Research

Sam Berstler has recently argued for a fairness-based moral difference between lying and misleading. According to Berstler, the liar, but not the misleader, unfairly free-rides on the Lewisian conventions which ground public language meaning. Although compelling, the pragmatic and metasemantic backdrop within which this moral reason is located allows for the generation of a vicious explanatory circle. Simply, this backdrop entails that no speaker has ever performed an assertion. As I argue, escaping the circle requires rejecting Berstler's fairness-based reason against lying. The problem is a general one: The wrong of lying cannot be founded on the goods of language.

Orthodoxy within the literature on the lying-misleading distinction understands the distinction to be between asserting disbelieved information, maybe with an intention to deceive, and conversationally implicating such information by asserting something believed to be true. The main battleground within Orthodoxy is over what account of assertion can bear this weight. In this paper I argue against Orthodoxy. More specifically, I argue that lying does not require assertion, nor is the relevant attitude disbelief. Speakers can expressively lie when they utter ``Ouch!" by not being in acute pain. Expressive lies necessitate a dramatic shift away from the orthodox, assertion-based theory of lying that dominates the literature and towards a heterodox, expressing-based one.

Are slurring statements, when applied to members of the slurred group, true, false, or a little bit of both? Intuitions are mixed. And investigating more truth-value judgments is unlikely to cure the stalemate we find ourselves in. Truth-value judgments are just not up to the task. In their place, I propose we look to judgments of lying instead. This change in focus provides a new and better tool for understanding the complex semantics and pragmatics of slurs. As I argue, it also suggests that slurring statements encode, conventionally implicate and presuppose the same information as statements with the slur's neutral counterpart. I then briefly apply this style of argument to the semantics and pragmatics of evaluative language more generally.

Does lying require an intention to deceive? Deceptionists answer 'Yes', while Non-Deceptionists answer 'No'. Non-Deceptionists point to a host of purported counterexamples in support of their position. Deceptionists are left unconvinced. By forging a stronger link between the lying and action theoretic literatures, I offer a new argument against the Deceptionist position. One that must be responded to differently if it is to be countenanced by Deceptionists. I conclude by advancing a promising middle ground between these two positions.

We all have been deceived, whether by politicians, pundits, or peers. Likely more often than we would wish to admit. But what is it to be deceived? As we argue, victims of deception settle on a false complete answer to a question. This settling proposal not only makes good on the intuitive idea that skeptical agents are harder to deceive than their non-skeptical peers, but also finds support in the infelicity of reporting an agent as both inquiring and being deceived. Want to avoid being duped? Our proposal provides an answer: inquire further, don't settle.

Some truths are fundamental, while others are non-fundamental. This distinction has often been put in terms of ground. Fundamental truths are ungrounded, and non-fundamental truths are grounded. Although widely assumed, this distinction between fundamental/ungrounded and non-fundamental/grounded truths is untenable. We need to make room for truths of a third type: truths that are inapt to be grounded, and therefore are ungrounded, but are not fundamental. Although this third status of so-called "autonomous truths" is not new, in this paper I provide a new argument for it.

Threats and escapes can both be chancy. We argue these two appearances of chance play distinct roles in the ethics of defensive harm. Necessity is chance-sensitive: a sufficiently probable escape renders defensive harm unnecessary. Proportionality is chance-insensitive: it compares defensive harm with the magnitude of the harm threatened, not its probability-weighted expectation. Jointly, this yields an asymmetry: for some n, Aggressor is liable to a defensive harm for imposing a 1/n chance of death, but not to that harm for imposing certain death when Victim has a 1-(1/n) chance of escape. These results tell against widely accepted views of necessity, proportionality, and therefore liability.

Deception is an important concept in ethics, social philosophy, law, and the philosophy of language. Deception can invalidate consent, is constitutive of fake news, and a deceptive evil genius laid the foundations of Cartesian doubt. But what is deception? A careful examination of three similar but contrasting notions---misleading, manipulating, and orchestrating a deception---provides the answer. As I argue, deceivers, themselves or through proxies, intentionally cause their victims to have inaccurate doxastic attitudes by exposing them to phenomenal evidence. This theory of deception and the contrasts that motivate it suggest a broadly Kantian theory of its unique and essential wrong. The wrong of deception is grounded in the essentially covert and co-opting control deceivers exert over their victims.

Metaphysical ground is standardly conceived as the point of convergence of metaphysical explanation and building. Each makes its own demands on the logic of ground. As the puzzles of ground show, marrying these logics results in an inconsistent logic of ground. We argue that this inconsistency is a symptom of conflating two kinds of metaphysical explanation: explanations of why a fact obtains and explanations of how it obtains. Ways how admit of reflexive instances; reasons why do not. Each species of explanation respects a consistent rule set, but only one---why-explanation---converges with building. We argue that the distinction between reasons why and ways how is intuitive and philosophically fruitful. It lends itself to a satisfying formalization: reasons why are unpreempted metaphysical explanations. Once we understand ground as the convergence of building and reasons why, the puzzles dissolve. We then put the distinction to use: it helps reframe the debate over whether laws govern, motivates an argument against the possibility of gunk, and, when naturally extended to the causal domain, arbitrates between individualist and collectivist accounts of causal overdetermination.

Can you consent to being deceived? Infamously, Kant thinks not. According to this Kantian thought, there is something inherent in the nature of deception and the nature of consent that renders it impossible to consent to deception. In this paper, I take this thought seriously. As I argue, doing so provides important lessons about deception, consent, and Kantian ethics.