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This essay gives a new interpretation of some of the central ethical doctrines of Bishop Butler's Sermons -- in particular, of his claim that a review of the empirical facts of human nature shows that we have "an obligation to the practice of virtue", and of the precise claims that he makes about the relations between morality and self-interest.

This is a review essay about Christopher Peacocke's book The Realm of Reason (Oxford University Press, 2004).

This paper outlines a new form of epistemological contextualism -- specifically, a contextualist account of terms like 'justified belief' (rather than terms like 'knowledge'). Some beliefs are more justified than others. So, how justified must a belief be to count as "justified" simpliciter? It is argued that there is no context-independent answer to that question: there are many different standards of justified belief. By considering which of these many standards will guide a rational believer in forming and revising her beliefs, a precise account is given of how the truth conditions of the sentence 'S is justified in believing p' vary with the context of use. This form of contextualism cannot by itself provide a satisfactory answer to scepticism about justified belief; but no plausible form of contextualism could do that. This form of contextualism can, however, reconcile the following two intuitions: (i) the relevant notion of 'justified belief' is a purely epistemic notion, which captures something that guides the rational believer as she forms and revises her beliefs, and (ii) in forming and revising her beliefs, the rational believer will often be influenced by the practical considerations -- such as the needs, values, and purposes -- that are at stake in her situation.

This paper outlines suggests a new solution to the Newcomb problem – different from the familiar solutions of both causal decision theory (CDT) and evidential decision theory (EDT). According to this new solution, the relevant probabilities are the conditional probabilities that are favoured by EDT; but the theory agrees with CDT in implying that if there are any dominant options, they are the only rational options, because there is a “causal” element, not in the relevant probabilities, but in the relevant measure of “degrees of correctness” instead.

According to epistemological internalism, the rationality of a belief supervenes purely on "internal facts" about the thinker's mind. But what are "internal facts"? Why does the rationality of a belief supervene on them? The standard answers are unacceptable. This paper proposes new answers. "Internal facts" are facts about the thinker's nonfactive mental states. The rationality of a belief supervenes on such internal facts because we need rules of belief revision that we can follow directly, not by means of following any other rules, and the proximate explanation of any belief revision always consists of such internal facts.

The aim of this chapter is to defend the claim that “the intentional is normative” against a number of objections, including those that Georges Rey has presented in his contribution to this volume. First, I give a quick sketch of the principal argument that I have used to support this claim, and briefly comment on Rey’s criticisms of this argument. Next, I try to answer the main objections that have been raised against this claim. First, it may seem that the claim that “the intentional is normative” is just hopelessly Panglossian: doesn’t this claim just wilfully ignore all the mountains of evidence that we have for the sheer ubiquity and pervasiveness of human irrationality? Secondly, the claim that intentional mental states are essentially normative seems to be intended as a purely philosophical, non-empirical account of the nature of these mental states: but why should we think that purely philosophical reflection can tell us anything interesting about the nature of the mind -- shouldn’t we look to empirical psychology to enlighten us about such matters? I argue that neither of these objections succeeds in undermining my version of the claim that "the intentional is normative".

This paper proposes an answer to one of the most profound and difficult questions of epistemology: What can make a belief-forming practice rational if its rationaolity is not due to the availability of some independent justification for believing that the belief-forming practice is reliable?

This is a review of Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics, by James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter; it is argued that the arguments of that book completely fail to establish the book's principal conclusions.

It is often said, metaphorically, that belief "aims" at the truth. This paper proposes a normative interpretation of this metaphor. First, the notion of "epistemic norms" is clarified, and reasons are given for the view that epistemic norms articulate essential features of the beliefs that are subject to them. Then it is argued that all epistemic norms--including those that specify when beliefs count as rational, and when they count as knowledge--are explained by a fundamental norm of correct belief, which requires that, if one considers a proposition at all, one should believe it if and only if it is true.

In this paper, I apply the "conceptual role semantics" approach that I have proposed elsewhere (according to which the meaning of normative terms is given by their role in practical reasoning or deliberation) to the meaning of the term 'ought'. I argue that this approach can do three things:

1. It can give an adequate explanation of the special connection that normative judgments have to practical reasoning and motivation for action.
2. It can give an adequate account of why the central principles of deontic logic are correct.
3. It can give an explanation of the precise ways in which the term 'ought' is systematically context-sensitive, so that the term expresses different (but systematically related) concepts in different contexts.

This paper deals with the problem that persistent moral disagreement poses for moral realism -- given that it is plausible that not all moral disagreement is caused by irrationality or non-moral error or ignorance, but some moral disagreement is caused by what are here called "moral evil demons" instead. For a realist, the solution must lie in a general account of the epistemic significance of disagreement. In this paper, a general view of disagreement is defended, according to which it can be rational for both sides of the disagreement to take it to be more likely that it is the other party to the disagreement who is in error, even if there is no "independent" way of adjudicating the dispute.

What exactly is reasoning? Like many other philosophers, I shall endorse a broadly causal conception of reasoning. Reasoning is a causal process, in which one mental event (say, one's accepting the conclusion of a certain argument) is caused by an antecedent mental event (say, one's considering the premises of the argument). Just like causal accounts of action and causal accounts of perception, causal accounts of reasoning must confront the problem of deviant causal chains. In this paper, I shall propose an account of the nature of reasoning, incorporating a solution to the specific version of the deviant causal chains problem that arises for accounts of reasoning. One striking feature of my solution is that it requires that certain normative facts are causally efficacious. In spite of this commitment to the causal efficacy of the normative, I shall argue that this account of the nature of reasoning is quite compatible with plausible versions of naturalism.