This dissertation is a set of three essays connected by the common theme of our epistemic fragility: the way in which our knowledge – of our own minds, of whether we are in violation of the epistemic and ethical norms, and of the philosophical truths themselves – is hostage to forces outside our control. The first essay, “Are We Luminous?”, is a recasting and defence of Timothy Williamson’s argument that there are no non-trivial conditions such that we are in a position to know we are in them whenever we are in them. Crucial to seeing why Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument succeeds, pace various critics, is recognising that the issue is largely an empirical one. It is in part because of the kind of creatures we are – specifically, creatures with coarse-grained doxastic dispositions – that nothing of interest, for us, is luminous. In the second essay, “What’s in a Norm?”, I argue that such an Anti-Cartesian view in turn demands that epistemologists and ethicists accept the ubiquity of normative luck, the phenomenon whereby agents fail to do what they ought because of non-culpable ignorance. Those who find such a view intolerable – many epistemic internalists and ethical subjectivists – have the option of cleaving to the Cartesian orthodoxy by endorsing an anti-realist metanormativity. The third essay, “The Archimedean Urge”, is a critical discussion of genealogical scepticism about philosophical judgment, including evolutionary debunking arguments and experimentally-motivated attacks. Although such genealogical scepticism often purports to stand outside philosophy – in the neutral terrains of science or common sense – it tacitly relies on various first-order epistemic judgments. The upshot is two-fold. First, genealogical scepticism risks self-defeat, impugning commitment to its own premises. Second, philosophers have at their disposal epistemological resources to fend off genealogical scepticism: namely, an epistemology that takes seriously the role that luck plays in the acquisition of philosophical knowledge.

This is a study of love (erōs) in Plato’s Symposium. It’s a study undertaken over three chapters, each of which serves as a stepping stone for the following and addresses one of three primary aims. First: to provide an interpretation of Plato’s favored theory of erōs in the Symposium, or as it’s referred to here, a theory of Platonic love. This theory is understood to be ultimately concerned with a practice of living which, if developed correctly, may come to constitute the life most worth living for a human being. On this interpretation, Platonic love is the desire for Beauty, ultimately for the sake of eudaimonic immortality, manifested through productive activity. Second: to offer a reading of the Symposium which attends to the work’s literary elements, especially characterization and narrative structure, as partially constitutive of Plato’s philosophical thought on erōs. Here it’s suggested that Platonic love is concerned with seeking and producing truly virtuous action and true poetry. This reading positions us to see that a correctly progressing and well-practiced Platonic love is illustrated in the character of the philosopher Socrates, who is known and followed for his bizarre displays of virtue and whom Alcibiades crowns over either Aristophanes or Agathon as the wisest and most beautiful poet at the Symposium. Third: to account for how to love a person Platonically. Contra Gregory Vlastos’ influential critical interpretation, it’s here argued that the Platonic lover is able to really love a person: to really love a person Platonically is to seek jointly for Beauty; it is to work together as co-practitioners in the art of love. The art of Platonic love is set up in this way to be explored as a practice potentially constitutive of the life most worth living for a human being.

This study examines the transaction of the lived experience of ‘suffering’ in the process of psychotherapy. ‘Suffering’ is conceptualised as having its weight and value transacted between a psychotherapist and his or her client. As a psychotherapist from a family with a disabled member, my fieldwork in a hospital with the parents of disabled children was conducted in Taiwan. The development of our therapeutic relationship was discovered as the process of ‘suffering transaction’: the interaction of lived experience of suffering between my clients and myself. Two clients took part in this study in which eight to ten sessions of counselling or psychotherapy were conducted and transcribed as the research data. The data also included my lived experience, which was made explicit in this field work through records of six sessions of therapeutic supervision and my self-reflective therapeutic diary and research journal. Inspired by Gee’s (2000) work on data presentation, my understanding of client’s stories is represented as poetic form. Reflections from the use of reflexivity explore the inter-correlations of ‘suffering’ between us. The theoretical perspective informing the further analysis of this study is hermeneutic phenomenology and social suffering. The socio-cultural embodiments in language are explored as the hermeneutic horizons of the theme of suffering transaction. Politically, the development of ‘early intervention’ in Taiwan creates as ‘unjust’ context for those encountering medical services, and this shared understanding of the medical bureaucracy influenced the psychotherapeutic encounter. The analysis also explores the influence of Confucian approaches to gender difference and family ethics, and Christian religious beliefs, in relation to the self-identification of my clients in suffering for other. These three horizons indicate that searching for the meaning of suffering is an inter-subjective process that entails taking the responsibility for the ‘Other’ as the symbolic socio-cultural body. The thesis concludes with discussion about the ethics of the therapeutic relationship. I argue that in psychotherapy, both therapist and client are engaged in the Levinasian idea of the primordial responsibility ‘for’ the other. In the context of wider debates about psychotherapy as an ethical practice, I argue that a therapist has the pre-moral position of not only witnessing client’s lived experience of suffering but also being witnessed by the client. This study provides an example in which the context of ‘witness’ is inter-subjectively developed in psychotherapy.

This paper examines the relationship between literature and philosophy, with special regards to how literature can contribute to deepen the understanding in philosophical matters. This is executed by a comparison between how a work of fiction, versus works of philosophy, can tackle the issue of personhood. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is being compared with philosopher Lynne Rudder Baker’s Persons and Bodies and Jacques Maritain’s The Person and the Common Good in order to map out how literature can contribute to the philosophical discourse regarding personhood. The paper finalizes that the main character in Frankenstein, “the monster” displays several issues that may show up when trying to define what it means to be a person, and where the line is to be drawn between a person and a non-person. The paper thus serves a two-folded purpose: to expand and challenge the traditional philosophical methodology, and find new understanding within the subject of personhood.

I hope this scientific essay can shed som light over how guilt kan appear at a school, primarily for those working as fritidslärare. Fritidslärare come often in close contact with special needs children.In the story I shall recount a case where I have taken the roll of carer and helping an extroverted pupil through his schoolday. He spends most of his time outside the classrum and is mostly with a special needs teacher. Generally his day is filled with rewards and punishment; methods that I find myself uncomfortable with. On one of these schooldays I find myself giving up on him. I see myself ignoring him, taking out my cell phone while he watches a film on the computer. In this situation I feel guilt. Do I have a bad moral standard or am I just acting in accordance with the situation? The question of how I deal with this guilt and what shape the guilt takes are two of the questions I pose to myself. I have made use of the Algerian author and philosopher Albert Camus and his theory of the absurd and the lack of freedom in our lives and how the absurd always stands in the way of total freedom. If we are aware of its existence then we can live with it and minimize its effect upon us. I will also refer to his novel The Fall (2007) in which the protagonist has long managed to avoid guilt and judgement. He comes to feel discomfort after an incident that he identifies as feelings of guilt. The guilt can be both collective and individual. In my text I shall concentrate on individual guilt. I, as an individual teacher, have my version of the truth whilst those around me have another. What does this imply? I also treat the mechanisms of control within the school that manifest themselves through reward and punishment.

This thesis relies on the works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Seyla Benhabib in the field of Postcolonialism. Guided by their theoretical insights it is aiming at providing an understanding of how postcolonial structures within the International Humanitarian Aid discourse takes form and discuss strategies for communication that would be deemed justified in this context. Through a field research in Lebanon, focusing on the Lebanese Red Cross and their methods used for communication, it provides a scrutiny of the theoretical insights of Spivak and Benhabib, in order to see how plausible they are when discussing the way Global Humanitarian Organizations operate in todays’ world. In the conclusive discussion, the study exposes the importance for these organizations to let go of their essentialist way of looking at the subaltern, continuously depriving her of her subject position. In a context of asymmetrical power relations, there is a need for these organizations to ”learn to learn from below”. The people of the Western world need to unlearn Western privilege to enable themselves to relate to people and communities outside of their own paradigm and thus create presuppositions for an ethical communication.

My DPhil submission consists of a series of papers on related topics on the moral philosophy of scarce benefit distribution. It focuses on two types of scarce benefit distribution case. The first type occurs when which all potential beneficiaries of a good each have an equally strong moral claim on an equal benefit from the resource but scarcity or indivisibility prevents us from benefiting all potential beneficiaries. Call these cases equal conflict cases. In 'Anti-Majoritarianism', I argue against the view defended by both utilitarians and non-utilitarians that in equal conflict cases you always ought to give the benefit to as many people as possible. I argue that doing so is neither morally right nor fair. In 'Weighing Up Weighted Lotteries', I argue that the philosophical debate between unweighted and weighted lottery benefit distribution procedures has been misconceived and that fairness requires us to use a new kind of weighted lottery that I call the exclusive composition-sensitive lottery. In 'Can't Get No Satisfaction', I defend a new view that I call the dual-structure view about how lotteries satisfy potential beneficiaries' claims in equal conflict cases and highlight the implications of that view for the distribution of donor corneas to those who have suffered corneal degeneration. The second type of this distributional problem occurs when we can either benefit a very large number of potential beneficiaries with a very small benefit (call these the many) or a very small number of potential beneficiaries with a very major benefit (call these the few). In "Valuing the Few Over the Many" I argue that there are cases where not only ought we to benefit the few over the many no matter how numerous the many are, but it is also better to do so. However, this conclusion can be shown to conflict with a number of widely held tenets of value theory. I evaluate different ways of accommodating these intuitions and argue that in some contexts, benefits are not of finite value. The view I defend in 'Valuing the Few Over the Many', combined with some intuitively plausible axiological claims, is inconsistent with the transitivity of the 'better than' relation. In 'Making Betterness Behave' I argue that for what I call the conditional non-coextensive thesis: if 'better than' is not transitive, one ought to take the position that 'more reason to bring about rather than' is transitive. I argue that one can generate a transitive 'more reason to bring about rather than' deontic ordering from a non-transitive axiological ordering in a principled way. This deontic ordering avoids the major practical objections (money pumps, moral dilemmas and threats to practical reasoning) to non-transitivity of the 'better than' relation.

This thesis examines the role appearances play, with notable continuity, in the psychology and ethics of Plato's Protagoras, Gorgias, and Republic. Common to these dialogues is the claim that evaluative appearances are almost invariably false: what appears to be good or bad is typically not in fact so and what is good or bad typically does not appear so. I argue that this disparity between apparent and real value forms the basis of Plato's diagnoses of a wide range of practical errors: psychological phenomena like akrasia, mistaken conceptions of the good like hedonism, and the influence of cultural sources of corruption like oratory, sophistry, and poetry. It also, relatedly, forms the basis of his account of lower passions like appetite, anger, or fear. Such passions are especially prone to lead us astray because their objects -- appetitive pleasures like food, drink, or sex, for example -- present especially deceptive appearances. One of the principal aims of this thesis is to show that this presents a significant point of agreement between the psychologies of the Protagoras, Gorgias, and Republic. In all three dialogues, I argue, motivational errors result from a specific kind of cognitive error: the uncritical acceptance of appearances. Plato's early and middle psychologies differ in their account of the subject of this error -- in the Protagoras and Gorgias, the whole person; in the Republic, the appetitive or spirited part of a person's soul -- but not in their basic theory of how our passions arise or, crucially, why they are liable to motivate us towards harmful ends.

This thesis presents a comprehensive theory of evildoing as an attack on morality, grounded in objective morality. It introduces evildoing as a distinct category of immorality, arguing that it is the relationship of evil acts to the core of morality that distinguishes them from ordinary wrongdoing. Two projects are undertaken: to provide an account of morality that can ground a theory of evildoing that is both objective and capable of systematically accommodating the diverse phenomena and definitions of evil acts, and to articulate and defend the attack on morality theory of evildoing. The challenge of the first project is met by a minimalist account of morality, structured by what I call the fundamentals of morality. The thesis defends a particular substantive account of these fundamentals, underpinned by the idea of conatus as the end of morality. Ultimately, it is conatus as the striving to persist in existence and prosper inherent in human beings that justifies the objectivity of the fundamentals of morality and with it the objectivity of the theory of evildoing, for it is these fundamentals that are attacked when we speak of an ‘attack on morality.’ Specifying and defending the conditions necessary for such an attack is the task of the second part of the thesis. An act constitutes evildoing, or an attack on morality, when it is wrong, results in serious harm to others, originates in an intention based on the correct belief that the act will cause or risk such harm, and where the perpetrator’s mental states and/or the act’s consequences are antagonistic to the realization of morality via one or more of its fundamentals.

Personal autonomy is often lauded as a key value in contemporary bioethics. In this thesis, I aim to provide a rationalist account of personal autonomy that avoids the philosophical flaws present in theories of autonomy that are often invoked in bioethics, and that can be usefully applied to contemporary bioethical issues. I claim that we can understand the concept of autonomy to incorporate two dimensions, which I term the 'reflective' and 'practical' dimensions of autonomy. I suggest that the reflective dimension pertains to the critical reflection that agents must carry out on their motivating desires, in order to be autonomous with respect to them. I begin by rejecting prominent desire-based and historical accounts of this dimension of autonomy, before going on to defend an account based upon a Parfitian analysis of rational desires. Following this analysis of the reflective dimension of autonomy, I argue that autonomy can also be understood to incorporate a practical dimension, pertaining to the agent's ability to act effectively in pursuit of their ends. I claim that recognising this dimension of autonomy more comprehensively reflects the way in which we use the concept of autonomy in bioethics, and makes salient the fact that agents carry out their rational deliberations in the light of their beliefs about what they are able to do. I go on to argue that this latter point means that my account of autonomy can offer a deeper explanation of why coercion undermines autonomy than other prominent accounts. Having considered the prudential value of autonomy in the light of this theoretical analysis, in the latter half of the thesis I apply my rationalist account of autonomy to a number of contemporary bioethical issues, including the use of human enhancement technologies, the nature of informed consent, and the doctor-patient relationship.