Posted on by

Atheer Al-Khalfa – “Fixing Reference by Maximizing Knowledge”

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

“Kryptos” (1990) Jim Sanborn. 
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Virginia

Let’s play a game. 

You’re in a foreign country. A local produces a set of inscriptions, and your job is to work out what those inscriptions mean (or to translate them in your own language). You don’t understand the local’s language, you are not allowed to cheat, you are not allowed to guess, but you’re allowed up to three clues (a clue can be a partial answer if you get really stuck). Where do you begin? 

There’s a dictionary nearby listing what every inscription in that foreign language means. You shouldn’t look through that dictionary; that would be cheating. 

You then think: “If only I could figure out what thoughts the local was expressing by those inscriptions, I’d know what those inscriptions mean.” That sounds right, but this feels like cheating too. Isn’t the meaning of any of the local’s inscriptions just the thought the local was expressing by it? Let’s not go down this path.

“Fine,” you say, “then I’ll use a clue: give me all the information in the local’s head.” You think to yourself: “Maybe if I get familiar enough with the local’s current mental state, it’ll point me to what the inscriptions mean.” There is a lot of metal stuff to sift through though; lots of thoughts, hopes, fears., etc. However, given that this strategy doesn’t obviously involve cheating, perhaps it’s a good place to start; a very daunting place to start. Why not use a second clue?

Here is one. Each of the inscriptions the local produced is in fact a simple subject-predicate declarative sentence (in English these are sentences like ‘John is happy’). Great, that narrows the search. You realize you only need to look at the locals’ beliefs. After all, if they were producing one of these sentences, that means they were just expressing one of their simple beliefs—but which belief? There are still so many. You get discouraged again. But you have one clue left. Why not ask for a partial answer, for example, the meaning of predicates? 

This is how the situation might look now (order of items between commas is random but color tells you what that part of the inscription means):

  • “Ϟ⟁Ϡ ⌖ϰ⟡ ⟁Ϟ⌖Ϡ”, “Ϟ⟁Ϡ ⌖ϰ⟡ ⟁Ϟ⌖Ϣ”, “⟡ϰ⌬ ⌖ϰ⟡ ⟁Ϟ⌖Ϡ”, “⟡ϰ⌬ ⌖ϰ⟡ ⟁Ϟ⌖Ϣ”
  • Sara is happy, Zara is happy, Sara is short, Zara is short 

Let’s start with the first inscription. What does it mean? By using your clues, you have narrowed down the possible correct answers to two. “Ϟ⟁Ϡ ⌖ϰ⟡ ⟁Ϟ⌖Ϡ” means either Sara is happy or Zara is happy. That is, given the above range of sentences/beliefs (as well as the partial answer), there are only two consistent ways of assigning a meaning to the first sentence. The problem is that no matter which of the two possible answers you pick, it will be a guess, and you will lose the game because you have used up all clues. 

That’s the game, but what is the philosophical question motivating this game? As philosophers, we want to explain why a sentence in some language means what it does. This question seems especially pressing given that the relation between a sentence and its meaning is somewhat arbitrary; it could’ve easily meant something else.

Some of the clues our player picked correspond to a strategy in the “charity” tradition of interpretation. According to this tradition, sentences mean what they do because those meanings make the agent “right” as much as possible. And “right” can be understood in different ways. We can interpret so that the meanings we assign to their sentences make them express as many truths/true beliefs/beliefs (this is the option we went with above) or as much knowledge as possible. This is a somewhat strange idea that strikes some as counterintuitive, and philosophers have raised a range of worries about it. The above game shows that even when we help this sort of account along considerably (giving the player lots of clues, one of which is a partial answer!), the account struggles to give the right answer. Of course, the example above uses a laughably small set of sentences/beliefs, but it turns out that enlarging these sets along several dimensions is not all that helpful.

The subfield of philosophy that attempts to answer the question of why an inscription (or any other kind of meaningful entity) means what it does is called ‘metasemantics’. Metasemanticists (I sometimes like to think) are in certain ways like codebreakers (think Benedict Cumberbatch’s character – Alan Turing – in The Imitation Game). Codebreakers take a seemingly non-sensical string of ink and try to transform the string into something that is not just meaningful but also intended by the individual who produced it. What they need to do is figure out how to rearrange the input strings to form the correct output strings. One trouble they face is that there can be too many charitable output strings (in the sense that they are all plausibly intended) – which one is the correct one? Afterall, typically, a sentence has one meaning. That is basically the problem we ended up with above. As codebreakers (and metasemanticists) we may help ourselves to a suitable range of what we know about the mental state of the individual producing those strings. Still, as we saw, that strategy didn’t rule out enough options.

In any case, let’s go back to the game. You’ve lost this round. You can try again; the same rules will apply, and you can still get some clues (but no more partial answers). I can think of a couple of promising strategies to try. Can you? 

Hint: you don’t have to limit yourself to the local’s beliefs. You can ask for very different information – even things like what the local (i.e., the producer of the inscription) is trying to convince the reader of. So long as it’s not cheating, you can help yourself to it.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/8578/

About the author

Atheer Al-Khalfa is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University. His work lies at the intersection of the philosophy of language and mind.

Posted on by

Jacob Barrett – “A Simple Solution to the Scope Problem”

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

“Self-portrait on the train, Germany” (1992) © Nan Goldin

What makes your life go better or worse? One popular answer is that your life goes well when, and to the extent that, you get what you want. This is called the desire-satisfaction theory of welfare, and it has a lot going for it.

Unlike hedonistic theories that focus only on pleasure and pain, it allows that what happens outside your conscious awareness can affect your welfare. Someone systematically deceived into thinking that they have deep friendships may be worse off than someone who genuinely has them. And unlike objective list theories, which assume that the same goods are valuable for everyone, it allows for individual differences. If I care a lot about finding a romantic partner, but the prospect leaves you cold, then romance may be good for me but not for you.

Unfortunately, the desire-satisfaction theory faces a problem: we desire all sorts of things that, intuitively, have nothing to do with our welfare. Suppose you meet a stranger on a train, learn that they are ill, and develop a desire that they recover. Years later, unbeknownst to you, they do. Has your life gone better as a result? That’s hard to believe. Or suppose you care about others’ welfare and on balance desire to donate most of your income to charity. Does donating really benefit you—making this not a case of self-sacrifice after all? That also seems wrong. Or, again, if you desire that a war in a distant country end, would its ending really improve your welfare? This, too, seems implausible.

These examples (adapted, respectively, from Derek Parfit, Mark Overvold, and Wayne Sumner) illustrate the “scope problem” for desire-satisfaction theories. If satisfying any desire counts as benefiting you, then the desire-satisfaction theory is implausibly expansive. It includes far too much in its scope.

I believe that a surprisingly simple solution to this problem is available. But to make it work, we first need to back up and consider an intuitive but overlooked claim about the structure of desire.

Philosophers typically treat desires as having three components: an agent (the desirer), an object (what they desire), and a strength (how much they desire it). But, as Stephen Darwall has observed, desires seem also to have a fourth component: a target for the sake of whom you hold the desire.

Consider a woman up for a prestigious award. There’s a real difference between her father wanting her to win for his sake—so he can bask in vicarious parental glory—and him wanting her to win for her sake. The agent is the same (the father), the object is the same (the daughter winning the award), and the strength can be the same too. What differs is the target: for whose sake does the father want this?

Once we notice this feature of desire, it shows up everywhere. When engaged in a group project, you might want it to succeed for your own sake or for your partner’s sake. If a friend’s child is ill, you might desire their recovery for your friend’s sake, their child’s sake, or in an impersonal way—for no one’s sake in particular or, perhaps, “for the sake of the world”.

With this richer picture of desire in hand, the solution to the scope problem becomes straightforward: simply modify the desire-satisfaction theory to say that something is good for you when you desire it for your own sake. This handles all the typical problem cases. You desire the stranger’s recovery for their sake, so it doesn’t affect your welfare. You desire to do the right thing for others’ sake (or impersonally), so self-sacrifice remains genuinely sacrificial. You desire a distant war to end for the sake of those involved, so its resolution doesn’t benefit you.

At the same time, the account handles cases where your welfare does seem to be affected by what happens to your close friends or relations. One remarkable feature of loving someone is that you come to desire their welfare not just for their sake, but also (to some extent) for your own. And this explains why your child or partner thriving can make you (to that extent) better off.

Is this too easy? Consider three objections.

First, is the solution ad hoc? Not at all. The case for desires having targets can be made independently, without reference to the scope problem. It is needed to capture a real psychological distinction.

Second, is it incomplete? Don’t we need a deeper explanation of what it is to desire something for someone’s sake? I don’t think so. It’s plausibly a primitive psychological fact about desires that they come with targets, just as they plausibly come with objects and (as I have argued elsewhere) strengths.

Third, is it circular—perhaps because desiring something “for someone’s sake” just amounts to desiring it insofar as you think it is good for them? This objection also misses the mark, since you can desire something for someone’s sake without thinking it promotes their welfare. For example, a parent can want their child to be morally upright for the child’s sake, even while acknowledging that this would make the child worse off.

The desire-satisfaction theory is one of the most compelling accounts of what makes someone’s life go well. The scope problem has long been considered a serious strike against it. But if we make a small and independently motivated revision to our understanding of the theory—grounded in the idea that desires have targets as well as agents, objects, and strengths—the problem dissolves.

Sometimes a simple solution is all we need.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/7429/.

About the author

Jacob Barrett is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at Vanderbilt University, where he works in social, moral, and political philosophy. He is the author of Ideal and Non-Ideal Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2026) and a co-editor of Essays on Longtermism (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Posted on by

Simon Schüz – “Rehabilitating Transcendental Arguments: A Dialectical Dilemma for Stroud’s Meta-Epistemological Skepticism”.

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

Great Temple of Abu Simbel, Upper Egypt © CC BY-SA Diego Delso

Today, “transcendental arguments” are usually viewed with the same nostalgia and estrangement with which we encounter ancient temples from distant times and cultures. We respect their grand design and metaphysical ambition, yet we tend to view them as relics of a superseded era.

Since Immanuel Kant, transcendental arguments have promised to reveal how the world must be in order for thought/experience to be possible. From Kant’s proof that inner experience presupposes outer experience of an external world to Fichte’s claim that self-awareness requires the existence of other persons, the ambitious goal has always been “world-directed”—moving from the certainty of our inner mental states to the necessity of an outer reality.

The 20th century brought a wave of sobering critiques. Logical Empiricism’s rejection of the synthetic a priori and W.V.O. Quine’s attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction gave way to the conviction that we cannot simply reason our way into the structure of the world.

The final blow came from Barry Stroud’s (1968) substitution objection: given any purported ‘outer’ transcendental condition of something ‘inner’ like thought or experience, what bars us from substituting it with the mere belief in something outer? Stroud argued that transcendental arguments only reveal how we must think or believe the world to be. We might be conceptually locked into believing in an external world, but that necessity remains internal to our minds. From the necessity of a belief, it does not follow that the belief is true.

In my paper, I argue that this skeptical trap is actually a two-way street. The very confidence with which the Stroudian skeptic levels their objection is also their Achilles’ heel.

For their confidence to be warranted, the Stroudian actually needs the support of a transcendental argument themselves. To maintain that our beliefs might fail to match reality, the skeptic must presuppose a certain yardstick of objectivity enforcing a principled gap between, on the one hand, holding a belief and, on the other hand, the truth of that belief.

This leads to a dialectical dilemma. If the skeptic’s yardstick is just another fallible belief about the world, their objection loses its authority – it even becomes incoherent. But if they claim this yardstick is a necessary condition for the very possibility of their doubt, they must confer a special, indubitable status on it: the status of what I call transcendental beliefs.

To see this, consider Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analogy to the standard meter in Paris. For decades, a physical bar defined the length of a meter. To ask if the bar itself was “one meter long” was a category mistake. The bar was not one meter long because it matched an external standard; it was the standard.

Mètre Étalon, Place Vendôme, Paris

Transcendental beliefs work the same way. They aren’t just hunches about the world that might be wrong. While the skeptic can assert that we can be wrong about empirical facts (like whether it’s raining), it is impossible for us to be mistaken about the transcendental propositions that make the idea of ‘objective facts’ possible in the first place.

Thus, transcendental arguments do not have to problematically move from something ‘inner’, like experience, to the ‘outer’ world. Rather, they show which beliefs are indispensable for our very notion of an objective world.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4652/.

About the author

Simon Schüz is Assistant Professor at the RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany. He works on philosophical anthropology, transcendental philosophy, and the history of German idealism. He is the author of Transzendentale Argumente bei Hegel und Fichte (De Gruyter, 2022).

Posted on by

Chong-Ming Lim – “Commemorative Artefactual Speech”

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

“The Embrace” (2023) Hank Willis Thomas

Political philosophers are increasingly directing their attention to objectionable public commemorations – things that honour morally or politically objectionable subjects. A clear example of an objectionable commemoration is a statue honouring a slave-owner or genocidaire. Many philosophers now think that a crucial problem with objectionable public commemorations is that they express hateful or pejorative messages. Arguably, honouring a slave-owner or genocidaire expresses contempt for their victims and potentially declares that their experiences and suffering do not take away from the glory of the honoured subject. 

For the most part, I agree with these claims. However, they focus narrowly on one way in which public commemorations can be objectionable. We should broaden our sights. To do this, I articulate an account of what I call “commemorative artefactual speech”, and show how such speech can go awry beyond expressing hateful or pejorative messages.

On my account, commemorative artefactual speech occurs when an authorised member of a group uses an artefact to declare the importance of remembering a historical subject, in virtue of some feature of that subject. Someone is an authorised commemorator if they have the right kind of standing to speak on behalf of the group as a whole. This can be, among other reasons, because they’ve been democratically elected or otherwise picked out by procedures that people endorse.

These authorised commemorators make use of artefacts to declare that some historical subject is important for the group to remember. Usually, they choose something made from a durable material (such as stone for statues or metal for coins), or something that can be easily reproduced in large quantities (such as printed paper for banknotes and stamps).

A historical subject can be important because they have established the group, made significant contributions to the group, or even adversely affected the group, and so on. These historical subjects are often picked out based on some feature they are believed to have, which renders them worthy of commemoration, and which is often cited as part of the explanation for why they (rather than others) are being commemorated. I keep the relevant sense of importance open.

Within the framework I offer, one can see more clearly that commemorative artefactual speech can go wrong in a variety of ways. Of course, as many have pointed out, it can be directed at inappropriate subjects who are not in fact worthy of being commemorated. However, it can also be problematic if it is made by people who lack the relevant standing, or if it unfairly excludes people who possess the feature being commemorated: for instance, a statue that commemorates the war dead but includes only men and not women.

Commemorative speech can also be problematic if the aesthetic features of the artefacts do not mention (or do not match) the feature in virtue of which some historical subject is being commemorated. Consider “The Embrace”– a sculpture commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King. This sculpture takes the form of four disembodied arms intertwined in an embrace, and it has been widely criticised for being ugly. My account reveals that the ugliness is connected to a further problem: arguably, the commemorative artefact not only fails to mention the feature in virtue of which the Kings are being commemorated, but it even fails to identify them as the targets of the commemoration.

Commemorative artefactual speech can go wrong in several other ways. In the paper, I discuss and illustrate some of them by appeal to a variety of examples, including the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, statues of Confederate soldiers, and commemorations of Winston Churchill.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/7962/.

About the author

Chong-Ming Lim is a Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. His research focuses on political resistance and public commemorations. He is now writing a book on commemorative justice (under contract with OUP).

Posted on by

Andreas Bengtson and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen – “Can Relational Egalitarians Supply Both an Account of Justice and an Account of the Value of Democracy or Must They Choose Which?”

In this post, Andreas Bengtson and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen discuss the article they recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

Painting of red-roofed buildings and a mostly blue partly cloudy sky, with the air filled by dozens of nearly identical men dressed in dark overcoats and bowler hats, standing still in mid air but making it look as if they are falling from the sky like rain.
“Golconda” (1953) René Magritte

Can you imagine justice being achieved without democracy being realized? The view we are concerned with in this paper—relational egalitarianism—cannot. It says that justice requires that people relate as equals, and that democracy is valuable because it is a necessary, or constituent, part of relating as equals. This is a popular view these days.

Unfortunately, relational egalitarianism runs into a dilemma: either it is plausible as an answer to what makes democracy valuable but implausible as a theory of justice, or it is plausible as a theory of justice but implausible as an answer to what makes democracy valuable.

What makes this dilemma obtain? Relational egalitarianism is a claim about how social relations should be: they should be equal, as opposed to unequal. This means that a precondition for the view is that social relations exist. However, relational egalitarians have not said much about how they understand social relations. 

There are different routes relational egalitarians could take here. One option is to go for a moralized view of social relations. For X and Y to be socially related on such a view, they must be able to treat each other in objectionable ways—e.g. in a racist, sexist or exploitative sort of way.

Another option is to go for a non-moralized view. On this view, you have a lexical account of what we mean when we say that two people are socially related. Such a view, we argue, puts interaction or communication front and center: if X and Y can interact or communicate, they are socially related.

The moralized and the non-moralized views come in both a one-way and a two-way version. In the one-way version, it suffices that either X or Y satisfies the requirements (e.g., it suffices, for X and Y to be socially related, that X can communicate with Y). In the two-way version, both parties need to satisfy the requirements (e.g., for X and Y to be socially related, it must be the case both that X can communicate with Y, and that Y can communicate with X). This gives us the following four possible views of social relations:

We argue that the view of social relations to which the relational-egalitarian needs to appeal in order to make relational egalitarianism plausible as a theory of justice – the moralized one-way view – also makes relational egalitarianism implausible as an answer to what makes democracy valuable.

Consider:

Sexist Son: The parents, a father and a mother, of a thirty-year-old man suddenly die in a car crash which leaves the son with the task of handling their wills. He decides to abide by his father’s will (to publish his book manuscript) but not abide by his mother’s will (to publish her book manuscript) solely because he is a very old-fashioned sexist who believes that women should not write books and feels strong revulsion at the thought of his mother publishing a book.  

Relating to another in a sexist way is a paradigmatic injustice according to relational egalitarianism. Thus, it is important, for relational egalitarianism to be a plausible theory of justice, that it can condemn sexism as unjust.

Sexist Son is a case of the son relating to his parents in a sexist way. But the only way in which Sexist Son can be condemned as unjust is if there exists a social relation between the son and his mother (since, as we pointed out, for a social relation to be unequal and therefore unjust requires that there is a social relation to begin with). And only the Moralized One-way View implies that the son and his mother are socially related. Thus, in order for the view to be plausible as a theory of justice, relational egalitarians must adopt the Moralized One-way View of social relations. 

But this creates trouble for the part of the view that claims that democracy is valuable because it is constitutive of equal relations. The reason is that one important requirement on any view of the value of democracy is that it provides a plausible solution to the boundary problem—i.e., the problem of determining who should be included in the demos.

Now, on the relational egalitarian view, those who are socially related should be included in the demos. But if we employ the Moralized One-way View of social relations, then currently living people and dead people are socially related, which means that dead people should be included in contemporary democratic decision-making.

It is a mainstay in democratic theory and history that democratic inclusion of dead people cuts against the egalitarian core of democracy. Indeed, many think that such inclusion amounts to government ‘by the dead hand of the past.’ Thus, adopting the Moralized One-way View makes relational egalitarianism implausible as a view of the value of democracy. 

Hence the dilemma: making relational egalitarianism plausible as an answer to what makes democracy valuable comes at the price of making relational egalitarianism implausible as a theory of justice, and vice versa.

Is there a way out of the dilemma? Arguably, the least costly way out is to say that relational egalitarianism is not a unified theory, but it is rather a disjunct of two different ideals of how social relations ought to be—one focused on justice, the other focused on democracy. 

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/7305/.

About the authors

Andreas Bengtson is Associate Professor at the Centre for the
Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination at Department of
Political Science, Aarhus University. He has published on issues such
as affirmative action, democracy, discrimination, paternalism and
relational equality. His work has appeared in journals such as
American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political
Science, Free & Equal, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy,
Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Moral Philosophy, and
Politics, Philosophy & Economics.

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (D.Phil.) is professor at Aarhus University
(AU), Denmark. He is the director of the Centre for the
Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination at AU. He has
published widely in ethics and political philosophy. Recent books
include Wrongful Discrimination (CUP) and The Beam and the Mote (OUP).
Presently, he is working on two monographs: Poverty Discrimination
(under contract with CUP; with Bastian Steuwer) and Discrimination
Against the Aged.

Posted on by

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.

Posted on by

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.

Posted on by

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).

Posted on by

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.

Posted on by

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.