ABSTRACT This paper proposes a novel reinterpretation of the familiar, if inchoate, thought that paternalism offends against an ideal of personal sovereignty. The central idea is that (competent) persons have a particular kind of normative power. Just as each of us has the right to control how others are permitted to use our bodies or property, we each have a structurally similar right to control how others are permitted to use our good . When others seek to benefit us without adequately consulting our will, they trespass into a domain that is ours to control, treating us as lacking rights that we in fact have. The paper argues that this theory of anti‐paternalism is superior to existing accounts, is independently attractive, and rests on deeper foundations.

ABSTRACT Guessing is the thesis that, roughly put, you may believe something iff it is among the most probable answers to a salient question. The thesis is motivated by observed features of felicitous belief reports when agents confront a question they aren't certain how to answer. This paper raises a novel problem for the thesis, focusing on belief reports in multi‐question scenarios. I introduce and motivate a plausible inter‐question principle for belief, show that Guessing is incompatible with the principle, and argue that the resulting puzzle is intractable and significant—posing a unique challenge to the thesis. Moreover, the problem generalizes to formally parallel “question‐sensitive” accounts in epistemology and philosophy of language, calling for future research into their limits.

ABSTRACT Consent plays an important role in our lives. Using someone's body or property without their consent is typically a serious wrong. However, there are various ways in which consensual interactions may be morally deficient. This paper articulates an underexplored way in which consent can be defective, namely by being moot . Moot consent occurs when others would act regardless of our consent. (Imagine Audrey consents to have sex with Brice, but if she hadn't consented, he would have had sex with her anyway.) These cases are disturbing, but it is difficult to explain why while preserving morally relevant distinctions among cases. On my view, moot consent is still valid consent, but the consent‐receiver wrongs the agent by mistreating the consent: consent fails to play a proper role in the consent‐receiver's practical deliberation and reasons for action. Cases of moot consent underscore that we care not just about the presence of consent but also about the role it plays in others' reasoning.

ABSTRACT Under what conditions does an externale (a sequence of speech sounds, a mark of ink) qualify as an articulation of a word? Standard approaches to the issue appeal to intentions and to the satisfaction of performance standards, but these treatments are challenged by the intuitive admissibility of unintentional and anomalous tokens. Recently, alternatives appealing to the role of lexical access in word production have been considered, but these, I argue, are threatened by counterexamples of their own. In this paper, I leverage formal and empirical insights into the architecture of utterance production to present a new hypothesis. The main idea is this: for an externale produced by a speaker to qualify as a token of a word, it must originate from the execution of an utterance score that incorporates the local standards over the word's form. I explain how this approach threads the needle between some key desiderata and can accommodate the case studies that challenge its competitors.

ABSTRACT Many have attempted to justify certain acts of disruptive climate activism by appealing to, at least in part, their effectiveness. Accordingly, they help raise awareness, assure others that many will participate in the collective action, pressure politicians, call for change in governmental policies, and/or directly frustrate environmentally damaging industries. But what if the climate disaster is inevitable? What if climate protests and resistance are futile? Should this be the case, we cannot appeal to the instrumental value realized to justify the costs (or even harm) imposed by activists, as those would be gratuitous costs (or harm). Nevertheless, we believe that futile climate activism can be justified as fitting protest, that is, as a form of fitting expression against serious disregard for the lives of others. Violent climate resistance can satisfy the conditions of correct directedness, type appropriateness, proportionality, and adequacy, and is thus called for in situations of futility. The conditions of fitting protest may have further implications for protests that aim to bring about political or social change.

ABSTRACT We are valuing beings, beings who possess the capacity to value things. But what is it “to value” something? The most common accounts in the literature hold that to value an item is either to have a first‐order or a second‐order desire toward it; or to believe that item to be valuable; or to care about that item; or to have a combination of all these mental states. In our paper, we raise some objections against all these accounts and defend a new affective account of valuings. Unlike standard affective accounts, according to which the term “valuing” refers to a single type of affective state, such as care, we hold that “valuing” refers to the members of a class of affective states, namely, the class of sentiments. On our view, to value something is to have a particular sentiment toward it. Since sentiments can be of different types, our account implies that there are as many ways of valuing things as there are types of sentiments.

ABSTRACT We argue that S is in a position to know that p iff S can know that p. Thus, what makes position‐to‐know‐ascriptions true is just a special case of what makes ability‐ascriptions true: compossibility. The novelty of our compossibility theory of epistemic modality lies in its subsuming epistemic modality under agentive modality, the modality characterizing what agents can do.

ABSTRACT The question of which mental functions require consciousness has recently come to the forefront because of its relevance for investigating animal consciousness. Finding out that an animal can perform a function associated with consciousness would count as evidence that it has conscious states. I argue that most of the empirical research interpreted as showing that some functions are associated with consciousness fails to show this. Instead, it merely shows that the relevant functions falter when based on degraded sensory signals—which is unsurprising. This issue hinders empirical research on the functions associated with consciousness. I explain how consciousness research can do better when investigating the functions that require consciousness. Until the relevant research is properly carried out, the presence of functions supposedly associated with consciousness in nonhuman animals should not convince the skeptics one bit.

ABSTRACT The standard view among philosophers of normativity is that practical reasons balance permissively (i.e., when reasons are tied between incompatible actions, either action is rational), while epistemic reasons balance prohibitively (i.e., when reasons are tied between incompatible doxastic attitudes, neither attitude may be rationally formed). Those who disagree, typically epistemic permissivists, think that epistemic reasons behave like reasons for action and that all reasons exhibit permissive balancing. One thing widely agreed on is that a third possibility, that all reasons exhibit prohibitive balancing, is off the table. This paper aims to get that option back on the table. I defend the view that all reasons balance prohibitively, and the apparent permissive balancing of practical reasons is an illusion. What we take to be cases of choosing on the basis of tied practical reasons, actually involve finding extra, tie‐breaking, reasons.

ABSTRACT According to an influential idea in the philosophy of set theory, certain mathematical concepts, such as the notion of a well‐order and set, are indefinitely extensible. Following Parsons (1983), this has often been cashed out in modal terms. This paper explores instead an extensional articulation of the idea, formulated in higher‐order logic, that straightforwardly formalizes some remarks of Zermelo. The resulting picture is incompatible with the idea that the entire universe can be well‐ordered, but entirely consistent with the idea that the sets of any set‐theoretic universe can be.