Alexander Pruss's Blog

Optimalism holds that, of metaphysical necessity, the best world is actualized. There are two ways to understand “the best world”: (1) the ...

On All-False Open Futurism (AFOF), any future tensed statement about a future contingent must be false. It is false that there will be a sea...

It is wrong to torture a stranger for 99 minutes in order to avoid 100 minutes of equal torture to oneself.

This is probably an old thing that has been discussed to death, but I only now noticed it. Suppose an open future view on which future conti...

Open Theist Christians tend to think that there are some things God knows about the future, and these include the content of God’s promises ...

Here is a very plausible pair of claims: The Son could have become incarnate as a different human being. God foreknew many centuries ahea...

Van Inwagen famously raised the Special Composition Question (SCQ): What is an informative criterion for when a proper plurality of objects ...

Most philosophical discussions of natural kinds concern entities in the category of substance: particles, chemical substances, organisms, et...

A standard view of reasons is that reasons are propositions or facts that support an action. Thus, that I promised to visit is a reason to v...

Alice has lived a long and reasonable life. She developed a lot of good habits. Every morning, she goes on a walk. On her walk, she looks at...

Some philosophers think that for your right action to be morally worthy you have to know that the action is right. On the contrary, there a...

It seems that: If you pursue friendship because friendship is non-instrumentally valuable, then you pursue friendship non-instrumentally. ...

I was going to post the following as Deep Thoughts XLIII, in a series of posts meant to be largely tautologous or at least trivial statemen...

I want to argue for this thesis: For a punishment P for a fault F to be right, P must stand in a causal-like relation to P . What is ...

I’ve always found punishment and (to a lesser extent) reward puzzling. Why is it that when someone does something wrong is there moral reaso...