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In this paper I want to argue that acts of blame are performed by collectives, and not by any collective but only by collectives that satisfy certain conditions { broadly those that, by collectivizing reason, can be held to be autonomous subjects to which it makes sense to attribute attitudes, including participant reactive attitudes such as resentment. The actors involved must also be related to the collective in particular ways in order to hold and be held responsible, but they need not have the same attitudes as the collective. This implies both that our attributions of moral responsibility to an agent does not depend only on facts about the agent but also on facts about us, and that the reasons for which we hold responsible and by which we justify our moral practices, and which the agent can likewise appeal to in an attempt to avoid being held responsible, depend on the collective involved and its substantive ethical precepts. The answer to whether an agent is responsible, or is an appropriate object of a reactive attitude, is not to be settled purely by philosophical analysis, and even the kind of naturalistic description of the pattern of our reactive attitudes that [22] suggests in \Freedom and Resentment" will only go part of the way { the excuses and exemptions are things we might say in a dialogue where reasons are exchanged, but each collective has some leeway over what substantive reasons count as grounds of an excuse or exemption.

In this paper, I examine the debate between Alice Crary and Nat Hansen concerning Austin's view of `literal meaning'. Crary suggests that Austin thinks that there is no literal meaning, while Hansen thinks that for Austin there is literal meaning. I will argue that for Austin there is indeed a literal meaning, a fixed meaning, which sentences carry across all occasions of use, however, such meaning does not suffice to determine whether, independent of these occasions, the sentences can be used to say something true or false. Thus I suggest a middle ground between the two readings. My reading highlights the importance of Austin's claim that `true' is a dimension-word, which both Crary and Hansen overlook.

Psychological egoism is the doctrine that all of our actions are ultimately motivated by self-interest, even including seemingly altruistic actions. Although this view is commonly referred to as \vacuous" or \trivially true" because of its immunity to counterexamples, I argue that there are possible observations that can refute this thesis. I describe the experiments, identify the results that could in principle falsify the strongest possible version of psychological egoism and formulate a probabilistic argument against this view. Ultimately, I conclude that a \trivially true" formulation of psychological egoism is an empirical theory that is in all likelihood false.

In this paper, I defend the view that within a rights-based ethical framework, the moral status of future generations is best under- stood as that of present rightsholders. I argue that in this way it can be justified that we have obligations towards future generations. This justification in turn is of great relevance for many issues in moral theory and applied ethics. In the first part of the paper, I argue that the fact that future persons will have rights in the future cannot fully account for present obligations. The missing link in this argument cannot be provided by approaches that infer those obligations mediately. In the second part of the paper, I argue that existing is not a necessary condition for being a rightsholder. First, our own future selves should be said to have rights even though they do not exist at present. Second, even at present, uncertainty challenges the relationship between rightsholders and obligation bearers: of- ten enough, obligations depend on presuppositions or suspicions about other persons' existence. In light of these cases, we should conceive of rightsholders as place holders, that is, sets of (actual) individuals whose existence or identity can be unknown or indetermined, with specific properties. Therefore, future generations can coherently be said to have rights now that correspond to our present obligations towards them.

When Schlick introduced his theory of "Konstatierungen" in the Vienna Circle's Protocol-Sentence Debate, the sole other member of the Circle who took part on his side was his former disciple Béla Juhos. However, Juhos' own conception, developed in full extend only later, differs in important respects from the one of his teacher. Both conceptions are critically examined in the first part of this paper. The second part is devoted to an examination of the charge that such basic propositions are by all means useless because of incommunicability.