ABSTRACT In bioethics, two sorts of normative categories are commonly used. These can be split into two families: the deontic categories, such as ‘right’, ‘ought to’ and ‘requirement’, and the evaluative categories, including ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘better than’ and ‘the best’. While other normative concepts such as ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’ have also been discussed, the aptic categories, including ‘fitting’, ‘appropriate’ and ‘merited’ have received little to no attention from bioethicists. Drawing on Philip Stratton‐Lake's important contributions to the metaethical literature on the aptic categories, this paper investigates the role of fittingness in bioethics. To this end, we first establish four characteristic features of the aptic categories. We then show how fittingness can be applied in four areas of bioethical research, before considering some objections. We conclude that there is much to be gained by expanding the dialogue between recent metaethical work on the aptic categories and practical ethics.

ABSTRACTThis paper develops a two‐tiered account of office trust, the distinctive form of trust arising among officeholders within institutions. Shifting from typical accounts that emphasize interpersonal relationships or public trust in institutions, it examines trust internally, among institutional role occupants. I argue that office trust cannot be reduced to personal trust nor to mere reliance on formal obligations or rules. Rather, it emerges when officeholders perceive their roles as constitutively interrelated, and presume colleagues act from a pro officio attitude, a disposition oriented toward fulfilling responsibilities according to the institution's raison d’être. I distinguish between minimal office trust, which involves only this presumptive stance, and robust office trust, which additionally requires trustees to explicitly regard their being entrusted as a reason for action. Office trust, especially in its robust form, supports discretionary judgment and institutional adaptability precisely where rules are incomplete or silent.

ABSTRACTGrief after the loss of a loved one often involves profound experiences of meaninglessness rooted in the absence of the deceased. Yet many people recover from this crisis of meaning fairly quickly. Can we explain this return to a meaningful life in a way that does not reveal anything problematic about our rationality, or about the significance of our relationship to the person who died? I propose that we can find meaning in the loss of a loved one by understanding how that loss has shaped who we are, or how it fits into a broader story about the world—even without attributing substantive value to the loss itself or its consequences in our lives. Thus, making sense of a loss through narratives can rationally support the recovery of meaningfulness in grief even if the evaluative facts about that loss remain the same, and without any troubling consequences regarding our relationship to the deceased.

ABSTRACTThis article provides an account of what it means to moralize. I claim that to moralize is to use a shared good as a means to a contested moral cause. Moralizing can be thought of as a three‐place predicate involving an agent, a shared good (like a conference, vacation, meal, or concert), and a contested moral cause. Key criteria for an act to count as moralizing include: that the good be shared with others, that the moral cause be controversial, that the moral cause be unrelated to the shared good by social convention, and that the agent is motivated to act on behalf of their moral cause. I distinguish moralizing from related concepts like moralism, moral hyperactivity, moral grandstanding, and politicizing. This article provides a conceptual analysis of moralizing that can ground a moral evaluation of moralizing. I conclude with a brief moral evaluation of moralizing.

ABSTRACTDiscussions of trustworthiness are not ubiquitous in the philosophical literature (compare remarks by Jones 2012, 61). Nonetheless, there are some attempted analyses and there is excellent work ongoing. The goal of this paper is to focus on trustworthiness's even less discussed opposite: untrustworthiness. So far as I can tell, the concept has gone largely undiscussed in the philosophical literature. This is unfortunate. For, just as Hawley (2014) points out that a theory of trust must be rendered compatible with a theory of distrust, so (I claim) a theory of trustworthiness must be rendered compatible with a theory of untrustworthiness. A further wrinkle to be introduced along the way is the need for a further distinction: cases where we must talk, not of trustworthiness or untrustworthiness, but of neither.

Abstract The term ‘recalcitrant emotions’ refers to those cases where we feel an emotion that apparently contradicts our better judgements. For instance, one may be afraid of flying while claiming not to believe that it is dangerous. This phenomenon is commonly conceived as an objection to cognitivism, according to which emotions are based on the subject's beliefs, insofar as it would force us to ascribe to the subject who feels them an excessive degree of irrationality, comparing recalcitrant emotions to contradictory beliefs. For this reason, many philosophers have developed perceptual theories which describe emotions as forms of perception, allowing us to explain recalcitrant emotions without attributing to the subject contradictory beliefs, treating them as perceptual illusions. Facing the most compelling of these attempts, the article shows that perceptual accounts fail to explain in what sense recalcitrant emotions (and people who feel them) are irrational, keeping the comparison with optical illusions, which are not. Having rebutted three popular perceptual proposals, I conclude that the analogy between emotions and perceptions is flawed and that the appeal of these theories lies on a surreptitious shift in the meaning of the term ‘perceive’.

Abstract Recent philosophy has seen a resurgence of the realist view of sensible qualities such as colour. The view holds that experienced qualities are properties of the objects in the physical environment, not mentally instantiated properties like qualia or merely intentional, illusory ones. Some suggest that this move rids us of the explanatory gap between physical properties and the qualitative features of consciousness. Others say it just relocates the problem of qualities to physical objects in the environment, given that such qualities cannot be derived from the non‐qualitative properties of objects, and it does not resolve the problem of consciousness either. I argue that such an outcome is welcome: if the physical world is full of explanatory gaps, then the mind–body explanatory gap is not so special. Moreover, the explanatory gaps regarding qualities of objects are less puzzling than the brain‐qualia gap. In order to counter the usual worries concerning realism about objective qualities, I introduce ‘imperfect realism’ as an alternative to colour pluralism and complex reductionism, which accommodates realism in the face of widespread perceptual error. I conclude with a discussion of how this ‘multiple‐gaps view’ sits better with a naturalistic framework compared to the Galilean‐Cartesian account of qualities.

Abstract This paper argues that there are good reasons to limit the scope of luck egalitarianism to co‐existing people. First, I outline reasons to be sceptical about how “luck” works intergenerationally and therefore the very grounding of luck egalitarianism between non‐overlapping generations. Second, I argue that what Kasper Lippert‐Rasmussen calls the “core luck egalitarian claim” allows significant intergenerational inequality which is a problem for those who object to such inequality. Third, luck egalitarianism cannot accommodate the intuition that it might be required to leave future generations better off than we are, even if it would come at no cost to ourselves. Finally, I argue that following another, broader, version of luck egalitarianism would require us to level down future generations and possibly even ourselves, which is a problem for those persuaded by the levelling‐down objection.