Abstract Sreenivasan has recently claimed that so far, no good examples of general rights in personam have been provided. He rejects two proposed examples, the right of a citizen against her state and the rights of children against their parents, on the basis that some persons are stateless and some children are parentless (father dies before birth, mother dies giving birth). Thus, for Sreenivasan, general rights must take ‘at the outset’, that is, must arise when they normally would without exception. Here it is argued (1) that Sreenivasan’s claim that the acquisition of general rights must be exceptionless in this way is too restrictive, and (2) that even accepting Sreenivasan’s ‘at the outset’ condition, we can identify conditional, disjunctive rights which fit the bill, for example, a person’s right against the state of which they are a citizen, but if the person is stateless, lesser rights, against the state where they currently reside.

Abstract According to veridicalism, if a subject’s beliefs have always been elicited by a computer simulation that wholly and perfectly simulates the world W it is a simulation of, and that is as open-ended as W is, then most of their beliefs are true. In this paper I examine David Chalmers’ argument that a subject’s being wrong about the fundamental nature of the entities that their everyday beliefs refer to does not render those beliefs false and show that it is unconvincing.

Abstract Some understand forgiveness as a normative power. Here we raise an objection to such views. They cannot explain certain instances when forgiveness is beyond our grasp. A victim of a wrong, despite thinking forgiveness is the right thing to do, and wishing that she could forgive, may find herself unable to do so. No good explanation of this impossibility, consistent with forgiveness being a normative power, is available.

Abstract The development of autonomous vehicles has stimulated research into preferences in sacrificial moral dilemmas. Studies such as the Moral Machine Experiment, which has attracted enormous attention in both philosophy and psychology, have been criticized for an important methodological flaw: forcing participants to choose between two options, like killing a man or a woman. It has been shown that many people actually prefer a third option, namely treating people “equally”. While this is an important improvement, we argue that “equal” treatment can be understood in different ways. Instead of “equality”, we propose to use the concept of impartiality and argue that impartiality needs to be complemented with action-guiding decision rules. To support this conceptual point, we conducted a vignette study. Our results suggest that impartiality is indeed the main preference and that the most attractive decision rule to complement impartiality is not random choice, as many papers suggest, but inaction.

Abstract What is the relation between the two main problems arising from vagueness, the Sorites Paradox and the Problem of the Many? This question seems to be neglected. In explaining this relation, this paper shows that the usual understanding of these problems is unsatisfactory and demonstrates what instead is fundamental to these problems. The usual understanding of the Sorites Paradox is that it is a problem arising for (apparently) vague concepts, while the Problem of the Many is understood to be a problem arising for ordinary objects. This paper, however, shows that both problems can arise for any kind of phenomenon of vagueness. Instead, what is fundamental to them is the number of boundary crossings that are involved, a novel notion introduced and further explained in this paper. Whereas the Problem of the Many arises for a collection of multiple boundary crossings, the Sorites Paradox arises for one single boundary crossing.

Abstract In a recent paper, John William Waldrop presents a problem for a popular interpretation of the consequence argument for the inconsistency of determinism and free will. This argument depends essentially on considerations as to whether, for some proposition p, anyone has, or has ever had, any choice about whether p. Under the counterfactual sufficiency interpretation (CSI), ‘No one has, or ever had, any choice about whether p’ is further unpacked as ‘no matter what anyone had done (at any time), if they had done it, p might still have been true’. Waldrop claims to show that this interpretation clashes with our intuitions about typical examples discussed in the literature. I conclude, however, that he has misstated one of our key intuitions about the case. Hence CSI remains viable.

Abstract In a recent paper published in Analysis, ‘Artificial achievements’, Kieval argues that AlphaGo deserves credit for the achievement of defeating Lee Sedol in a Go competition. The present paper provides an argument against this proposal. The argument relies on the connection between the notions of achievement and praiseworthiness, as well as on the broader debate on responsibility in AI ethics.

Abstract We are called upon to favor good items and disfavor bad ones, but what about those that are neither good nor bad? Consider the state of a pebble lying unnoticed on a distant planet or a weevil not having a favorite color. If they possess neutral values, they would call upon us to react neutrally. Invoking the intuition that not everything makes normative demands, this paper defends a pluralistic view: among items that are neither good nor bad, some matter in a neutral way and others do not matter at all. The ethical implications of this view are highlighted and discussed.