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57767.502468
We say we believe that all children can learn, but few of us really believe it.” Lisa Delpit Teachers are expected to believe in the potential of every student in front of them. To believe otherwise is to give up on a central premise of the educational mission, that students can be taught. However, the people who come into the classroom have different levels of knowledge, skills, and motivations. To deny that what the student brings to the classroom matters to their potential progress is to deny empirical reality. Teachers face a tension between cultivating high expectations for student success and recognizing the limitations that a student and their circumstances impose.
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139860.502537
Emotions can get things right and serve us in many productive ways. They can also get things wrong and harm our epistemic or practical endeavors. Resenting somebody for having insulted your friend gets it wrong when your friend well understood that the remark was a joke. On the other hand, if your friend is not familiar with the given cultural context and hence couldn’t quite grasp the subtly sexist nature of the joke, your resentment might not only be appropriate but also help her navigate the new social context. Hoping that your meeting with your supervisor will be productive might motivate you to prepare better but will be inappropriate if all your previous meetings were failures.
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139888.502546
Besides disagreeing about how much one should donate to charity, moral theories also disagree about where one should donate. In many cases, one intuitively attractive option is to split your donations across all of the charities that are recommended by theories in which you have positive credence, with each charity’s share being proportional to your credence in the theories that recommend it. Despite the fact that something like this approach is already widely used by real-world philanthropists to distribute billions of dollars, it is not supported by any account of handling decisions under moral uncertainty that has been proposed thus far in the literature. This paper develops a new bargaining-based approach that honors the proportionality intuition. We also show how this approach has several advantages over the best alternative proposals.
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139962.502553
Contractual inflationists claim that contractual relationships are a source of noninstrumental value in our lives, to be engaged with for their own sake. Some inflationists take this to be the value of “personal detachment.” I argue that though personal detachment can indeed be valuable, that value is not plausibly considered noninstru-mental. Even on the most charitable reading of personal detachment—its potential to emancipate us from traditional social relations—these inflationists overlook that it may just as much lead to domination as traditional society does, only this time, due to alienation under market conditions. To salvage our intuitive sense of the emancipatory potential of contract, we can consider the detachment it makes possible to be a form of technology, casting the value of contract in a “merely” instrumental role. I conclude that if we are to reinvigorate the politics of the appeal to personal detachment in contract theory, we have to deflate its value.
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140042.502567
A moral requirement R1 is said to be lexically prior to a moral requirement R just in case we are morally obliged to uphold R1 at the expense of R2—no matter how many times R2 must be violated thereby. While lexical priority is a feature of many ethical theories, and arguably a part of common sense morality, attempts to model it within the framework of decision theory have led to a series of problems—a fact which is sometimes spun as a “decision theoretic critique” of lexical priority. In this paper, I develop an enriched decision theoretic framework that is capable of model-ling lexical priority while avoiding all extant problems. This will involve introducing several new ingredients into the standard decision theoretic framework, including multidimensional utilities, de minimis risks, and the means to represent two different conceptions of risk.
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140137.502574
Skeptical theists contend that human cognitive limitations undermine atheistic arguments from evil. One recent challenge to skeptical theism has been posed by Climenhaga (2025), who argues that if we should—as some skeptical theists argue— be agnostic about the probability of the total collection of evils we observe given theism, Pr(E|T), we should also be agnostic about the probability of theism given these evils, Pr(T|E), and therefore be agnostic with respect to God’s existence. If one is persuaded, as I am, that Climenhaga’s argument is correct, the most promising skeptical theist response available seems to be one of mitigation: concede that Pr(E|T) is not inscrutable—and thereby concede skeptical theism cannot undermine arguments from the total collection of observable evils to the nonexistence of God— but maintain that skeptical theism is still able to undermine other Bayesian problems of evil; namely, those which argue from some individual instance of observable evil to the nonexistence of God. However, as I will argue, this mitigation strategy is not viable: if Pr(Ei|T) is inscrutable, where Pr(Ei|T) is the probability of any individual instance of observable evil occurring given theism, so too is Pr(E|T) correspondingly inscrutable. Therefore, absent demonstrating Climenhaga to be incorrect, skeptical theism cannot undermine any Bayesian arguments from evil.
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140158.50258
Apparent orthodoxy holds that artistic understanding is finally valuable. Artistic understanding—grasping, as such, the features of an artwork that make it aesthetically or artistically good or bad—is a species of understanding, which is widely taken to be finally valuable. The objection from mystery, by contrast, holds that a lack of artistic understanding is valuable. I distinguish and critically assess two versions of this objection. The first holds that a lack of artistic understanding is finally valuable, because it preserves the pleasure of an artwork’s incomprehensibility; the second holds that a lack of artistic understanding is conditionally valuable, as the enabling condition of a finally valuable relationship with an artwork. I defend orthodoxy by arguing that both versions of the objection fail and that we have no general reason against gaining artistic understanding.
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140182.502586
Refutation and Imagination Quentin Skinner, Michel Foucault, Raymond Geuss, David Graeber, and Bernard Williams, have recognised the importance of these imaginative resources in shaping methodological reflections. These thinkers are concerned that limiting the relevance of history to normative theorising exposes ahistoricist thinkers to imaginative failures. I argue that this is best construed as a concern about the epistemic reliability of their evaluative judgments. Imaginative failures can introduce biases that unjustifiably restrict the range of solutions to practical collective problems they contemplate. Historical research serves a normative function that is unavailable to the methodologically ahistoricist approach by preventing such failures.
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140206.502592
Suppose Socrates is looking at a bright red apple in good viewing conditions, so that it looks to him the colour it is. Schematically, Aristotle’s explanation of this “Good Case” is that the apple looks bright red to Socrates because he has taken on the perceptual form of bright red without the matter. But what happens if Socrates misperceives the apple instead and it looks purple? It is not at all clear how to apply Aristotle’s account of perception to such a “Bad Case.” Does Socrates still take on the perceptual form of the actual—bright red—colour of the apple in the Bad Case? Of purple? Neither? I argue that applying Aristotle’s account of perception to this sort of Bad Case requires that there are different ways of being in perceptual contact with perceptible qualities like the colour of an apple, depending on how that perceptual contact is mediated by changes in the sense organs and perceptual medium.
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194909.502598
Disruptive technologies are a key theme in economics, the philosophy of technology, and situated cognition - yet these debates remain largely disconnected. This paper addresses four core questions that cut across them: (i) What, precisely, are disruptive technologies “disrupting” across the different contexts in which the literature situates them? (ii) Why do technological disruptions play such prominent roles, in multiple domains, concerning the development of our species, cultures, and personal lives? (iii) Are technological disruptions inherently beneficial or harmful, and how are potential benefits and harms brought about? (iv) What strategies are available for adaptation to disruptive technologies, and how accessible are they for different groups and individuals? To unify current debates and provide a conceptual and normative foundation for future research, we draw on niche construction theory. We argue that disruptive technologies are technological niche disruptions (TENDs) that occur at various spatiotemporal scales. TENDs pressure social groups and individuals to adapt. As the abilities and resources that adaptation requires are often unevenly distributed, so are the harms and benefits TENDs produce. TENDs, therefore, both reflect and sustain existing inequalities.
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321165.502605
Scott Aaronson’s Brief Foreword:
Harvey Lederman is a distinguished analytic philosopher who moved from Princeton to UT Austin a few years ago. Since his arrival, he’s become one of my best friends among the UT professoriate. …
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467273.502611
Learning not to be so embarrassed by my ignorance and failures. Reminder: everyone is welcome here, but paid subscriptions are what enable me to devote the necessary time to researching and writing this newsletter, including pieces like this one on Katie Johnson, the woman who alleged Trump sexually assaulted her at the age of thirteen at a party of Jeffrey Epstein’s. …
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596962.502617
Subsumption theodicies aim to subsume apparent cases of natural evil under the category of moral evil, claiming that apparently natural evils result from the actions or omissions of free creatures. Subsumption theodicies include Fall theodicies, according to which nature was corrupted by the sins of the first humans (Aquinas 1993, Dembski 2009), demonic-action theodicies, according to which apparently natural evils are caused by the actions of fallen angels (Lewis 1944, Plantinga 1974, Johnston 2023), and simulation theodicies, according to which our universe is a computer simulation, with its apparent natural evils caused by the free actions of simulators in the next universe up (Dainton 2020, Crummett 2021).
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602455.502629
[This continues an earlier essay, Book Review: Paradise Lost by John Milton.] 1. Adam asks Raphael, and you would too, admit it, about the sex lives of angels:
Love not the heavenly spirits, and how their love Express they, by looks only, or do they mix Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch? …
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602456.502635
PEA Soup is pleased to announce the forthcoming discussion from Free & Equal, on Elise Sugarman’s “Supposed Corpses and Correspondence” with a précis from Gabriel Mendlow. The discussion will take place from August 6th to 8th. …
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748061.502643
The term algorithmic fairness is used to assess whether
machine learning algorithms operate fairly. To get a sense of when
algorithmic fairness is at issue, imagine a data scientist is provided
with data about past instances of some phenomenon: successful
employees, inmates who when released from prison go on to reoffend,
loan recipients who repay their loans, people who click on an
advertisement, etc. and is tasked with developing an algorithm that
will predict other instances of these phenomena. While an algorithm
can be successful or unsuccessful at its task to varying degrees, it
is unclear what makes such an algorithm fair or unfair.
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806972.502649
Picture a playground on a sunny day, bustling with excited children. One falls and scratches her knee. Cries of distress draw the concern of a new friend. A few breaths later, she’s back on her feet with a big grin, ready for the next adventure. …
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824069.502655
Social authorities claim that we are obliged to obey their commands and they also claim the right to enforce them should we refuse. Many liberals (amongst others) insist that these claims hold water only when those subject to such an authority have agreed to obey it. Thus, according to classical liberals, people are subject to the authority of the state only if they have (in some sense) consented to its rule. Grounds for scepticism about a consent-based theory of political authority are no less familiar. Though ‘consent’ can mean different things, it is often observed that there is no form of consent which could both (a) validate political authority and (b) plausibly be attributed to most of the population of either past or present states.
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825987.502661
PEA Soup is pleased to introduce the July Ethics article discussion on “Gender, Gender Expression, and the Dilemma of the Body” by Katie Zhou (MIT). The précis is from Cressida Heyes (University of Alberta). …
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939412.502669
It is uncontroversial that humanistic thought and scientific inquiry have been entangled throughout a very long arc of intellectual history. Beyond this, however, significant challenges await anyone hoping to understand let alone articulate the nature of these entanglements. Since ‘science’ and ‘humanism’ are labels that are commonly applied to traditions of theorizing and practice that predate the 18th and 19th century introduction and use of these terms in their modern senses, respectively, and since both of these traditions have evolved and speciated a great deal from antiquity to the present, any attempt to untangle the many complex relationships between them amounts to a formidable task.
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944966.502675
Critics of ambivalence see it as something of inherent disvalue: a sign of poorly functioning agency. Instead, this chapter challenges this assumption, outlining the potential benefits of ambivalence for well-functioning agency, using criteria of rationality, agential effectiveness, autonomy, and authenticity. Furthermore, by exploring the interplay between philosophical debates on ambivalence and psychological research on suicide, the chapter shows how insights from each field can inform the other. For example, it follows that fostering ambivalence, rather than eliminating it, can sometimes support more effective suicide interventions, while ambivalence alone should not be seen as a marker of deficient agency and thus as justification for paternalistic measures.
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1002642.502683
The literature on values in science contains countless claims to the effect that a particular type of scientific choice is or is not value-laden. This chapter exposes an ambiguity in the notion of a value-laden choice. In the first half, I distinguish four ways a choice can be said to be value-laden. In the second half, I illustrate the usefulness of this taxonomy by assessing arguments about whether the value-ladenness of science is inevitable. I focus on the “randomizer reply,” which claims that, in principle, scientists could always avoid value-laden choices by flipping a coin.
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1169228.50269
Pedants complain that the word “literally” is more often misused than used correctly. “This post will literally blow your mind! Your brain will literally explode!” “Literally?” they exclaim. “Then I had better stop reading.”
But the pedants are not pedantic enough. …
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1225978.502695
1. Should the state get out of the marriage business? Would it be better, if “personal relationships are regulated, the vulnerable are protected, and justice is furthered, all without the state recognition of marriage or any similar alternative”? …
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1233472.502701
What is health? This book addresses this fundamental question by narrowing the focus to contemporary medicine, specifically Western biomedicine or mainstream medicine. This chapter and the next one introduce the strategy: to understand what health is, we need to analyze health concepts. The health concepts we will discuss and evaluate throughout the book are the statements found in regulatory documents of the medical and healthcare community, or the operational definitions found in research protocols and scientific articles. We will see throughout the book that each concept of health is a theoretical tool designed to serve specific goals.
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1402107.502708
In the last fifth of their interview, Adelstein and Huemer discuss my views. I now respond point by point. Adelstein:
And it just almost feels like there's something different going on when Bryan Caplan does moral reasoning than when I do. …
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1459262.502714
Joseph Heath presents his market failures approach to business ethics as a happy medium between cynicism and the idealism of traditional moral theories such as Kantian ethics, which Heath believes to be incompatible with important forms of competition. The market failures approach defends some real ethical limits in business, beyond following the law, but it condones certain deviations from the norms of everyday morality in the interest of economic efficiency. On this view, a certain level of sleaziness in business is permissible and inevitable, even if it is regrettable. This article argues that Kantian ethics provides a better account of the ethics of competition than the market failures approach does. Kantian ethics is in fact compatible with competition, both on the market and in the workplace. On some key issues, notably including the issue of truthfulness and disclosure, Kantian ethics permits competitive strategies that the market failures theory forbids. Moreover, when Kantian ethics deems the reasoning behind a competitive strategy morally acceptable, it endorses the strategy without any ethical reservations. There is no reason to regard justified business practices as regrettable or sleazy.
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1485159.50272
Now that you’ve watched and/or read the Matthew Adelstein-Mike Huemer conversation on the ethics of insect suffering, I hope you’re ready to hear my reaction. I’m going to post this in two parts. In part 1, I dissect Adelstein and Huemer’s exchange with each other. …
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1485160.502726
A decade ago, Effective Altruism got an early taste of bad PR when someone at an EA Global conference was widely reported as enthusing that EA was “the last social movement the world would ever need,” or words to that effect. …
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1820679.502732
As I write in the spring of 2025, we are in the midst of a crisis in the United States. The crisis is economic, social, political, and legal. One dimension of this crisis is the attack on higher education by the Trump administration. To date, this attack has included: o Cuts to funding for existing federal grants to higher education o Substantive content restrictions on applications for new grants o Deporting, or canceling visas of, international students and scholars without due cause o Denial of entry into the United States of international scholars traveling for academic or research activities o Increases to the amount of overhead that universities must pay to support federal grants o Threats to increase endowment tax on universities from 1.4% to as much as 35% o Closure, or severe cuts to funding, of libraries, museums, and archives.