thus explains how we can be justly accountable for our past actions.

Most evidentialists think that experiences, in some way or other, yield evidence for a person. Critics of evidentialist theories often make objections that depend on substantive assumptions about how experiences yield evidence for a person. A common set of objections turns on the assumption that a sensory experience all by itself is evidence for a person. For instance, it has been assumed that a visual experience of blood beside an unmoving naked body in a park is itself evidence that a crime has been committed. But, this assumption is false, as I will argue. Until I have additional experiences that give me reason to link the look of blood beside an unmoving body to a crime having been committed, my visual experience does not indicate to me that a crime has been committed. This point has implications across many discussions in epistemology, from theoretical discussions about whether and the extent to which there is any immediate prima facie justification given in experience, to debates about how testimony yields epistemically rational belief. Careful reflection on my argument both gives us reason to reject a number of epistemic theories and principles in the literature and motivates a powerful evidentialist case for an intimate relation between epistemic rationality and epistemic justification.

Justification-skepticism is the view that all our beliefs based on perception, memory, and induction are epistemically unjustified. A typical argument for justification-skepticism argument runs as follows: ' Suppose that SE is your sensory evidence for target proposition p ; You have no good reason to believe that SE makes p probable; If you have no good reason to believe that SE makes p probable, then you are not epistemically justified in believing p ; Therefore, you are not epistemically justified in believing p.' ;I reveal two key assumptions of the justification-skepticism arguments: the truth-conduciveness thesis and the skeptical higher-order thesis . ;Using the goal-oriented approach to epistemic justification, I consider various accounts in order to assess their consistency with nine key intuitions affirmed by epistemic internalists, including the same evidence principle and the same justification principle . I argue that there is no account of epistemic justification that both supports the arguments for justification-skepticism and is consistent with all the key intuitions. Any view that supports justification-skepticism is inconsistent with either the same evidence principle or the same justification principle. However, denying the same evidence principle or the same justification principle is extremely implausible for an epistemic internalist such as the justification-skeptic. This result strongly suggests that the justification-skeptic's requirements for epistemic justification are much too stringent. In light of the fact that there are accounts of epistemic justification that avoid all the implausible consequences of justification-skepticism and are also consistent with all the key intuitions, we have good reason to think that the justification-skepticism arguments depend on faulty assumptions, and thus are weak

The recent book Rush Rhees on Religion and Philosophy contains a stimulating collection of writin~s by Rush Rhees on a variety of topics in the philosophy of religion. Comprising accounts of personal, religious and moral struggles, these essays provide a refreshing change from the often dry, overly technical approach to philosophy writing. Despite spanning more than thirty years, Rhees' s essays disclose a fairly consistent philosophy.of religion with a clear emphasis. Since he was Wittgenstein's student and long-time friend as well as a literary executor ofWittgenstein's writings, it is not surprising that Rhees's comments on the philosophy of religion reveal a distinctly Wittgensteinian approach, both in content and style. Moreover, Rhees's particular way of doing philosophy of religion seems, in retrospect, to have set the course that subsequent philosophy of religion of the Wittgensteinian type would take

The teaching of evolutionary theory in U.S. public school science classes has been called into question via numerous school board mandated “evolution is a theory, not a fact” disclaimers that have appeared on science textbooks in recent years and which have been the subject of recent court cases. I evaluate the scientific reasonability of such disclaimers by engaging in conceptual analysis on the crucial terms in the key claim: “evolution is a theory, not a fact.” Assessing various interpretations of the key claim, I argue that, for any interpretation, it is either clearly false, or trivially true, or not even marginally reasonable as a rationale, of the sort pertaining to science, that justifies the use of the disclaimer or the advice it recommends to students. I conclude that such disclaimers haveno scientific merit. Finally, I offer brief remarks about what we may learn from the use of the disclaimers, as well as a word about the relevance of methodological naturalism to current disputes, and likely ones in the near future, over evolution.

Michael Bergmann seeks to motivate his externalist, proper function theory of epistemic justification by providing three objections to the mentalism and mentalist evidentialism characteristic of nonexternalists such as Richard Feldman and Earl Conee. Bergmann argues that (i) mentalism is committed to the false thesis that justification depends on mental states; (ii) mentalism is committed to the false thesis that the epistemic fittingness of an epistemic input to a belief-forming process must be due to an essential feature of that input, and, relatedly, that mentalist evidentialism is committed to the false thesis that the epistemic fittingness of doxastic response B to evidence E is an essential property of B–E; and (iii) mentalist evidentialism is “unmotivated”. I object to each argument. The argument for (i) begs the question. The argument for (ii) suffers from the fact that mentalist evidentialists are not committed to the consequences claimed for them; nevertheless, I show that there is, in the neighborhood, a substantive dispute concerning the nature of doxastic epistemic fittingness. That dispute involves what I call “Necessary Fittingness”, the view that, necessarily, exactly one (at most) doxastic attitude ( belief , or disbelief , or suspension of judgment ) toward a proposition is epistemically fitting with respect to a person’s total evidence at any time. Reflection on my super-blooper epistemic design counterexamples to Bergmann’s proper function theory reveals both the plausibility of Necessary Fittingness and a good reason to deny (iii). Mentalist evidentialism is thus vindicated against the objections

I answer Alvin Plantinga's challenge to provide a ‘proper’ de jure objection to religious belief. What I call the ‘sophisticates’ evidential objection' concludes that sophisticated Christians lack epistemic justification for believing central Christian propositions. The SEO utilizes a theory of epistemic justification in the spirit of the evidentialism of Richard Feldman and Earl Conee. I defend philosophical interest in the SEO against objections from Reformed epistemology, by addressing Plantinga's criteria for a proper de jure objection, his anti-evidentialist arguments, and the relevance of ‘impulsional evidence’. I argue that no result from Plantinga-style Reformed epistemology precludes the reasons I offer in favour of giving the SEO its due philosophical attention.