Simon Keller

Friendship and Belief

Abstract I intend to argue that good friendship sometimes requires epistemic irresponsibility. To put it another way, it is not always possible to be both a good friend and a diligent believer.

Presentists Should Believe in Time-Travel

Do non-present things exist? Four-dimensionalists say that they do, and presentists say that they don’t. Four-dimensionalists believe that time is a fourth dimension, orthogonal to the three spatial dimensions. In the same way that things exist at other points in space, says the four-dimensionalist, we should accept that things exist at other points in time. Just as Shania Twain exists, but not here, John Denver exists, but not now. On the fourdimensionalist view, the universe is an existing space-time manifold, containing everything that has happened, everything that is happening and everything that will happen. It follows from the four-dimensionalist picture that there is no single time that can be non-indexically regarded as the present. Presentists deny the analogy between time and the spatial dimensions, and insist that the only things that exist are the things that exist now. Shania Twain doesn’t exist here, but she does exist. John Denver doesn’t exist now, so he doesn’t exist at all. The best that can be said about John Denver, according to the presentist, is that he did exist. There are those who say that presentism is vacuously true, those who say that it is obviously false, and those who say that presentists and four-dimensionalists are talking past each other. We think that the disagreement between presentism and four-dimensionalism is both real and interesting, but we won’t try to defend that view here. In fact, our purpose is to deny what has sometimes been taken to be a defining difference between the two views: their disagreement over the possibility of time-travel.

Patriotism as Bad Faith

Most people think that patriotism is a virtue. That, at least, is what is suggested by a quick glance at the political world and the popular media in this and similar countries. Politicians constitute an extreme case— I think that many of them would rather be called cowardly or selfish or corrupt than unpatriotic—but their case is odd only for its extremity. In everyday life, it seems as though you are usually offering a compliment when you call someone a patriot and as though patriotism is usually thought to be something that we should foster in our children and ourselves. Patriotism, in the popular imagination, may not quite rank alongside kindness, justice, temperance, and the like, but it is a virtue nonetheless; it is a character trait that the ideal person would possess. Recent philosophical discussions of patriotism have usually been framed by the debate over universalism and communitarianism. Universalism—sometimes called “liberal universalism,” and closely related to cosmopolitanism—is the view that many of the most important ethical judgments are ideally made from an impartial, detached perspective,

Virtue ethics is self-effacing

An ethical theory is self-effacing if it tells us that sometimes, we should not be motivated by the considerations that justify our acts. In his influential paper ‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories’ [1976], Michael Stocker argues that consequentialist and deontological ethical theories must be self-effacing, if they are to be at all plausible. Stockers argument is often taken to provide a reason to give up consequentialism and deontology in favour of virtue ethics. I argue that this assessment is a mistake. Virtue ethics is self-effacing in just the same way as are the theories that Stocker attacks. Or, at the very least: if there is a way for virtue ethics to avoid self-effacement then there are ways for its rivals to avoid self-effacement too. Therefore, considerations of self-effacement provide no reason to prefer virtue ethics to its major rivals.

Civic Motivation and Globalization: What Is It Like to Be a Good Citizen Today?

Good citizenship is often associated with patriotism. The patriotic citizen identifies deeply with her country and has a primary and far-reaching loyalty to the country. In the twenty-first century, forms of identification that support patriotic citizenship are increasingly undermined. State boundaries play an ever smaller role in forging citizens’ identities, in defining citizens’ moral horizons, and as sites of the political problems with which citizens are most concerned. But there are still good reasons to want people to be good citizens, even if they cannot be patriotic citizens. What could take the place of patriotic citizenship? This paper sketches a model of the “wordly citizen.” The worldly citizen does not identify primarily with her country, but she nevertheless holds a strong derived commitment to her state, grounded in an accurate understanding of her place in her local community and the wider world. Worldly citizenship, the paper argues, is both recognizable and achievable. It stands as an attractive alternative to patriotic citizenship, and also to the “global citizenship” associated with strong forms of cosmopolitanism.

Moral Blackmail and the Family

Moral blackmail is a wrongful strategy intended to force a person to perform an act by manipulating her circumstances so as to make it morally wrong for her to do anything else. The idea of moral blackmail can seem paradoxical, but moral blackmail is a coherent and indeed a familiar phenomenon. It has special significance for our intimate personal relationships and is often a force within family dynamics. It is used to enforce power relationships within families, and in particular to uphold expectations that women and girls will do most of the work in caring for vulnerable family members. It is also used as a tool of policy makers, to transfer to families duties of care that would otherwise be discharged by the government or by society at large. It is an important but under-recognized source of ongoing manipulation and exploitation.