As Ruse points out, as long as it is not possible to explain adaptation phenomena without resorting to the metaphor of design (evidently teleological), then both the phenomenon to be explained and the explanations themselves are, in a relevant sense, teleological.
A state of affairs S is 'maximal' just in case, for any state of affairs S*, either it is impossible for both S and S* to obtain, or it is impossible for S to obtain without S*: the point of the restriction to the maximal is just that a possible world should be a possible state of affairs that is, in a relevant sense, complete).
In the European Middle Ages, for example, although there is nothing congruent to a modern homosexual identity, prostitution was a sexual identity in any relevant sense of the word.
In the appeal court judgment, Lord Sales said: "On the medical evidence, platinum sensitisation is not harmful in itself in any relevant sense.
There can be a sovereign authority, in a jurisprudentially relevant sense, even where such an authority is not recognized by positive constitutional law.
A morally considerable being is a being who can be wronged in a morally relevant sense.
It's the best I could have done that should be our baseline in Feinberg's sense – not what I would have done – for purposes of determining when a person has been made worse off (or, in a morally relevant sense, harmed) (Feinberg 1988).
He proposes therefore that a normatively relevant sense of application requires that one accept the benefits but that is to transform a natural duty account into a weakly voluntarist one like fairness.
This proposal claims we can retain the person-based intuition in its original form and recognize that bringing a person into an existence that is worth having but unavoidably flawed does not make things worse for, or harm (in a morally relevant sense), that person and yet insist that the acts under scrutiny in a large class of nonidentity cases are clearly wrong.
Moreover, as Parfit suggests, even if we think it correct on occasion to say that a person who has not been made worse off has been "harmed," we may still be unclear whether that person has been harmed in a "morally relevant sense" (Parfit 1987, 374).
If 'green' means green for S, and S uses 'red' to express her belief that x is green, she may fail in her communicative intentions (although not necessarily, consider the use of irony and metaphor), but does it follow that she has used her expressions incorrectly in a semantically relevant sense?
