The Good, the Bad, and the Badass: On the Descriptive Adequacy of Kant's Conception of Moral Evil

This chapter argues for an interpretation of Kant's psychology of moral evil that accommodates the so-called excluded middle cases and allows for variations in the magnitude of evil. The strategy involves distinguishing Kant's transcendental psychology from his empirical psychology and arguing that Kant's character rigorism is restricted to the transcendental level. The chapter also explains how Kant's theory of moral evil accommodates 'the badass'; someone who does evil for evil's sake

The Phenomenology of Kantian Respect for Persons

Emotions can be understood generally from two different perspectives: (i) a third-person perspective that specifies their distinctive functional role within our overall cognitive economy and (ii) a first-person perspective that attempts to capture their distinctive phenomenal character, the subjective quality of experiencing them. One emotion that is of central importance in many ethical systems is respect (in the sense of respect for persons or so-called recognition-respect). However, discussions of respect in analytic moral philosophy have tended to focus almost entirely on its functional role, in particular the behaviors that respect disposes us to engage in (or refrain from). Here we wish to investigate the phenomenal character of respect, what it is like to feel respect for persons. Since Kant is the reference point for modern discussions of respect, we try to reconstruct Kant’s account of the phenomenology of respect, but also endeavor to refine his account in light of our own phenomenological observations

Orthogonal polarity graphs and Sidon sets

Determining the maximum number of edges in an $n$-vertex $C_4$-free graph is a well-studied problem that dates back to a paper of Erd\H{o}s from 1938. One of the most important families of $C_4$-free graphs are the Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi orthogonal polarity graphs. We show that the Cayley sum graph constructed using a Bose-Chowla Sidon set is isomorphic to a large induced subgraph of the Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi orthogonal polarity graph. Using this isomorphism we prove that the Petersen graph is a subgraph of every sufficiently large Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi orthogonal polarity graph.Comment: The authors would like to thank Jason Williford for noticing an error in the proof of Theorem 1.2 in the previous version. This error has now been correcte