Many philosophers have discussed the normative significance of personal relationships. The implicit focus of most of these discussions is on the normative significance of active, ongoing relationships. But, of course, all relationships end eventually. This article focuses on relationships that end through the death of one of the participants. A relationship that has ended in this way can still be a source of reasons for the surviving participant. This represents a different dimension of the normative significance of personal relationships, and it is a dimension that tends to become increasingly salient as one ages. Indeed, aging is in part a normative phenomenon, because it involves significant changes in the kinds of reasons people have. This article explores some of those changes and the distinctive questions to which they give rise.

Thomas Reid has the unusual distinction of arriving at a metaethical position very much like G. E. Moore's via a route very similar to that employed by the Kantians. That is, Reid embraces a version of nonnaturalist moral realism by appeal not to open question-style considerations but to a particular account of agency. In this essay, we reconstruct Reid's agency-centered argument for his constitutivist version of moral nonnaturalism, highlighting its commitments. Having presented Reid's argument, we close by considering a prominent contemporary Kantian view, namely, Christine Korsgaard's, and identifying where, despite their common commitments, Reid and Korsgaard part company. The comparison, we suggest, is instructive because it allows us to see more clearly why the link between agency-centered approaches to ethical theorizing and nonrealist, constitutivist views of morality, such as Korsgaard's, is deeply contingent.

Philosophy of mind and cognitive science (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2010; Palermos 2014) have recently become increasingly receptive to the hypothesis of extended cognition, according to which external artifacts such as our laptops and smartphones can—under appropriate circumstances—feature as material realizers of a person's cognitive processes. We argue that, to the extent that the hypothesis of extended cognition is correct, our legal and ethical theorizing and practice must be updated by broadening our conception of personal assault so as to include intentional harm toward gadgets that have been appropriately integrated. We next situate the theoretical case for extended personal assault within the context of some recent ethical and legal cases and close with critical discussion.

I offer a new analysis of Aristotle's concept of an accidental cause. Using passages from Metaphysics Δ and Ε, as well as Physics II, I argue that accidental causes are causally inert. After defending this reading against some objections, I draw some conclusions about Aristotle's basic understanding of causation.

Speech does not merely reflect social identity; it helps create it, by ingrouping and outgrouping individuals and establishing and clarifying community boundaries and norms of membership. We define a pragmatic category of community-specific speech that is used by and directed at community insiders. We focus on a species of community-specific speech that has flown under the philosophical radar, a type of speech we term peripheral speech: Peripheral speech is informal, typically playful, insider speech that includes inside jokes, riffs, gossip, insider references; it is loosely constrained, and only those who have skills and normative competence characteristic of a community can play along successfully. Peripheral speech is shared by a community, but also used to bring people into it and cast people out of it. We argue that entitlement to peripheral speech requires a type of speaker authority that is not granted by way of established rules and conventions, but rather settled locally and in situ.

This paper concerns desires with a distinctive interpersonal structure. ‘Second-personal desire’ seeks something of or from a particular person who is the irreplaceable, intrinsic object of the desire by virtue of his or her significance to the desirer as a participant in an interpersonal relationship in which what is desired carries interpersonal significance. Such desires involve a wish that the other person will experience one's desire as a reason in a way that involves positive interpersonally directed emotional responsiveness to one's desire. Second-personal desire thus renders one vulnerable to distinctive forms of disappointment and to the possibility that the other person is neither positively motivated by, nor positively emotionally responsive to, the possibility of such disappointment. A distinctive form of positive emotional regard is thus always at issue in second-personal desire. This form of regard is not always owed, despite our craving for it—a fact that considerably complicates interpersonal interaction. The paper concludes with an argument that the participant reactive attitudes cannot be understood without the notion of second-personal desire and that second-personal desire is consequently crucial for an adequate understanding of the normative structure of interpersonal interaction.

For over a century there has been a protracted effort in American philosophy to use Darwinian explanatory resources in order to make certain leading ideas in German idealism naturalistically intelligible. I trace some of the nineteenth and twentieth century contours of this effort. In doing so I outline an understanding of ourselves as norm-laden persons in a natural world. As a consequence, philosophical inquiry—understood in C. S. Peirce's sense as the practice of the ‘normative sciences’ of aesthetics, logic, and ethics—can be understood as the self-conscious and rational exercise of natural and socially conditioned capacities to sense, think, and act. This leaves us with a project, by no means completed, to frame categories through which to understand the sociohistorical development of the notions of beauty, truth, and goodness as a process continuous with the natural evolution of the nervous system in its sensory, central, and motor moments.

In her account of a debate held at Princeton University between herself and Peter Singer, the lawyer and disability rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson criticizes the ‘terrible purity of Singer's vision’. Although she certainly disagrees with the substance of Singer's arguments concerning disability and infanticide, this remark is best understood as a critique of their form. In this paper, I attempt to make sense of this critique. I argue that Singer's characteristic mode of argument, with its appeal to a universal, neutral point of view, makes it impossible for McBryde Johnson to give voice to her particular experience and thus obscures her humanity. In order to clarify the positive contribution that an appeal to particular experience may make to moral reasoning, I draw a parallel with the transformative effects of the experience of beauty, arguing that McBryde Johnson's writing ought to be regarded as both morally and philosophically instructive.