Glossary

The Make-Believe Theory, predominantly associated with philosopher Kendall Walton, posits that our emotional responses to fiction are not genuine emotions directed at real objects, but rather "quasi-emotions" or "make-believe emotions" that arise within the context of a game of make-believ

The Non-Identity Problem is a philosophical paradox, prominently articulated by Derek Parfit, that questions the very nature of harm and moral responsibility towards future individuals whose existence is entirely dependent upon the choices made in the present. It highlights the counter-int

The Person-Affecting Principle is a foundational ethical intuition asserting that an action or state of affairs can only be considered good or bad, right or wrong, if it is good or bad for someone. It posits that moral evaluation must be anchored to the impact on identifiable individuals,

Everyday aesthetics is a branch of philosophy, prominently championed by Yuriko Saito, which shifts the traditional focus of aesthetic inquiry from "high art" to the aesthetic dimensions of commonplace objects, actions, and environments encountered in daily life. It posits that the manner

Aesthetic literacy, as conceptualized by Yuriko Saito within the framework of everyday aesthetics, refers to the cultivated capacity to discern, appreciate, and critically evaluate the aesthetic qualities present in ordinary experiences and objects. This goes beyond mere sensory perception

Testimonial smothering is a form of self-silencing where a speaker voluntarily truncates or withholds their own testimony because they anticipate that their audience, due to structural prejudices, will fail to comprehend it correctly or will distort it to cause further harm.

Hermeneutical injustice is the structural disadvantage that occurs when a society's collective interpretive resources—such as language, legal terms, and social concepts—are inadequate for allowing members of marginalized groups to understand or communicate their own lived experiences.

A causal loop is a closed sequence of evolutionary events in which each event is a cause of the next, and the final event in the chain serves as a cause for the first. This structure violates classical linear causation by allowing self-referential temporal feedback without an ultimate orig

Predator-prey abolitionism is a radical ethical position within animal advocacy asserting that humans should, if technically feasible without causing greater ecological collapse, systematically eliminate or modify predatory behaviors in the wild to prevent the horrific suffering of prey an

Wild Animal Suffering (WAS) is an academic field of inquiry in animal ethics that investigates the scale, causes, and potential remedies for the harms endured by non-human animals living in the wild. Unlike traditional animal welfare, which focuses on human-caused harms (like factory farmi