-
3571.084052
One of the most pressing tasks for metaethicists is that of solving the location problem: finding a home for morality in the natural world. It goes without saying that some have risen to the occasion more enthusiastically than others, and it is one enthusiast in particular that shall occupy my attention here. The naturalist moral realist affirms continuity between ethics and the empirical sciences, striving to integrate her metaethics with the outputs of scientific theorizing. To her mind, moral epistemology does well to take science as its guide; moral facts are ripe for empirical investigation.1 Unfortunately, the naturalist canon does not always reflect these noble ambitions.2 The naturalist is committed to letting the world do (much of) the talking. But so far, she has scarcely given it the chance to speak. My aim here is to set us back on course. The organizing theme of this paper is that the outputs of empirical investigations are of underrecognized significance for the moral naturalist. Its more specific contention is that these empirical resources help her to address two fundamental challenges that she faces.
-
226064.084339
Disclaimer: Despite the appearances, there is no Michel Foucault in the following essay (quite the contrary actually)! Let’s consider a fictional place called “Wisdom Town.” Wisdom Town is a small town, or maybe a village of a few dozen individuals at most. …
-
315055.084357
If I have done you a serious wrong, I bear a burden. I can be relieved of that burder by forgiveness. What is the burden and what is the relief? The burden need not consist of anything emotional or dispositional on your side, such as your harboring resentment or being disposed not to interact with me in as amicable a way as before or pursuing my punishment. …
-
395354.08437
The underreporting of suspected adverse drug reactions remains a primary issue for contemporary post-market drug surveillance or ‘pharmacovigilance.’ Pharmacovigilance pioneer W.H.W. Inman argued that ‘deadly sins’ committed by clinicians are to blame for underreporting. Of these ‘sins,’ ignorance and lethargy are the most obvious and impactful in causing underreporting. However, recent analyses show that diffidence, insecurity, and indifference additionally play a major role. I aim to augment our understanding of diffidence, insecurity, and indifference by arguing these sins are underwritten by value judgments arising via epistemic risk. I contend that ‘evidence-based’ medicine codifies these sins.
-
505171.084383
Content warning: This post discusses sexual assault, stalking, harassment, abuse, and also contains all the spoilers. Sigh. I started watching Baby Reindeer on Netflix with a great deal of trepidation. …
-
505292.084395
According to urban legend, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Death is number two.1
I don’t know if it’s true, but if it is, I’d bet that the most dreaded form of public speaking is to stand onstage, alone, attempting to make an audience of strangers laugh. …
-
514806.084407
Feminists have disagreed about whether women can choose gendered subordination autonomously. Less attention has been paid, however, to the socio-ontological questions that underlie this debate. This article introduces novel cases of ‘thwarted autonomy,’ in which women pursue autonomy but in ways that reinforce gendered subordination, in order to challenge dominant proceduralist and substantivist views, as well as motivate an expressivist view of the social self as a promising foundation for an account of autonomy. On this view, which draws on the Hegelian tradition, agents must embody their desires and values in the social world to achieve self-understanding. Social meanings and norms therefore mediate the form an agent’s expressive activity takes, and the sense of self she develops. An expressivist view, I argue, allows us to reinterpret women’s outward acquiescence to gendered subordination as an attempt to express autonomy in an oppressive social context. It also points towards a robustly social conception of autonomy to aid in the diagnosis and redress of patriarchal oppression.
-
514892.084419
According to reductivist axiological perfectionism about well-being (RAP), well-being is constituted by the development and exercise of central human capacities. In defending this view, proponents have relied heavily on the claim that RAP provides a unifying explanation of the entries on the ‘objective list’ of well-being constituents. I argue that this argument fails to provide independent support for the theory. RAP does not render a plausible objective list unless such a list is used at every stage of theory development to shape the details of the view. Absent such motivated fine-tuning, RAP even fails to provide a satisfying account of two supposed paradigm cases of perfectionist value: achievement and knowledge. Thus, if RAP is to be defended, it must be defended directly by providing reasons for accepting the axiological principle at its heart. It cannot be defended, indirectly, by pointing to its attractive implications.
-
514921.084431
A specter is haunting economics—the specter of revealed preference theory. Many philosophers of old have entered into an alliance to exorcise this specter; Sen (1977) and Hausman (2012), Dietrich and List (2016), and Guala (2012; 2019). In the face of the trenchant critique it has faced, the longevity of revealed preference theory is quite surprising. While it still holds considerable power among economists, in recent years also philosophers have begun to offer novel arguments in its defense (e.g., Vredenburgh 2020; Clarke 2020; Thoma 2021a; 2021b). At its core, revealed preference theory can be stated as the view that preferences are just patterns in choice-behavior. My aim in this paper is to argue against the revival of revealed preference theory. Towards this end, I will first outline the different facets of revealed preference theory (Section 2). I will then briefly present the two most common arguments that philosophers of economics have offered against it. In particular, I will look at the argument from belief and the argument from causality (Section 3).
-
514973.084444
Is the overall value of a world just the sum of values contributed by each value-bearing entity in that world? Additively separable axiologies (like total utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and critical level views) say ‘yes’, but non-additive axiologies (like average utilitarianism, rank-discounted utilitarianism, and variable value views) say ‘no’. This distinction appears to be practically important: among other things, additive axiologies generally assign great importance to large changes in population size, and therefore tend to strongly prioritize the long-term survival of humanity over the interests of the present generation. Non-additive axiologies, on the other hand, need not assign great importance to large changes in population size. We show, however, that when there is a large enough ‘background population’ unaffected by our choices, a wide range of non-additive axiologies converge in their implications with additive axiologies—for instance, average utilitarianism converges with critical-level utilitarianism and various egalitarian theories converge with prioritarianism. We further argue that real-world background populations may be large enough to make these limit results practically significant. This means that arguments from the scale of potential future populations for the astronomical importance of avoiding existential catastrophe, and other arguments in practical ethics that seem to presuppose additive separability, may succeed in practice whether or not we accept additive separability as a basic axiological principle.
-
660504.084456
"Anarchy, State, and Utopia" after 50 Years
Preliminary Note: I’ve just finished writing the first draft of a working paper titled “Complexity and the Case for Liberal Neutrality and Skepticism. Aron, Hayek, and Gaus on the Limits of Political Knowledge” which I will present at the 7th Economic Philosophy International Conference at the end of this month. …
-
673535.084468
What is the proper role for scientists in policymaking? This paper explores various roles that scientists can play, with an eye to questions that these roles raise about value-neutrality and technocracy. Where much philosophical literature is concerned with the conduct of research or the transmission of research results to policymakers, I am interested in various non-research roles that scientists take on in policymaking. These include raising the alarm on issues, framing and conceptualising problems, formulating potential policies, assessing policy options for expected efficacy, and more. I consider examples from climate change and Covid- 19 policymaking. My intention is to encourage philosophers to expand their interest in values in science out from the conduct of research to the wide array of roles that scientists play in policymaking. The paper is therefore an overview of the landscape of potential research questions, rather than a presentation of a single argument.
-
826172.084479
Naïve Instrumentalists are practically unconstrained in pursuit of their moral or political goals. If it seems to them, just based on the immediately legible evidence, that violence or deception would advance their goals, they won’t hesitate to act accordingly. …
-
846696.084491
Empirical research provides striking examples of non-human animal responses to death, which look very much like manifestations of grief. However, recent philosophical work appears to challenge the idea that animals can grieve. Grief, in contrast to more rudimentary emotional experiences, has been taken to require potentially human-exclusive abilities like a fine-grained sense of particularity, an ability to project toward the distal future and the past, and an understanding of death or loss. This paper argues that these features do not rule out animal grief and are present in many animal loss responses. It argues that the principal kind of “understanding” involved in grief is not intellectual but is instead of a practical variety available to animals, and outlines ways that the disruption to an animal’s life following a loss can hinge upon a specific individual and involve a degree of temporal organisation.
-
885441.084516
Black K-12 students are 4 times more likely to receive out-of-school suspension than their white peers; housing lenders are more likely to offer Black homebuyers subprime loans even when they qualify for prime loans; employers call back candidates for interviews with ‘white-sounding’ names 50% more often than candidates with ‘Black-sounding’ names. All these are said to be examples of systemic racism. But what does it mean to say that racism is systemic? Using the tools of social ontology, this essay explores the various ways that social systems can be racist.
-
885490.084531
Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality, by Katharine Jenkins, is a wonderful and engaging book in social ontology. It perfectly weds a rigorous theoretical account of social kinds with a deep concern for oppressed people. I expect that Jenkins’ book will generate significant conversation about the nature of social kinds and the relation between social ontology (and philosophy in general) and efforts at achieving social justice.
-
898778.084546
‘Gender identity’ was clearly defined sixty years ago, but the dominant conceptions of gender identity today are deeply obscure. Florence Ashley’s 2023 theory of gender identity is one of the latest attempts at demystification. Although Ashley’s paper is not fully coherent, a coherent theory of gender identity can be extracted from it. That theory, we argue, is clearly false. It is psychologically very implausible, and does not support ‘firstperson authority over gender’, as Ashley claims. We also discuss other errors and confusions in Ashley’s paper.
-
904511.084558
On April 19, 2024, the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness was announced at the “Emerging Science of Animal Consciousness” conference held at New York University. The New York Declaration is an effort to showcase a scientific consensus on the presence of conscious experiences across all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fish) and many invertebrates (at least including cephalopods, decapod crustaceans, and insects).
-
904537.084569
Pascal’s Wager involves expected utilities. In this chapter, we examine the Wager in light of two main features of expected utility theory: utilities and probabilities. We discuss infinite and finite utilities, and zero, infinitesimal, extremely low, imprecise, and undefined probabilities. These have all come up in recent literature regarding Pascal’s Wager. We consider the problems each creates and suggest prospects for the Wager in light of these problems.
-
1025302.084581
The goal of this form of politics is the manufacturing and maintaining of 'pluralistic ignorance' where members of a group mistakenly believe that most other members disagree with them. As a result, a well-organised minority is able to dominate the group as a whole by convincing them of a fictitious shared consensus supporting their rule or values. …
-
1077838.084593
Welfare subjectivists face a dilemma. On the one hand, traditional subjectivist theories—such as the desire-fulfillment theory—are too permissive to account for the well-being of typical mature human beings. On the other hand, more “refined” theories—such as the life-satisfaction theory—are too restrictive to account for the well-being of various welfare subjects, including newborns, those with profound cognitive impairments, or non-human animals. This paper examines a class of welfare subjectivism that addresses this dilemma with sensitivity to the diversity in welfare subjects. First, the most-sophisticated-attitude view (MSA) is introduced. MSA holds that an object, , is good for a subject, , in proportion to the strength of ’s pro-attitude towards if and only if the pro-attitude at issue is ’s most sophisticated type. Typically, the well-being of typical mature human beings is assessed in terms of one’s authentic whole-life satisfaction, whereas that of human newborns is assessed in terms of something less sophisticated such as pleasure. MSA offers the rationale for this difference based on an underexplored version of perfectionism: procedural perfectionism. Next, provided that MSA may involve an implausibly strong claim, this paper examines two moderate variations of MSA that accept the partial relevance of less sophisticated types of valenced attitude. Finally, it is illustrated how MSA and its variations have plausible implications regarding the well-being of enhanced or dis-enhanced people.
-
1093539.084605
I recently discussed my “make desertion fast” proposal (updated here) with philosopher Ned Dobos over lunch. Though he’s sympathetic, he’s sent me the following two emails outlining possible objections. …
-
1135557.084616
Theories of graded causation attract growing attention in the philosophical debate on causation. An important field of application is the controversial relationship between causation and moral responsibility. However, it is still unclear how exactly the notion of graded causation should be understood in the context of moral responsibility. One question is whether we should endorse a proportionality principle, according to which the degree of an agent’s moral responsibility is proportionate to their degree of causal contribution. A second question is whether a theory of graded causation should measure closeness to necessity or closeness to sufficiency. In this paper, we argue that we should indeed endorse a proportionality principle and that this principle supports a notion of graded causation relying on closeness to sufficiency rather than closeness to necessity. Furthermore, we argue that this insight helps to provide a plausible analysis of the so-called ‘Moral Difference Puzzle’ recently described by Bernstein.
-
1193292.084628
In political philosophy, reflective equilibrium is a standard method used to systematically reconcile intuitive judgments with theoretical principles. In this paper, we propose that survey experiments and a model selection method—i.e., the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC)-based model selection method—can be viewed together as a methodological means of satisfying the epistemic desiderata implicit in reflective equilibrium. To show this, we conduct a survey experiment on two theories of distributive justice, prioritarianism and sufficientarianism. Our experimental test case and AIC-based model selection method demonstrate that the refined sufficientarian principle, a widely accepted principle of distributive justice, is no more plausible than the prioritarian principle. This tells us that some changes of certain intuitions revolving around sufficientarianism should be examined (separately) based on the findings of the survey experiment and AIC model selection. This shows the potential of our approach—both practically and methodologically—as a novel way of applying reflective equilibrium in political philosophy.
-
1308920.084644
Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean states that each moral virtue stands opposed to two types of vice: one of excess and one of deficiency, respectively. Critics claim that some virtues—like honesty, fair-mindedness, and patience—are counterexamples to Aristotle’s doctrine. Here, I develop a generalizable strategy to defend the doctrine of the mean against such counterexamples. I argue that not only is the doctrine of the mean defensible, but taking it seriously also allows us to gain substantial insight into particular virtues. Failure to take the doctrine seriously, moreover, exposes us to the risk of mistaking certain vices for virtues.
-
1351286.084655
On the mere difference view of disability, one isn’t worse off for being disabled as such, though one is worse off due to ableist arrangements in society. A standard observation is that the mere difference view doesn’t work for really big disabilities. …
-
1354933.084667
Consider contemporary injustices against Indigenous peoples in settler-colonies, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia. These injustices have a historical dimension: they can be traced to actions of invasion, dispossession, and genocide that occurred hundreds of years ago. The moral status of the ongoing injustices depends, in part, on their historical dimensions: it matters, morally, that the contemporary injustices are perpetrated against people whose ancestors were here first and whose sovereignty was violated. But who bears culpability for those historical wrongs? Is culpability borne merely by the individuals involved, who are now long-dead? Are those long-ago actions attributable to the ideology of the time, which persists in various ways but which seems to lack the agency necessary for culpability? Or are there presently-existing agents that bear culpability?
-
1424457.084681
We argue that, in the predominant sense of the term, propaganda is a necessarily negative phenomenon. We follow Ross’s (2002) account and claim that, with some refinements, it is an explanatorily useful analysis of political propaganda. We then assess two prominent attempts that aim at classifying positive or legitimate cases of public communication as cases of propaganda, namely Ross’s (2013) revision of her previous model, and Stanley’s (2015) influential account. We show that some of the cases in contention are problematic and that no satisfactory reasons are provided to count other nonproblematic cases as propaganda. We also argue that the arguments these authors offer for their revisionary understanding of propaganda are inconclusive. In particular, the motivation for counting legitimate public communication as propaganda is lacking.
-
1424485.084692
This paper challenges the two aims of Michael Cholbi’s Rational Will View (RWV) which are to (1) offer an account of why paternalism is presumptively or pro tanto wrong and (2) relate the relative wrongness of paternalistic interventions to the rational powers that such interventions target (Sections 1 and 2). Some of a paternalizee’s choices harm their future selves in ways that would be wrong if they were done to others. I claim this challenges Cholbi’s second aim (2) because the cases his account deems particularly wrong turn out to be not to be as wrongful as expected (Section 3). When this second aim is challenged, it has knock-on effects on the capacity of the RWV to discern which cases of paternalism are generally more wrongful than others, which undermines Cholbi’s first aim (1). I consider responses on behalf of Cholbi’s view but conclude that the account is insufficient on its own to vindicate its two aims (Section 4). Finally, I draw on recent work that adopts ideas from the practical reasoning literature to help determine paternalism’s wrongness (Section 5). I argue this helps Cholbi’s view withstand my objections, but we must remain skeptical of why interceding with rational powers is particularly wrong.
-
1424507.084703
Here are some things we know about conflicts around the world in April 2024. On 7 October 2023 Hamas killed over 1200 people in Israel and took more than 240 hostage. In response Israel launched an assault on Gaza that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and displaced millions. Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine continue; since 2022 Russia has repeatedly ignored international humanitarian law, tortured and murdered civilians, and destroyed basic infrastructure in civilian areas. Civil war continues in Sudan, and the country faces imminent famine. Approximately 25 million people in Sudan need humanitarian assistance.