Troy Seagraves

ABSTRACT Permissivisms in both epistemic and practical rationality enjoy support, but they are discussed in strikingly different ways. Epistemic permissivists focus on both intrapersonal and interpersonal cases, finding the latter more popular than the former. In contrast, practical permissivists focus only on intrapersonal cases. This is odd because practical and epistemic rationality are structurally similar. Furthermore, Paul Forrester (2024) argues that permissivism faces significant explanatory burdens regarding the range of one’s rational options: permissivists need to explain why some cases are permissive and others are not as well as explain why some options are permissible while others are not. I argue that we can meet Forrester’s challenge by appealing to reasons holism, which explains the range of rational options. This appeal also illuminates similarities between practical and epistemic permissivisms, motivating an underappreciated interpersonal practical permissivism.

This paper argues for an explanation of self-hatred where quintessential cases of self-hatred are caused by shame. Self-hatred (hatred directed at oneself) is distinguished from other-hatred (hatred directed at others). While the latter has enjoyed much attention, the former has enjoyed little. Self-hatred, however, is interestingly different from its other-focused cousin in that other-hatred presupposes a sense of positive self-worth while self-hatred does not. In explaining self-hatred, I first contend that the formal object of hatred is best understood as incorrigibility, then I show that self-hatred involves identifying oneself with a negative trait, causing a self-evaluation of incorrigibility. This kind of identification calls for explanation. To this end, I argue that existential shame not only leads one to internalize a globalizing negative evaluation but also leads one to identify themselves with the negative trait at the heart of the self-evaluation of incorrigibility. These facets of existential shame, then, explain some quintessential cases of self-hatred.

This paper argues that God plausibly has facts of self that function as modifiers of the normative reasons that apply to him. Facts of self are subjective facts like the fact that one has certain commitments, the fact that one has a certain character, the fact that one has a certain practical identity, the fact that one has certain projects. There is a widespread intuition (the normative significance of self) that facts of self influence what an agent’s sufficient reasons are. While this intuition is widespread in ethics, its implications for God’s practical life have received little scholarly attention. Facts of God’s self have, however, received some attention in the context of what I call the divine mechanism complaint, but their normative roles have been undertheorized. The divine mechanism complaint is that on certain conceptions of God’s relation to reasons, God is objectionably mechanical. I take this complaint as requiring that God have some influence on what his sufficient reasons are. An adequate account of the normative significance of God’s self, then, can answer the divine mechanism complaint, providing us with a plausible picture of God’s practical life. I provide such an account, arguing that God need not be objectionably mechanical if his facts of self function as modifiers of his normative reasons.

This paper argues for a permissivism of personal rationality, a rationality concerning the epistemic evaluation of persons. I work from the perspective of virtue epistemology where the standards of evaluation are the intellectual character virtues. On this picture, an agent is personally rational in having a doxastic attitude when having it is the result of some exemplification of an intellectual virtue. Permissive cases arise when the emotional components of intellectual virtues conflict, making some potential conclusions both enabled and disabled for the agent. The agent is left in a confusion needing resolution, but if each of these conflicting emotions are components of intellectual virtues, then she has multiple personally rational options. This grounds a potential case of a permissivism of personal rationality, but this should be interesting to epistemologists in general since opting for one of the sides of this conflict leads an agent to have different doxastic attitudes.