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Alex Broadbent and Pieter Streicher – “Was Lockdown Racist?”

In this post, Alex Broadbent and Pieter Streicher discuss the article they recently published in Ergo on Covid-19 lockdowns and racial injustice. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

A policeman points his pump rifle to disperse a crowd of shoppers in Yeoville, Johannesburg, on March 28, 2020 © MARCO LONGARI/Getty Images

When many people hear “lockdown”, they picture a public-spirited sacrifice: staying home to protect others. But “staying home” looks radically different depending on where you live. For someone with a secure salary, space at home, and reliable utilities, it may be difficult but manageable. For someone who depends on informal daily work, lives in crowded housing, and must leave home to obtain water or food, a stay-at-home order can be disastrous.

In our article, we argue that Covid-19 lockdowns were racist. We do not mean that policymakers were motivated by racial hatred. We mean something more ordinary, and more actionable: lockdowns were a form of negligent racism.

Lockdown as a policy package

“Lockdown” is not a single, precisely defined intervention. Still, during Covid-19 there was a recognizable policy pattern across countries: legally enforced, population-wide restrictions on leaving the home and on activities outside it. That is what we mean by “lockdown”. In 2020 it became a highly portable policy template, implemented very widely around the world.

Negligent racism

Some people reserve “racist” for actions driven by beliefs in racial inferiority or hostility. On that understanding, calling lockdown racist sounds like calling officials bigots.

Our claim uses a different idea: negligent racism. The analogy is with negligence. You can wrong someone even if you did not intend harm. If you impose serious foreseeable harm when you had better options, good intentions do not make the harm disappear.

We call a policy negligently racist when:

  • it reasonably foreseeably harms a large number of people of certain races;
  • that harm is avoidable, because viable alternatives exist and are epistemically accessible; and
  • race helps explain the distribution of harm (even if poverty and other factors matter too).

(For the precise definition and defense of it, see the paper.)

Why Africa matters

Our argument focuses on sub-Saharan Africa because the pattern is clearest there. Most Black people in the world live in sub-Saharan Africa, and the continent has roughly 1.4 billion inhabitants. If lockdown foreseeably caused major net harm there, then it foreseeably harmed an enormous number of Black people. 

In the paper we treat “lockdown” as a global policy trope: a historically situated template that spread internationally. Given that framing, establishing that the template was negligently racist in the place where most Black people live is enough (on our definitions) to establish the general conclusion that lockdown was negligently racist, not merely “sometimes” or “somewhere”.

The key background facts were well known in early 2020:

  • A large share of work is informal, so income often stops immediately when work stops.
  • Many households are crowded and cannot realistically distance indoors.
  • Leaving home is often necessary for basic needs, and government support is limited.
  • Health systems are vulnerable to disruption, and the main health burdens include conditions such as HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and preventable childhood illness.

In these conditions, lockdown predictably produces “collateral” harms: hunger and poverty, interrupted healthcare, disrupted vaccination programs, and major education losses where online substitutes are not realistic. In some places, enforcement was harsh, with deaths and injuries caused by security forces during lockdown periods. (The full article gives the evidence and sources.)

Did lockdown in Africa deliver compensating benefits?

Lockdown might be justified if it prevents greater harm. So the crucial question is whether the lockdown package in Africa plausibly delivered benefits that outweighed its costs.

We argue that this was doubtful, and foreseeably so. Covid-19 risk rises steeply with age, and Africa has a very young population (median age around 20). In dense informal settlements, confining people to cramped homes can undermine the effectiveness of stay-at-home orders, and can even plausibly increase transmission. In many rural settings, low population density already slows spread. Add widespread non-compliance driven by necessity, and the expected benefits of strict lockdown fall further.

Our conclusion is not that every restriction was pointless. It is that the full lockdown package was a poor fit for many African contexts, imposing enormous predictable costs for limited predictable benefit.

Were there better options?

Even under severe uncertainty, it does not follow that lockdown was the only responsible response. Public health has many tools. Measures such as restrictions on travel and large gatherings, targeted protection of vulnerable groups, keeping routine health services running, and locally tailored interventions can reduce transmission while avoiding some of the most extreme collateral damage of stay-at-home orders.

A striking feature of the early pandemic response is how quickly lockdown travelled as a policy template, largely shaped by models and experience from the Global North. If viable alternatives existed and were accessible, then the harms of lockdown were not unavoidable. That is exactly what negligence is about.

“Is this about race, or just poverty?”

A natural retort is: perhaps lockdown was anti-poor, not racist. Wealth and health are unevenly distributed across races, but is race really doing any explanatory work here, or is poverty the whole story?

Poverty clearly shapes who suffers under lockdown. We reply, however, that in many places poverty itself is deeply racialised, as a result of colonial histories and ongoing structural injustice. Subtracting race from the story would result in an incomplete explanation, one that is neither coherent nor accurate. 

So lockdown can be both anti-poor and racist. The fact that poverty mediates the harm does not make race irrelevant if race helps explain why poverty is where it is.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/7431/

or have a look at Alex and Pieter’s new book Power, Knowledge and Covid-19: The Making of a Scientific Orthodoxy, which they just published with Routledge!

About the authors

Alex Broadbent is Professor of Philosophy of Science at Durham University and Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Epidemiology, Medicine, and Public Health at Durham University and the University of Johannesburg. 

Pieter Streicher is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Philosophy of Epidemiology, Medicine, and Public Health at Durham University and the University of Johannesburg.

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Michael Cohen and Matteo Colombo – “Paths to Diversity: A Simulation of Conformity in Environments with Different Geometries”

In this post, Michael Cohen and Matteo Colombo discuss the article they recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

Painting of city lights from above
“Broadway Boogie Woogie” (1942) Piet Mondrian

“the straight line… is the proper thing for the heart of a city. The curve is ruinous, difficult and dangerous; it is a paralyzing thing. The straight line enters into all human history, into all human aim, into every human act.” 

Le Corbusier, “The City of Tomorrow“

Map of New York City (1807) William Bridges
Plan of the City of Rome (1645) Antonio Tempesta © MET

New York City has a regular grid plan. Like many other cities, the geometry of its environment consists of straight parallel paths and long streets running at right angles to each other. Cities such as Rome have a less regular plan, with many zigzagging short paths intersecting into curves with varying angles and no ordered distribution

Let’s imagine all features of New York City and Rome are similar, except their layout. That is, let’s imagine that Rome and New York City have similar extension, history, and climate, as well as similar distributions of wealth and income and of private and public areas, and so on. The agents in these two places are also similar, let’s suppose. They have similar political and religious beliefs; they all have basic capacities for perception, movement, and social learning; but they have different, personal preferences about fashion. Assuming all these imagined similarities, let’s now consider whether the differing geometry of their layouts will have an influence on the spread of a social norm of fashion among the dwellers in Rome and New York City about, say, the proper length of their trousers.

If spatial determinism is true—if it is true that “people’s agency and subjectivity are shaped and determined by the spaces they are in” (Kukla 2021, 13)—then this thought experiment should reveal that the different geometry of New York City and Rome will make this difference. But is spatial determinism true? Is there evidence that environments with different layouts can constrain social learning to produce universally shared norms of fashion in a population? Notice these types of questions apply at multiple spatial scales, also beyond city planning. For example, when choosing a new office layout, should you prefer an open space or a traditional layout with private offices? How will such choices influence your day-to-day behaviour? Will it make a difference to the emergence and spread of social norms in your department?

Philosophical utopias typically assume that spatial determinism is true, as they seek to promote conformity to a desired moral and political order partly based on the shape of the space the citizens of these utopias are in (Lisciandra & Colombo 2024). Spatial determinism is empirically vindicated in urban planning, where geometric features of a city can predict dwellers’ pattern of movement, the duration of their commutes, and the frequency of their encounters with random people (Hillier et al. 1986). Economic geographers have also demonstrated that the size of a city can predict its population density, commuting dynamics, quality of public service delivery, transit accessibility, economic growth, and environmental footprint (Batty 2008). This rich body of empirical evidence and theoretical insight supports spatial determinism, but does not clarify whether and how different city plans can shape the emergence and dynamics of a social norm such as a norm of fashion.

With our study, we wanted to contribute filling this gap, using agent-based modelling to explore how variation in the distribution of paths and barriers in an environment can constrain conformity-biased social learning to produce one, universally shared, descriptive norm in a population. Our simulations are highly idealized; but they show that a place with an irregular layout such as Rome can facilitate the emergence of multiple descriptive norms in a population, whereas a place with a regular grid plan such as New York City can constrain social learning to produce a behaviourally homogeneous population.

Because the agents in our simulations could learn from each other based on their degree of social sensitivity to the behaviours they could observe in other agents, an irregular space with barriers and paths, which limit who can observe whom, promoted diversity compared to a regular space with ample view. Moreover, our simulations suggested that population density, by itself, does not facilitate conformity. Rather, densely populated spaces facilitate conformity in regular environments, and diversity in irregular ones.

Our study complements existing work on the emergence of descriptive norms (Muldoon et al. 2014) and adds nuance to results about the impact of conformism on the epistemic dynamics of a group. Weatherall & O’Connor (2021) found that conformism can negatively influence the epistemic performance of a group. Fazelpour & Steel (2022) qualify this result by showing that demographic diversity can counteract the negative influence of conformism. By highlighting the role of the layout of the environment in constraining conformity-biased social learning, our own study indicates that conformism need not always have negative epistemic consequences for a group, since these consequences can be prevented with an appropriate design of the social learning environment.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/8584/.

About the authors

Michael Cohen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands. His research interests are in epistemology and formal philosophy, logic, AI, and philosophy of science. He comes from a city with with meandering and disorderly paths.

Matteo Colombo is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands. His research interests are in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, history and philosophy of science, and moral psychology. He comes from a city with less meandering, more orderly paths.

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Allan Hazlett – “From Doxastic Blame to Doxastic Shame”

In this post, Allan Hazlett discusses the article he recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Allan’s article can be found here.

“Subspecies of Wild Haggis” © Haggis Wildlife Foundation

Shame is a familiar human emotion.  Most people have been ashamed of something they have done or of some fact about themselves.  Of course, sometimes people feel shame when they should not.  Social norms cause people to be ashamed of their bodies, for example, or about being gay.  In these cases, although our shame is real, the thing we are ashamed of isn’t really shameful.  Our shame, then, is not “fitting,” as contemporary philosophers would put it. Just like it is fitting to be afraid only of what is dangerous or threatening, so it is fitting to be ashamed only of what is shameful.

But is shame ever fitting?  Is anything really shameful?  I think so.  I once drank too much wine and ate a bunch of my kids’ Halloween candy.  Of course, because they had been keeping careful inventory of it, they found out.  That was shameful, to eat their Halloween candy, and I was ashamed of having done it.  My shame, in that case, was fitting and appropriate.

In my paper, “From Doxastic Blame to Doxastic Shame”, I argue that it is sometimes fitting to feel shame for having believed something.  Actions like eating your kids’ Halloween candy can be shameful, but so can beliefs. I think this is an interesting conclusion, in part, because it sheds light on a long-standing debate in philosophy about whether it is ever fitting to blame someone for their beliefs. This debate, in turn, is connected to how, in general, we can evaluate or criticize people for their beliefs.

A central worry about blaming someone for their beliefs is that we don’t seem to be responsible for our beliefs in the way that we are responsible for our actions.  The wine notwithstanding, I chose to eat that Halloween candy. But we do not and cannot choose to believe something.  I don’t know where Tom Cruise is right now, but he might well be in Paris.  Even so, I cannot choose to believe that he is in Paris – not, at least, in anything like the way I chose to eat the Halloween candy.

However – and this a key idea in the paper – it is sometimes fitting to feel shame for things that you are not responsible for.  To see this, we need a different example (since I was responsible for eating my kids’ Halloween candy). Here’s an example I use in the  paper: you might be ashamed of the fact that you are selfish, even though you are not responsible for being as selfish as you are.  In other words, we can appropriately feel shame about our personality traits even though we don’t choose our personality traits.  While I believe that nothing can be blameworthy unless you are responsible for it, things can be shameful even though you’re not responsible for them. 

Still, you might wonder, can beliefs be shameful?  

The example I use in the paper to support the conclusion that beliefs can be shameful is a case of racial resentment: for example, believing that White people are discriminated against more than non-White people.  But I think it is also useful to approach this by thinking about embarrassing beliefs. (Embarrassment and shame are different, but related.)

Have you ever been taken in by an April Fool’s joke or a fake news post?  That can be embarrassing.  In general, gullibility is embarrassing.  When I lived in Scotland, my friends would tell American tourists that haggis was made from a little furry animal, called a haggis, that lived in the highlands. Some of them believed it.  That was embarrassing for them.

Was it shameful?  Not quite.  But I argue that when the moral stakes are higher – as in the case of racial resentment – what would otherwise be an embarrassing belief turns into a shameful one.  

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/6915/.

About the author

Allan Hazlett is Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis.  He works on several topics in epistemology, metaethics, and moral psychology.  He is the author of many articles and three books, the  most recent of which is The Epistemology of Desire and the Problem of Nihilism (Oxford University Press, 2024).

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Somogy Varga, Andrew J. Latham and Jacob Stegenga – “Health, Disease, and the Medicalization of Low Sexual Desire: A Vignette-Based Experimental Study”

In this post, Somogy Varga, Andrew J. Latham and Jacob Stegenga discuss the article they recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

Portrait of Elizabeth I of England, also known as “the Virgin Queen” (ca. 1575) author unknown

The concepts of health, disease and disorder play a central role in medical research, healthcare, and public health. They inform our understanding of these areas and they are crucial in establishing which conditions, correctly, fall within the domain of medicine.

Debates about these concepts have significant implications for both medical research and practice. These implications are clearly seen, for example, when we consider a contested condition such as “Female Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder” (FSD).

FSD is in the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; APA 2013). The core symptoms of FSD are a decrease in interest in sex, including (i) sexual activity, (ii) sexual thoughts, (iii) sexual reception and initiation, (iv) sexual pleasure, (v) sexual cues, and (vi) genital sensation. To be diagnosed with FSD, a woman must have at least three of these symptoms, the symptoms must cause distress, and they must not be explainable by another medical condition or external cause, such as relationship difficulties.

Whether FSD correctly counts as a disorder has significant implications for how it is viewed and treated. The FSD literature is divided between those who judge that low sexual desire is a disorder and appropriate target of medical treatment—call this the mainstream view (e.g., Berman, Berman, & Goldstein 1999)—and those who contest both claims—call this the critical view (e.g., Tiefer 2001). There are significant stakes in this debate: anyone with an intervention to market (pharmaceutical or otherwise) has an interest in sustaining the mainstream view.

Mainstream and critical theorists often ground their arguments in what they think are shared judgments (Stegenga 2021). To empirically inform this debate, we conducted a study to examine what factors influence people’s judgments regarding FSD as a disorder and an appropriate target of medical intervention. If a good making feature of a view is that it (better) aligns with shared judgments, then uncovering people’s judgments align could help advance the debate.

Of course, aligning with shared judgments provides, at best, only a defeasible reason in favour of a view. For instance, if people judged both that FSD is a disorder and an appropriate target for medical intervention, whereas they did not judge “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” (i.e., male low sexual desire) in the same way, then we would have good reason to discount the import of such judgments.

We found that people’s judgements did not straightforwardly align with either the mainstream or the critical view. 

The biggest predictor of whether FSD was judged to be a disorder was the extent to which people judged it to be a “dysfunction”. However, what it meant to people to be a dysfunction in this context reflected a complex interaction of both descriptive factors (the cause and intensity of the atypical sexual desire) and evaluative factors (how the atypical sexual desire is valued).

This stands in striking contrast with how people conceive of dysfunction in the context of somatic diseases: there, it has been reliably found that people’s judgments are not influenced by how the condition is valued. Instead, people’s judgments simply depend on descriptive facts about bodily systems (e.g., Latham & Varga forthcoming; Varga, Latham, & Machery, forthcoming).

We also found another discrepancy: while subjects’ evaluative attitude towards FSD had no direct influence on whether FSD was judged to fall within the scope of medicine, it did influence the extent to which medical intervention was deemed to be appropriate. People were more likely to judge that medical intervention would be appropriate when someone with FSD disvalued their condition.

This suggests that people take a permissive view about medicine’s role: a view according to which medicine not only treats disorders and diseases but also promotes people’s health and wellbeing (e.g., Stegenga 2018; Varga 2023).

References

  • American Psychiatric Association (2013). DSM-5: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th edition).
  • Berman, J. R., Berman, L., and Goldstein, I. (1999). “Female Sexual Dysfunction: Incidence, Pathophysiology, Evaluation, and Treatment Options”. Urology 54(3): 385–391.
  • Latham, A. J. and Varga, S. (forthcoming). “Is “Dysfunction” a Value-Neutral Concept?” Philosophical Studies.
  • Stegenga, J. (2018). Medical Nihilism. Oxford University Press.
  • Stegenga, J. (2021). “Medicalization of Sexual Desire”. European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 17(2): 5–34. 
  • Tiefer, L. (2001). “A New View of Women’s Sexual Problems: Why New? Why Now?” Journal of Sex Research, 38(2): 89–96.
  • Varga, S. (2023). “The Aim of Medicine. Sanocentricity and the Autonomy Thesis”. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. 104(4): 720–745.
  • Varga, S., Latham, A. J., and Machery, E. (forthcoming). Health and Disease: Experimental Philosophy of Medicine. Cambridge University Press.

About the authors

Somogy Varga is Professor of Philosophy at Aarhus University. His current research focuses primarily on topics in the philosophy of medicine, science, and psychiatry. He is the author of four books: Science, Medicine, and the Aims of Inquiry (Cambridge University Press), Scaffolded Minds (MIT Press), Naturalism, Interpretation, and Mental Disorder (Oxford University Press), and Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal (Routledge).

Andrew J. Latham is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Aarhus University. He works mainly at the intersection of metaphysics, cognitive science, and ethics. His recent work has appeared, among other places, in Noûs, Journal of Philosophy, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

Jacob Stegenga is Professor at Nanyang Technological University Singapore. He has published widely in philosophy of science and philosophy of medicine, and he is the author of Medical Nihilism (Oxford University Press), Care and Cure: An Introduction to Philosophy of Medicine (University of Chicago Press), and a book to be published in 2026 titled Heart of Science.

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Daniel Buckley – “On the Relevance of Self-Disclosure for Epistemic Responsibility”

In this post, Daniel Buckley discusses his article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Daniel’s article can be found here.

“The Mark on the Mirror Left by Breathing” (1977) Dieter Appelt ©  the Art Institute Chicago

According to one prominent view, a necessary condition for the appropriateness of holding someone responsible for their conduct (e.g. through moral blame) involves disclosure of an objectionable feature of their (“true”, “deep”, or “real”) self, where the latter consists, roughly, of the person’s values, ends, and commitments.  This is the kind of condition which is plausibly unmet in a case where a person’s action causes harm to others, but where the person performing the action manifested no malice, ill-will, or disregard. For instance, perhaps at the time of acting this person was, through no fault of their own, simply ignorant of the likely objective consequences of their action. Contrast this with a case where a person’s action causes harm to others, but where the person performing the action was fully aware of its likely objective consequences. Perhaps their action was underwritten by an egregious disregard for the well-being of others, or by an explicit intention to harm people. The idea is that moral accountability responses like blame are perhaps called for in this latter kind of case, but not in the former, in virtue of the fact that the conduct expressed objectionable values, ends, and commitments, i.e. an objectionable “self”. 

The aim of my paper is to investigate the relevance of self-disclosure for epistemic responsibility. The central question that I explore is the following: Is it the case that, in order to appropriately hold a person epistemically responsible, the person must express or disclose an objectionable doxastic self?

As I understand it, a person’s “doxastic self” consists of values, ends, and commitments which pertain to the maintenance and regulation of their beliefs. So, for instance, a diligent and conscientious doxastic self might include a commitment to carefully weigh the evidence, avoid biases and fallacies, etc. A reckless and dogmatic doxastic self, on the other hand, might be characterized by a tendency to draw hasty conclusions, cherry pick evidence, etc. I argue for a negative answer to the above question. In other words, my view is that a person can be appropriately held epistemically responsible even if they have revealed nothing objectionable about their “doxastic self”, so understood. 

Consider the following two cases which frame much of my discussion: 

Stubborn Sam: Sam has an abundance of available evidence which is such that, were he to consider it more carefully, he would feel rationally compelled to abandon his denial of the existence of human-induced climate change. However, Sam doesn’t consider this evidence more carefully and, as a result, he maintains his belief that human-induced climate change isn’t real. 

Diligent Doug: Doug lives in a community run by a group of individuals who have managed to shut off access to evidence pertaining to the existence of human-induced climate change. Doug is interested in forming true beliefs about this topic, frequently going to the library to research it. Nevertheless, given the evidence available to him, Doug believes that human-induced climate change isn’t real.

Unlike Sam, Doug does not reveal an objectionable doxastic self in believing as he does; he is a conscientious and responsible believer who is doing his best to respond to the available evidence. In spite of this, I argue that Doug can be appropriately held responsible for believing that human-induced climate change isn’t real.

Sam can of course also be held responsible for believing that human-induced climate change isn’t real. What’s more, the accountability responses that can be appropriately adopted towards Sam may amount to a distinctly epistemic form of blame (I am willing to grant this). My view is that Doug is also an appropriate target of distinctly epistemic accountability responses.

Importantly, I do not argue that Doug is blameworthy for believing as he does. Thus, one claim that I defend is that the epistemic domain involves accountability responses which can be appropriately adopted towards an individual even when that person is in no way blameworthy.

What is it, though, to hold a person responsible in a distinctly epistemic manner? Here I follow Boult (2021) and Kauppinen (2018) in thinking that adjusting my trust in an individual is a way of holding that person responsible in a distinctly epistemic manner. For instance, I might cease to take a person’s words at face value when it comes to certain topics or subject matters (e.g. climate change).

Interestingly, both Boult and Kauppinen suggest that this kind of trust modification only constitutes a genuine accountability response in cases where the person in question manifests an objectionable doxastic self (e.g. Stubborn Sam). Here I disagree: this kind of trust modification can also constitute a genuine accountability response in cases where the person does not manifest an objectionable doxastic self (e.g. Diligent Doug).

My hope is that this paper advances our understanding of epistemic responsibility and contributes to broader discussions of epistemic normativity, especially those which connect the latter with our social practices. 

References

  • Boult, Cameron. (2021). “There is a Distinctively Epistemic Kind of Blame”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 103(3), 518–534.
  • Kauppinen, Antti. (2018). “Epistemic norms and epistemic accountability”. Philosophers Imprint, 18(8).

About the author

Daniel Buckley is currently Assistant Teaching Professor at Penn State Harrisburg. His research focuses on issues in ethics and epistemology, especially questions concerning normativity, agency, and responsibility. 

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Ofer Malcai and Re’em Segev – “The Imperialism of Desert”

In this post, Ofer Malcai and Re’em Segev discuss the article they recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

Picture of the opening credits of the Twin Peaks TV show
Still from the TV show “Twin Peaks” (1990)

Most people are value pluralists. They believe that there are several different moral values. For example, many believe that there is a reason to maximize well-being (for instance, that a greater benefit is better than a smaller one), but also that there is a reason to give some priority to the worse off such that a benefit to a person who is worse off is more valuable than a slightly greater benefit to a person who is much better off. It may seem that this is true also regarding desert (e.g., Arneson 1999, 239). However, on closer inspection, desert turns out to be different—it is much more difficult to accept desert together with other values. 

Shelly Kagan (1998, 2012) has noted this unique aspect of desert regarding its relationship with equality and priority for the worse off. His argument begins with the following case:

Twin Peaks: A is a sinner, who is doing better than he deserves. B is a saint, who is doing less well than she deserves. Yet B is still better-off than A (she deserves much more). We can benefit either A or B. Here is a graphic representation of it.

In this graph, the X (horizontal) axis tracks how much wellbeing a person has, while the Y (vertical) axis tracks how morally good it is, from the standpoint of desert, that a given person has a given amount of wellbeing. The “peaks” of A and B represent the levels of wellbeing that maximize moral value, namely, the levels of wellbeing that A and B exactly deserve. Thus, in this graph, A (the “sinner”) deserves less than B (the “saint”), and his peak is accordingly at a much lower level of wellbeing than that of B. 

In this case, equality and priority favor A, the sinner, since he is worse-off. However, Kagan claims that we should instead favor B, as desert advocates. After all, B is a saint who is getting less than she deserves, while A is sinner who is doing better than he deserves. Moreover, Kagan claims that there isn’t even a pro tanto reason in favor of preferring A. Therefore, he concludes that if you accept desert, you should reject equality and priority as intrinsic values.

Kagan directs his argument only against equality and priority. However, it seems to us that this argument suggests conclusions that are even more radical: a commitment to desert is discordant with a number of additional salient considerations.

First, although Kagan (1998, 305) himself denies this, we think that desert undermines utility, i.e. the reason to maximize wellbeing. Assume, for example, that we increase overall utility by 10%, but all of this increased utility goes to a sinner whose level of well-being is already higher than what he deserves. Is the resulting state of affairs indeed morally better? It seems that, to the extent that Kagan’s argument is compelling, this is because there is nothing good in increasing the sinner’s wellbeing beyond what he deserves.

One may insist that utility is valuable in itself, independently of desert, and that, for this reason, it is in one respect better if the sinner gets more utility. According to this view, if desert is also valuable, these values may clash.

This view seems odd. however. While it is perfectly coherent to accept several independent values that may clash – for example, to hold that it is pro tanto good to increase the wellbeing of a person even if this is bad in terms of equality – it seems less plausible to hold that there is something good in increasing the wellbeing of a sinner who already fares better than he deserves. This suggests that desert is incompatible with equality, priority, and utility. 

We propose an even more radical conclusion: if we accept desert, we should accept monism about value. This is because the tension between desert and other values is not limited to utility, priority, and equality. For example, it appears to apply also to the relation between desert and sufficiency, namely the view that inequality is objectionable only if the worse-off is below a certain threshold of wellbeing (e.g., Frankfurt 1987).

Kagan does not consider whether his argument applies to sufficiency. However, it seems to us that it does. Consider, on the one hand, a sinner who is evil enough to grant the claim that, although he has more than he deserves, what he has is still below the sufficiency threshold. Consider, on the other hand, a saint who has much less than she deserves, although she is above the threshold. It seems that Kagan’s intuition regarding the Twin Peaks case has considerable force also regarding this case. After all, here too, the saint is getting less than she deserves while the sinner is doing better than he deserves.

This monistic view also has the theoretical virtue of simplicity: it explains diverse intuitions regarding specific cases in light of a single basic value. Moreover, it explains (away), at least partly, the intuitive appeal of the pluralistic view: equality, priority, and utility are prima facie appealing because their implications often coincide with those of desert. For example, desert implies that we should allocate benefits equally, or in a way that gives priority to the worse off when people are equally deserving or when there is no evidence that they are unequally deserving.

However, there are also strong reasons to doubt monism. One such reason is that desert does not always apply. Consider babies, non-human animals, or other individuals who are not morally responsible. These individuals still warrant moral concern, even though desert does not apply to them. If well-being, equality, and priority matter in these cases, why would they suddenly lose importance when desert becomes applicable?

Another challenge to desert monism is

the “Desert Monster” thought experiment: Imagine two persons whose initial levels of well-being accurately reflect what they deserve. Assume that both are decent persons who are, accordingly, reasonably well-off (say, each has 500 units of well-being). If one of these persons performs a good action that entitles her to an additional amount of well-being (say, 10 units), and there are no more available goods, we should allocate to her some goods at the expense of the other person, who did not perform such action (although he could have), in order to equalize the distance of the two persons from what they deserve, i.e., their “peaks” (the new distribution should thus be 495:505).

“The Desert Monster” created by Ofer and Re’em using AI

This seems plausible. But now assume that the more virtuous person keeps on performing good deeds, so we keep on transferring goods from the less virtuous to the more virtuous person. At a certain point, equalizing the distance between what the persons have and what they deserve requires that the more virtuous get all the goods, while the other gets nothing. Intuitively, this result seems wrong. The fact that the less virtuous person is very badly-off appears relevant when deciding if additional transfers are just. This means that desert cannot be the only pertinent moral factor: we should also consider the degree to which a person is worse (or better) off.

The relationship between desert and other values thus raises an interesting dilemma: both the monistic and pluralistic options involve significant costs. This may lead some to reconsider the initial assumption that desert is valuable, but this course has its costs too.  Our conclusion is that there is no easy way out of this dilemma. Indeed, we suggest that this dilemma is due to the unique nature of desert. Unlike other values, desert, especially its more robust form, not only sometimes conflicts with competing considerations that favor different courses of action but rather seems to dispel other values, even as pro tanto ones.

References

  • Arneson, Richard J. (1999). “Egalitarianism and responsibility”. The Journal of Ethics 3: 225-247.
  • Frankfurt, Harry G. (1987). “Equality as a Moral Ideal”. Ethics, 98: 21-43. 
  • Kagan, Shelly. (1998). “Equality and Desert”. In O. McLeod and L. Pojman (eds.), What Do We Deserve? A Reader on Justice and Desert . Oxford University Press.
  • Kagan, Shelly. (2012). “The Geometry of Desert”. Oxford University Press.

About the authors

Ofer Malcai is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Law of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on moral and legal philosophy and law and complexity theory.

Re’em Segev is a Professor at the Faculty of Law of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on moral philosophy and philosophy of law. 

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Sara Aronowitz and Grace Helton – “Subjectivity in Film: Mine, Yours, and No One’s”

In this post, Sara Aronowitz and Grace Helton discuss the article they recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

a young girl attending a carnival wanders off by herself into a poorly lit funhouse
Still from the movie “Us” (2019)

When you watch a movie, where do you experience yourself as located? And who do you imagine yourself to be? The answers to these questions might seem obvious. You experience yourself as located in the movie theatre, reclining in a velvet-covered chair, your legs sprawled under the chair in front of you, your hand clutching some popcorn. And the person you imagine yourself to be is, well, you, the same person you always are, one who happens to be watching a film.

Some aspects of film experience suggest these answers to be incorrect. In at least some cases, viewers seem to imagine themselves to be located in the world of the film. Consider the opening sequence of Us (2019), in which a young girl attending a carnival wanders off by herself into a poorly lit, seemingly abandoned funhouse. Unable to find her way out, the girl descends further and further into the strange space, occasionally confronted by spooky animatronic figures or by her own distorted image reflected in half-hidden mirrors. As viewers, we might feel as though we too are there, in that claustrophobic space, disoriented and unsettled by it.

Or, think of the famous shower scene in Psycho (1960), in which you view the killer through a mist of water, about to deliver blows to his victim Marion Crane. This might create a sense that you are endangered. Thus, you might clutch your seat, feel your heart race, or even raise your hands briefly in a defensive gesture, as though to protect your own body from the onslaught. Examples such as these suggest that viewers sometimes imagine themselves to be embodied in the world of the film.

But other considerations push back against the suggestion that in viewing a film, you imagine yourself to be embodied within that world. Suppose, for instance, that in watching the opening sequence of Us, you imagine yourself in the world of the film. In doing this, you must further represent yourself as an invisible element of the narrative, a shadow character who is for some reason unseen by the young girl. For, consider that the girl lost in the funhouse doesn’t acknowledge the presence of anyone who might help her. It would be very odd to build yourself into the narrative in this way, as an additional, inefficacious element.

This paradox of film, wherein film can engender a powerful sense of felt presence at the same time that film typically requires that the viewer remain at a kind of distance, undergirds several competing views of film experience. In our recent paper, ‘‘Subjectivity in Film: Mine, Yours, and No One’s’’, we develop a new theory of film experience, one which aims to solve both this traditional puzzle and two new puzzles.

Our theory is pluralistic: we think different film sequences mandate different points of view, and sometimes, they mandate no point of view at all. Put otherwise: in some cases, film experience involves the representation of a kind of subjectively presented perspective, one that is ‘from the inside.’ In other cases, film experience mandates an impersonal presentation of the world. For instance, establishing shots, wide shots which depict a scene’s broader environmental context, typically involve an impersonal presentation.

But back to the subjective cases. In some of these cases, a perspective is indexed to one of the film’s characters, and in some cases, this perspective is indexed to you, the viewer. But, we maintain, in still other cases, this perspective is indexed to no one at all. This view helps to resolve the decades-old puzzle about how films can, sometimes via the same sequence, engender both a sense of here-ness and a sense of distance. Films do this via integrated sensory and emotional cues which together ground complex perspectives or what we call subjectivities. These subjectivities are presented ‘from the inside’ but are at least sometimes indexed to no one at all.

We argue that the view that film sometimes mandates the representation of an unindexed subjectivity can help solve two new puzzles about film. The first puzzle concerns perspective divergence, which occurs when a film sequence suggests that a certain spot both is and is not occupied by a viewer. For instance, in a sequence from Caro Diario (1993), we view the main character riding on a Vespa. Our vantage point is from some distance directly behind the main character, and the camera shakes, as though it is mounted on a moving vehicle. At one point, a pedestrian looks directly into the camera, as though acknowledging someone’s presence. Together, these cues suggest the presence of someone behind the protagonist, but the narrative of the film makes it implausible that anyone follows this character during this period. We argue that in sequences such as this one, viewers represent a perspective, or a ‘subjectivity,’ that is indexed neither to a character in the film, nor to the viewer herself, but to no one at all.

Still from the movie “Caro Diario” (1993)

The second puzzle concerns what we call post facto point-of-view sequences. These are point-of-view sequences which are disclosed to be point-of-view sequences only after the presentation of the relevant sequence. For instance, in one sequence from Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), we see the protagonist Héloïse through the flickering flames of a bonfire. She slowly walks a short distance before pausing, gazing in what seems to be the direction of the viewer. The hem of her dress catches fire, which she doesn’t notice. It gradually dawns on us that the vantage point from which we see Héloïse is her companion Marianne’s perspective and has been all along; this is why the gaze is so fixed, so unmoving from Héloïse, even after her dress catches fire, and why Héloïse’s gaze returns so unwaveringly. It is the gaze of someone transfixed by Héloïse as an object of desire and who in turn transfixes Héloïse. 

We argue that in sequences such as this one, viewers initially represent a perspective, or a ‘subjectivity,’ that is indexed neither to a character in the film nor to the viewer herself, but to no one at all. Only later do viewers represent this perspective as a particular character’s (such as Marianne’s). 

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/5707/.

About the authors

Sara Aronowitz studies learning and memory. She’s an assistant professor at the University of Toronto.

Grace Helton is a philosopher of cognitive science and epistemology. She’s currently writing a book on the emotions, with a special emphasis on grief, PTSD, and awe. She’ll be joining the University of Rochester in July of 2025.

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Nicholas Wiltsher – “The Aesthetic Constitution of Genders”

In this post, Nicholas Wiltsher discusses his article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Nick’s article can be found here.

photo of a woman and a man with overlapping geometric patterns
Detail of “121” by Ren Hang © 2023 Taschen GmbH

Sometimes, you write a paper because you think you’ve got the right answer. Sometimes, you just want to explore some ideas; whether you have them exactly right isn’t so important. This paper is of the second kind. It starts from the thought that genders are socially constructed. This means that they’re made from coordinated human thought and action—what we can call social practices. These social practices generate constraints, enablements, and norms: rules about things you can, can’t, should, and shouldn’t do, according to your gender. A gender is constituted by those rules, and thus constructed from social practice.

My general notion was to think about whether, and how, aesthetic practices such as judgements of attractiveness and dress codes contribute to the construction of genders by generating constitutive rules.

Now, you might think that it’s obvious that genders have something to do with aesthetics, but let’s be clear: the claim isn’t just that genders have aesthetic effects. The claim is that what makes genders substantial, what really makes them whatever they are, is in large part rules generated by the gendered aesthetic practices in which we collectively engage. In the paper, I try to justify this claim in three stages: first, by showing that there’s conceptual space for it; second, by showing that the conceptual space can be filled; third, by suggesting that it’s useful to do so.

Let’s start from conceptual space. We can divide human thought and practice into three domains: epistemic, practical-ethical, and aesthetic. Each has its own distinctive kind of value (truth, goodness, beauty), its own salient mental states (knowledge, virtue, appreciation), and so on. On my reading, most of the work on genders is either about epistemic practice or practical-ethical practice. On the epistemic approach, the categories woman and man are constructed from the explanations and predictions we make of people so categorised: for example, from explanations for action appealing to gendered character traits (emotionality, aggression). On the practical-ethical approach, the categories are constructed from the ways we treat and judge people so categorised: for example, from differential judgement of similar sexual behaviour in women and men (promiscuity). Very few people have thought about genders as constructed through their use in aesthetic valuation of people. So there’s the conceptual space.

How do you fill such a conceptual space? With a model, is my answer. A model is a selective account of something. You could think of it in terms of telling a story from a perspective. When it comes to complicated things, it’s worth making multiple models, telling multiple stories, which highlight different important aspects. A model of gender construction shows us one important aspect of it. So aesthetic, epistemic and practical models aren’t really in competition: they’re showing us different things.

The aesthetic model begins with an account of aesthetic social practices. These are coordinated patterns of thought and behaviour focussed on the creation and appreciation of things with aesthetic value. Making art is an obvious example of such a practice. So are lots of practices with humans at their centre. Think of fashion, grooming, perfume; think, in fact, of what people often mean by “aesthetics”. These are coordinated ways of finding aesthetic value in people: of finding each other beautiful, striking, interesting, stylish, expressive.

Lots of human-centred aesthetic practices are gendered. But that doesn’t mean they all contribute directly to constructing genders. The really important practices are those in which gender differentiation occurs essentially: those where it’s definitional of the practice that it’s done differently by people of different genders. It’s essential to the practice of professional dress that men and women do it differently—you can tell this because the very same action, say wearing red lipstick, has very different aesthetic consequences depending on the gender of the actor. Perhaps surprisingly, drag is another aesthetic practice in which gender differentiation is essential. It’s definitional of drag that aesthetic value varies depending on the gender of the performer.

These important aesthetic practices help to construct genders because they generate constraints, enablements, and norms. They tell us how people belonging to a given gender ought to look, dress, comport themselves, express themselves. You can see this most clearly by thinking of gender policing. Which transgressions of gender norms are most often and obviously punished by societies? I say it’s transgressions of aesthetic norms: norms of what we wear and how we present ourselves. 

So there’s a model of how aesthetic social practices in which gender differentiation occurs essentially generate norms that are sufficiently substantial to constitute genders. But is this model useful? The third part of the paper says it is, because it can bridge a troublesome gap between gender categories and self-identity.

We each establish our gender identity in relation to gender categories. Moreover, people want to identify with genders. They often put their gender at the core of their self-identity. But, ideally, we want our self-identity to be something we positively embrace. Yet if we think of genders as defined by epistemic or practical-ethical practices, it’s not clear why anyone would want to positively embrace them, rather than just accept them. 

The aesthetic model allows us to tell a fluent story about how genders can be embraced as constituents of self-identity. Identifying with a gender means embracing the aesthetic norms that constitute it. By embracing those norms, one adopts reasons to value oneself and makes assertions about how one wishes to be valued. Moreover, by participating in gendered aesthetic practices, one finds tools with which to construct and express one’s gendered identity, while also actively participating in the construction of gender itself.

So there’s the argument. There’s space for an aesthetic model of genders; there’s a credible model to be made; and the model can do useful work. I don’t think I’ve done everything right in this paper, and I’d be delighted if someone else were to do it better. But I think the basic idea is sound: whatever genders are, aesthetic practices substantially make them so.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/6160/.

About the author

Nicholas Wiltsher is currently a lecturer at Uppsala University. He will take up a similar position at St Andrews in September 2025. He has previously worked in Belgium, Brazil, the USA, and the UK. His research encompasses several topics in aesthetics, and also the imagination.

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Michael Dickson – “Musical Notation”

In this post, Michael Dickson discusses his article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Michael’s article can be found here.

a painting of three musicians by pablo picasso
Three Musicians (1921) Pablo Picasso

While scholars have often discussed the artifacts created from musical notation (scores), philosophical exploration of the nature of notation is relatively sparse. My essay “Musical Notation” takes a step back to address foundational questions about notation: What is it? What and how does it express? And what are the implications of this expression?

In my essay, I do not offer an exhaustive philosophy of notation, but I develop a framework that accommodates the complexity and context-dependence inherent in musical notation. The essay focuses on notation in the Western tradition, itself quite diverse, and does not pursue a comprehensive treatment of other traditions.

My approach differs from Nelson Goodman’s work on this topic in two ways: firstly, it avoids his nominalist commitments and, secondly, it acknowledges that musical notation is not a formal language and resists being treated as such.  

To ground the discussion, I introduce four desiderata for any theory of musical notation:

  1. Diverse Uses: The theory must explain the various roles notation plays – e.g., prescriptive (as in scores), mnemonic, transcriptional, pedagogical, and analytic.
  2. Diverse Systems: The theory must accommodate the multitude of notational systems and their integration with specific musical practices.
  3. Extra-notational Interaction: The theory should account for how notation interacts with contextual information, such as titles, composer names, and stylistic indications.
  4. Entanglement with Practice: The theory must recognize that notation is deeply interwoven with the practices it supports, reflecting the cultural, historical, and practical contexts of its use.

I distinguish various types of symbol: for example, sonic symbols, such as quarter-notes, which relate directly to the production of a sound, and supporting symbols, such as staves and clefs, which provide context for establishing the meaning of sonic symbols.

I then turn to disentangling the components of musical notation.

  • Symbol-forms are the abstract shapes or other configurations (such as the shape of a notehead or a rest) that carry musical meaning.
  • Symbol-engravings are the physical manifestations of these forms, found in scores and other notational media.
  • Symbols themselves are abstract entities, created through the association of symbol-forms with meanings, intended for use within a notational system.

This model allows for a nuanced understanding of how notation functions. For instance, the same symbol-form (e.g., a dot) can have different meanings depending on context, as seen in late medieval mensural notation where dots signify various rhythmic values. Similarly, the variability of symbol-engravings, especially in historical manuscripts, underscores the flexibility of notation. A quarter-note engraved as an odd squiggle by Janáček might differ morphologically from the standard engraving, but it remains a quarter-note because of its role within the system.

Symbols are not reducible to their forms or engravings. They are abstract artifacts with meanings and relationships that evolve over time. A clear illustration of this can be found in the historical development of rhythmic notation in the 13th-century treatise De mensurabili musica, where symbols (like the semibrevis) were created by associating specific forms with new rhythmic meanings.

A key contention of my essay concerns the meaning of musical symbols. I call it

Instructional Meaning: the thesis that musical notation denotes imperative meaning.  

Musical instructions are open-ended and flexible.  A whole note, for instance, instructs the performer to sustain a pitch for a duration but leaves details like dynamics, timbre, and phrasing to the performer’s discretion. This abstraction aligns with the nature of performance, where expertise and context fill in the gaps.

I also explore how instructions are expressed. Musical notation employs symbolic, iconic, and sometimes ostensive modes of expression. A crescendo marking might iconically represent a gradual increase in volume, while a symbolic convention determines its precise interpretation. This interplay of modes underscores the richness of notation as a medium for conveying meaning.

One notable feature of musical instructions is their self-directedness. Unlike instructions for baking bread, where the aim is an external product, musical instructions aim at their own enactment. Performing a push-up or playing a scale exemplifies this self-directedness; the goal is the performance of the action itself, irrespective of downstream objectives like fitness or musical presentation.

I contrast Instructional Meaning with

Sonicism: the thesis that notation denotes fixed sonic structures.

Sonicism struggles to account for the variability of performance and interpretation. If scores were tied univocally to specific sonic outcomes, much of the nuance and adaptability of musical practice would be lost.

Instructional Meaning, by contrast, reflects the fact that performers interpret scores as flexible guides, not rigid blueprints. For example, debates about whether a modern piano performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations constitutes a ‘genuine performance’ illustrate the interpretative richness of musical instructions. These debates arise because the instructions encoded in notation (like all instructions) are always mediated by the norms and practices of interpretation.

Instructional Meaning also makes good sense of unperformable scores – notations that describe impossible actions, such as each performer playing louder than the others. Such scores reinforce Instructional Meaning because their interest lies not in any hypothetical sonic outcome but in the instructions themselves and the conceptual engagement they provoke.

Another strength of Instructional Meaning is its ability to account for extra-notational elements. Titles, composer names, stylistic annotations, and other markings often influence how performers interpret scores. For instance, the tempo marking “Maestoso” in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 shapes the performer’s approach, even though it is not part of the core sonic symbols. These interactions demonstrate how musical instructions (like all instructions) are embedded within broader interpretative contexts.

My essay emphasizes that musical notation is inextricably linked to the practices it supports. Understanding a notational system requires familiarity with the cultural and historical context in which it operates. For example, the rhythmic notation of the Notre Dame school of polyphony relies on an implicit knowledge of rhythmic modes specific to that practice. Similarly, contemporary chord symbols like “Fm7” depend on the tonal conventions of modern music.  This entanglement underscores the limitations of treating musical notation as a formal language. Instead, musical notation must be understood as part of a dynamic, context-sensitive practice.

In the conclusion, I speculate on the ontological implications of Instructional Meaning. If musical scores represent musical pieces, and if scores express instructions, then perhaps musical pieces themselves are instructions. This view aligns with the observation that musical pieces are created, instantiated, and contextualized within specific practices. By conceiving musical works as instructions, we gain a fresh perspective on their nature and the role of notation in their realization.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/5706/.

About the author

Michael Dickson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina.  For many years he worked in philosophy of science, especially physics.  More recently his work has focused on the philosophy of music and psychiatry.

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Martin Glazier and Stephan Krämer – “The Logic of Contingent Actuality”

In this post, Martin Glazier and Stephan Krämer discuss the article they recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

porcelain bust of a woman, with a large baguette and bronze statue precariously set on her head
Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933) on view at the MoMA © 2025 Gala-Salvador Dalí
Foundation / Artists Rights Society, New York

The word “actually” can be used in many ways. One prominent use is to compare the way things actually are with the way they could have been or must be. For example, we may say that the weather could have been nicer than it actually is or that the chemical formula of any substance must be what it actually is. The orthodox view of this notion of actuality accepts the thesis of

actuality necessitism: for all p, if actually p, then it is necessary that actually p.

For example, since it is actually the case that Trump is president, the necessitist will take it to be necessary that he is actually president.

Although this view is widespread, there are reasons to reject it (Glazier forthcoming). One argument against it, which draws on Dorr and Goodman (2020), appeals to the idea that actuality – the collection of propositions that are actually true –  changes over time. Since actuality has been otherwise, it must be possible for it to be otherwise. So actuality necessitism is false.

In our paper “The Logic of Contingent Actuality”, we explore the logic that results if the assumption of necessitism is dropped. What principles govern necessity, possibility, and actuality, once we allow what is actually true to be contingent?

We do not think that under contingentism just anything goes with respect to actuality. Not every proposition – nor even, perhaps, every possible proposition – could have been actually true. The contingency of actuality has limits, some of which are imposed by the very nature or essence of the notion of actuality. With an eye to these limits, we develop a number of axiomatic systems of modal logic with contingent actuality.

What sort of semantics characterizes these systems? Necessitist logics are typically characterized by a possible worlds semantics with a designated actual world. The statement “actually p” is taken to be true at a possible world just in case p is true at the designated world.

However, a semantics like this will not do for contingentist logics. Instead, our semantics appeals to an actuality function: a function which maps each possible world w to another possible world which serves as w’s actual world. (This world may, but need not be, w itself.) Different possible worlds may therefore have different actual worlds. The statement ‘actually p’ is taken to be true at a world w just in case p is true at w’s actual world, the world to which the actuality function maps w. We establish soundness and completeness results for our contingentist systems.

References

  • Dorr, C. and J. Goodman. (2020). “Diamonds are forever”. Noûs 54(3): 632-65.
  • Glazier, M. (forthcoming). “The contingency of actuality”. Ergo

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/5713/.