The concept of mestizaje as a means to understand racial mixing in so-called Latin America has a long philosophical tradition, and is still used as a means to self identity in many current communities. However, that tradition goes beyond the colonization of the Americas and can be traced back to a Greco-European tradition of thought concerned with monsters. In fact, mestizaje itself parallels the concept of ‘monster’ because it is rooted in a framework of white supremacy that seeks to eradicate what it perceives to be an Indigenous monster. This project has four aims. First, to provide an historical overview of mestizaje as a colonial institution. Second, to trace its roots in the tradition of monster philosophy and illuminate the way it monsterizes people. Third, to explore its latest iteration in the work of the philosopher Gloria Anzald�a and demonstrate that no amount of positive reimagining will save such a flawed conception of people. Fourth, to offer an alternative way to self-identify in a colonial capitalistic world through community relationships.

In a word, this dissertation is about friendship. I begin by raising a problem related to one traditionally found within some of the philosophical literature regarding moral egalitarianism: that of partiality and friendship, except that I raise the issue of partiality within the context of one’s close relationships. From here I propose a solution to the problem based on understanding a close relationship as one in which friends possess the attitude of openness to the development of the relationship. The remainder of the dissertation is concerned with elaborating upon and explaining this conception of friendship and its consequences. In the course of doing this I propose a theory of the self and how we relate to one another, consider the importance of the psychophysical self, explore the notion of mutual recognition, reflect on relationship’s end, and, finally, explore the connections between friendship and play.

We are often highly confident that we can bring about what we intend, but current theories of intention only partly account for this capacity. The theory of epistemic warrant can serve as a model for a corresponding theory of technical warrant for appropriately confident intention: What permits confidence in an aim to perform a “basic action” under a certain condition is a technical entitlement corresponding to the epistemic entitlement to a perceptual belief. Basic aims, together with beliefs, can then technically justify non-basic aims, not as valuable or desirable things to do, but as ends pursued in virtue of the justifying means.

In light of the theory of technical warrant, knowledge itself provides a model for a theory of intentional actions as technically warranted true aims in the absence of “waywardness”: What has been discussed as “antecedential” waywardness in the context of Causalist theories of action is analogous to veridical hallucination. Similarly, problems of “consequential” and “tertiary” waywardness correspond directly to Gettier problems, in that each is the result of a “gap” between a specific pattern of justificatory reasoning and circumstances in the world. Intentions of lower confidence are analogous to lower-credence epistemic attitudes.

The topic of my dissertation is merit recognition, recognition for good action or thought. To start, I introduce the question that motivates the dissertation: what is the value of recognition for us? Recognition is, in various ways, instrumentally valuable for us. But we care about recognition not just as a means. This is not, I suggest, a mistake. Merit recognition is good in itself for us as part of good in itself action. The second and third sections of my first chapter begin to make a case for thinking that merit recognition is part of good in itself helping. And my second chapter aims to be a first step towards arguing that merit recognition is part of a kind of good thinking. In the second section of my first chapter, I make a case for thinking that small acts of helping between friends aim at merit recognition and include it when they succeed. Friends do small acts of beneficence together by doing them for each other. The beneficiary’s seeing the benefactor’s helping as good for the reason that it is is her part of shared friendly helping. In the third section of the first chapter, I suggest that we can find, in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (EN) discussion of friendship, the idea that helping generally (not just within friendship) aims at merit recognition and includes it when it succeeds. In order to find this idea in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics discussion of friendship, I do a couple of things. First, I make a case for thinking that perfect friendship, friendship between two people who each have complete virtue, is the only relationship of equality in which parties love each other as good that Aristotle is interested in in the Nicomachean Ethics. It is this relationship that Aristotle means to consider the value of in EN Book IX section 9. Second, I offer some critiques of proposals that have been made about how the first part of the concluding section of EN Book IX section 9, 1169b29-1170a12, can be understood as argument that a virtuous person needs a friend to be happy. Third, I make my own suggestion about how we can understand the entire concluding section of EN Book IX section 9, 1169b29-1170b19, as argument that a virtuous person needs a friend to be happy. We can do this, I suggest, if we suppose that Aristotle thinks that the small-scale activity of practical virtue aims to be seen as good for the reason that it is by a character friend and is completed by such recognition. At the end of the second chapter, I raise the possibility that the most blessed person, for Aristotle, will not spend all of the time for serious activity she has contemplating. If this is true, then we might interpret Aristotle in EN Book IX section 9 as suggesting that beneficence from a friend makes available a valuable and unique kind of self-awareness. In the second chapter of my dissertation, I turn to testimony and to beginning to think about how merit recognition might be part of a kind of good thinking. My second chapter is primarily an in-depth discussion of an account of testimony coming from Richard Moran. Testimony, as Moran (2018) understands it, aims at merit recognition and includes merit recognition when it succeeds. To show this, after presenting the basics of Moran’s account of testimony, I discuss Burge’s (1993/2013) account of the warrant we have to believe what comes to us from interlocution. Like Burge, Moran thinks that telling gives reason for belief because telling is subject to certain norms. A person should tell p, for Moran, only if she believes and is in a position to know p. Telling, as Moran understands it, is an act that aims at a hearer’s believing on the basis of trust, not as a product, but as its proper finishing, I say. A hearer who believes what a teller tells on the basis of trust, believes on the basis of a reason, the goodness of which depends directly on the teller’s reason for believing what she tells. In my second chapter, I consider how this is true and connect my discussion of this to Burge’s (1993/2013) idea that when a hearer knows something on the basis of interlocution, we need to look at the hearer’s “extended body of justification” to evaluate her warrant (p. 251). At the end of my second chapter, I make a small suggestion about the point of telling. When we tell, we act for a reason that we have in a way that others can see and believe directly on the basis of such seeing what our reason supports believing. Because, with respect to many of our reasons, telling is the only thing we might do to act for them in this way, the point of telling, we might say, is allowing us to act for our reasons in this way. There is, we might think, a good realized through acting for our reasons in ways that others can see and believe directly on the basis of such seeing what our reasons support believing that telling makes available.

Profound intellectual disability, the most severe form of intellectual disability, has long been left at the margins of philosophical thought. Further, many accounts of the grounds for human moral standing rely on the possession of higher-order capacities of mind that serve as status-conferring attributes to the exclusion of human beings with more significant intellectual impairments. This dissertation advances three main theses responding to three main questions regarding the lives of those with profound intellectual disability. First, with regards to the question of how we should conceptualize profound intellectual disability, that we should think about it as a disability characterized by the impossibility of successful, mutual linguistic communication rather than solely as extreme cognitive deficit. Second, with regards to the role of heterogeneous forms of communication that are available to non-speaking intellectually disabled persons, that there is ubiquitous form of communication I call relationship-constituted and constituting meaningful expressions (RCMEs). RCMEs are morally significant in their relying on the fabric of a particular relationship for their use, and they are particularly salient for pairs of profoundly intellectually disabled and non-intellectually disabled communicators. Third, with regards to human moral standing and the historical philosophical exclusions of intellectually disabled lives, that the grounds for human moral equality lie in our ability to employ RCMEs to develop and deepen relationships – a capacity whose possession in one individual presupposes its existence in others.

Everyday life is full of situations in which we act not only as individuals, but also with others, as parts of informal groups or structured collectives. For example, a group of friends spend a day hiking a trail together, a guardian offers a hand to stabilize a young child’s tentative first steps, or an academic department draws up policies that facilitate student instruction. Philosophers call this category of action “joint action,” and agree that it is an important and distinctive way in which we exercise our agency. However, there has been a tendency in the philosophical literature to explain the phenomenon by analyzing highly structured and cooperative cases of joint action like two or more agents painting a house together or moving a heavy piece of furniture together. On these analyses, two or more agents are engaged in joint, rather than individual action when they jointly and intentionally pursue goals that they have in common, all while abiding by principles of rationality which demand that they act in ways that are both conducive to achieving the shared goal and responsive to the actions of their co-participants. In this dissertation, I argue that these standard analyses of joint action do not provide us with a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon, because they ignore important cases of joint action that do not fit into the highly structured and cooperative paradigm. To address this gap in the literature and bring us closer to a comprehensive understanding of joint action, my dissertation uses case studies of the speech act of telling and early childhood development to show that joint action also occurs in situations which involve little to no cooperation or strongly shared goals. Instead, as we see when we investigate these atypical cases, joint action is consistent with competition and antagonism, and does not require participants to have the sophisticated theory of mind needed to track and adjust to the goals and actions of their co-participants in a way that coheres with principles of rationality.

This dissertation is about the moral importance of irony. In the first chapter, I introduce the topic. I argue that having values makes us vulnerable to facing choice situations that we properly regard as absurd, and I articulate a form of ironic playacting as an apt response to those choice situations. The subsequent chapters draw out the implications of this account. The second chapter treats akrasia. I defend the virtues of an overlooked kind of self-awareness in akrasia. In doing so, I articulate the importance of taking oneself seriously in a way that will make akrasia apt to seem absurd and to call for ironic playacting. In the third chapter, I argue that contentment and affirmation play a wide-ranging role in our practical thinking, in light of their ubiquitous connection to what we value, and this makes us apt to encounter absurd choice situations that call for irony. In the fourth chapter, I consider a common but puzzling phenomenon: the way in which the thought that some emotion is “not worth it” shows the emotion not to be fitting. My explanation of this phenomenon shows how we can end up in emotionally absurd situations that call for ironic playacting.