Some targets of report feeling shame in response to a racist incident. However, this phenomenon seems puzzling since plausibly, the target of racism has nothing to feel shame about. I draw on David Velleman’s analysis of shame to claim to explicate the nature of shame that is sometimes experienced in response to racism. I propose that when an individual is racialised as non-white and stereotyped in a racist incident, she can feel shame about her inability to choose when race is made salient. Given that certain racialised identities are stigmatised, I argue that targets of racism should be able to choose when race is made salient. Hence my account of shame can both capture the phenomenology of some who feel shame in response to racism and deliver the verdict that it is sometimes appropriate to feel shame in response to racism. My account also highlights emotional and cognitive costs of racism that have their root in shame felt in response to racism as well as a new form of hermeneutical injustice and distinctive communicative harm, contributing to a fuller picture of what is morally objectionable about racism.

In this paper, I explore the relationship between autonomous agency and oppression. In particular, I take one desideratum of any adequate account of autonomous agency to be that it explain the ways in which oppression undermines our autonomy. Many have thought that this desideratum can only be satisified by a substantive account of autonomy. However, members of marginalized groups who live in circumstances of oppression can and do make autonomous choices. The aim of the paper is to do justice to these two thoughts not by giving up on a substantive account of autonomy, but by complementing it with an account of agency, socially embedded agency, the locus of which is in the exercise of our ability to negotiate between different features and perspectives. The agentic skills involved in negotiating are crucial for members of marginalized groups to navigate the social world, and exercising these skills is one important way of making choices and asserting their agency. In addition, (substantive) autonomy and social agency are related: although having social agency doesn’t entail (substantive) autonomy, having the social agentic skills of negotiation is important in achieving autonomy in our unjust non-ideal world.

Bernard Williams’ Shame and Necessity(1993) was an influential early contribution to what has become a broader movement to rehabilitate shame as a moral emotion. But there is a tension in Williams’ discussion that presents an under-appreciated difficulty for efforts to rehabilitate shame. The tension arises between what Williams takes shame in its essence to be and what shame can do—the role that shame can be expected to play in ethical life. Williams can—and we argue, should—be read as avoiding the difficulties stemming from this tension, but this requires a reevaluation of several of his central claims about shame’s role in ethical thought and experience. For instance, his broad claims that the “structures of shame” can “give a conception of one’s ethical identity” (93), and that shame “mediates ... between ethical demands and the rest of life” (102), cannot be taken at face value. What emerges is a view that is in a sense less ambitious, but also more in tune with the spirit of Williams’ larger project. There may also, we suggest, be a more general lesson: We should be suspicious of the temptation to seek some special affinity between shame and ethical life, lest we distort our understanding of both.

One challenge in providing an adequate definition of physical disability is unifying the heterogeneous bodily conditions that count as disabilities. We examine recent proposals by Elizabeth Barnes (2016), and Dana Howard and Sean Aas (2018), and show how this debate has reached an impasse. Barnes’ account struggles to deliver principled unification of the category of disability, whilst Howard and Aas’ account risks inappropriately sidelining the body. We argue that this impasse can be broken using a novel concept: marginalised functioning. Marginalised functioning concerns the relationship between a person’s bodily capacities and their social world: specifically, their ability to function in line with the default norms about how people can typically physically function that influence the structuring of social space. We argue that attending to marginalised functioning allows us to develop, not one, but three different models of disability, all of which—whilst having different strengths and weaknesses—unify the category of disability without sidelining the body.

Many claims about conceptual matters are often represented as, or inferred from, claims about the meaning, reference, or mastery, of words. But sometimes this has led to treating conceptual analysis as though it were nothing but linguistic analysis. We canvass the most promising justifications for moving from linguistic premises to substantive conclusions. We show that these justifications fail and argue against current practice (in metaethics and elsewhere), which confuses an investigation of a word’s meaning, reference, or competence conditions with an analysis of some concept or property associated with that word.

How is the burden of proof to be distributed among individuals who are involved in resolving a particular issue? Under what conditions should the burden of proof be distributed unevenly? We distinguish attitudinal from dialectical burdens and argue that these questions should be answered differently, depending on which is in play. One has an attitudinal burden with respect to some proposition when one is required to possess sufficient evidence for it. One has a dialectical burden with respect to some proposition when one is required to provide supporting arguments for it as part of a deliberative process. We show that the attitudinal burden with respect to certain propositions is unevenly distributed in some deliberative contexts, but in all of these contexts, establishing the degree of support for the proposition is merely a means to some other deliberative end, such as action guidance, or persuasion. By contrast, uneven distributions of the dialectical burden regularly further the aims of deliberation, even in contexts where the quest for truth is the sole deliberative aim, rather than merely a means to some different deliberative end. We argue that our distinction between these two burdens resolves puzzles about unevenness that have been raised in the literature.

The Demarcation Question asks whether there is a principled framework that makes sense of the differences between tort and criminal law. My answer takes clues from substantive doctrines. I argue that some affirmative defences (such as insanity) that are available in criminal law are not available in tort law. I also examine the content of intention that is required to satisfy the intention element in the two domains. These suggest that criminal law implicates blameworthiness whereas tort law implicates a weaker account of responsibility. I propose a two-pronged answer where the first prong appeals to different notions of responsibility and the second prong appeals to different rights that are protected by the two domains (to account for the fact that some rights recognised by tort law are not recognized by criminal law (such as the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress) and vice versa (for example, criminal attempts).

Some have argued that we are never blameworthy for negligence when the negligence is not caused by some prior blameworthy decision or action. In this paper, I examine arguments that argue that we are not blameworthy for negligence. One argument appeals to the idea that negligent agents fails to be aware of some relevant information and that they are not blameworthy for such failures. The other argument appeals to the idea that ignorance exculpates. I conclude that even if these arguments succeed, they do so at the cost of undermining the claim that we can be and often are blameworthy for recklessness. I also show that the success of the arguments about our blameworthiness for negligence depend on there being no salient difference between moral and nonmoral ignorance. However, if there is no salient difference between moral and nonmoral ignorance, then this puts pressure on our blameworthiness more globally.

I cannot determine whether a 14-premise argument is valid in less than a second even if a computer can. Am I, to this extent, irrational? Would I be more rational if I could? I argue that "yes" is a good answer, if we want the concept of rationality to play a worthwhile theoretical role in an account of reasoning. My argument exploits parallels between this issue and analyses of the demandingness objection against many ethical theories. Just as rationality on my account seems too hard to achieve, so, it is argued, ethical theories which require me to give to charity until it hurts are too demanding to be taken seriously. My argument is a response to worries about both rationality and morality. It distinguishes norms that set the standards of right action and rational decision from norms against which agents should be judged. My account also has a lot to say about cakes!