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9111.275644
Ugliness is the opposite of beauty. So we may learn what beauty is, by investigating ugliness, and turning the result upside-down. Ugliness is deformity. Two arguments for this thesis may be given: an argument from the dictionary, and an argument from the writings of famous long-dead philosophers. …
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12263.275782
Suppose a man has already murdered most of your family, including several of your children, for no other reason than that he believes your kind doesn’t deserve to exist on earth. The murderer was never seriously punished for this, because most of your hometown actually shared his feelings about your family. …
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95674.275791
I specialize in trillion-dollar ideas: policy reforms which, if implemented, would generate trillions of dollars of net social benefits. Ideas like open borders, educational austerity, and by-right construction. …
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182066.275797
In 2015, Amy Finkelstein, Nathaniel Hendren, and Erzo Luttmer released an NBER working paper called “The Value of Medicaid: Interpreting Results from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment.” The paper’s results were a slap in the face of Social Desirability Bias — and the authors boldly advertised them right in the abstract:
Our baseline estimates of Medicaid's welfare benefit to recipients per dollar of government spending range from about $0.2 to $0.4, depending on the framework, with at least two-fifths – and as much as four-fifths – of the value of Medicaid coming from a transfer component, as opposed to its ability to move resources across states of the world. …
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353559.275802
Economists have long scoffed at know-it-all business and financial gurus with the rhetorical question, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” And sometimes the gurus use the same question to scoff at know-it-all economists. …
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356636.275811
When thinking about big social problems like climate change or factory farming, there are two especially common failure modes worth avoiding:
Neglecting small numbers that incrementally contribute to significant aggregate harms. …
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428780.275819
An important feature of theoretical projects that aim to promote social justice is their commitment to empowering those in oppressive circumstances so that they can solve their own problems. There are two reasons to take this approach. First, the oppressed have situated knowledge of the circumstances that others lack. But situated knowledge may not be enough to prompt critique. The second is that because both knowledge and values are shaped by social practices, a collective engagement with historically and materially grounded practices can provide a new frame for agency that enables a creative and potentially emancipatory restructuring of social relations. I argue that such path dependency of values is compatible with social justice being objective, but not to be discovered by theory alone.
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444196.275824
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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527517.275832
1. Liu’s Theory
The title is a reference to Cixin Liu’s science fiction novel, The Dark Forest, from the Three Body Problem trilogy. (That trilogy, by the way, is among the greatest works of science fiction.) …
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687447.275838
In the first lecture, I argued that societies are complex dynamic systems and that in order to promote social change we must attend to material meso-level systems, e.g., heath care systems, education systems, criminal justice systems, and the like, and their patriarchal, White supremacist, and capitalist dynamics. This complex systems approach – together with attention to the social formation of subjects within practices – helps us capture the phenomenon of intersectional oppression and is suited to the strategic thinking needed for social transformation.
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851555.275844
It is a stark truth that the prison system in the United States is a moral catastrophe. Many of those who go to prison are routinely subject to battery, assault, and rape, or live in constant fear thereof. Incarcerated individuals are forced to align with gangs to protect themselves. They are treated by guards and other prison officials in deeply dehumanizing ways, subjected to psychological torture through solitary confinement and other measures, and sometimes inhabit literally unlivable conditions.
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1060378.275849
As part of the summer break, I’m publishing old essays that may be of interest for new subscribers. This post has been originally published March 29, 2023. If not already the case, do not hesitate to subscribe to receive free essays on economics, philosophy, and liberal politics in your mailbox! …
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1294873.275854
Generally speaking, it is seriously wrong to do harm to others. It is also often seriously wrong to allow harm to others. Some nonetheless hold that doing and allowing harm are morally inequivalent. They endorse the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA): the view that it is harder to justify doing harm than merely allowing harm, all else being equal. For example, it seems wrong to deflect a lethal threat onto an innocent in order to save oneself, but permissible to allow a lethal threat to reach an innocent in order to save oneself. The DDA naturally accounts for this. But others deny that there is any morally significant difference, arguing that when all else is equalized, doing harm is no worse (nor harder to justify) than allowing harm.
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1294923.27586
Blame abounds in our everyday lives, perhaps no more so than on social media. With the rise of social networking platforms, we now have access to more information about others’ blameworthy behaviour and larger audiences to whom we can express our blame. But these audiences, while large, are not typically diverse. Just as we tend to gather and share information within online social networks made up of like-minded individuals, much of the moral criticism found on the internet is expressed within groups of agents with similar values and worldviews. Like these epistemic practices, the blaming practices found on social media have also received criticism. Many argue that the blame expressed on the internet is unfitting, excessive, and counterproductive. What accounts for the perniciousness of online blame? And what should be done to address it?
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1295279.275865
robbery is a far more serious crime than larceny, drawing much longer prison sentences. Force is an element of many other crimes. Often, when the realization of a set of conditions that does not include force constitutes a crime, as with larceny, to realize those same conditions with force is to commit a more serious crime. In many jurisdictions, for instance, and controversially, force is what distinguishes rape from lesser forms of sexual assault. Even when a forcibly committed crime is not a more serious crime, it draws greater punishment because force is frequently treated as an aggravating condition for sentencing purposes.
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1295362.27587
at “trolling.” Trolls often post deliberately inflammatory content with the goal of provoking emotional responses. They aim to trick their targets into mistaking them for good faith interlocutors, thereby “baiting” them into responding in an emotional manner. This is typically done for the troll’s own entertainment, as well as the entertainment of anyone who happens to witness the exchange and recognize it as trolling. Some instances of trolling seem mostly harmless, such as when their contents aren’t ethically problematic and no one takes the bait. However, trolling can also be dangerous. For one thing, empirical studies show that racist and misogynistic trolling can be part of a gradual radicalization into extremist or hateful ideologies (Munn 2019; Hoffman et al. 2020; Rauf 2021; Thorleifsson 2022). Furthermore, when problematic trolls are allowed to run amok, online platforms can gradually become cesspools of hateful speech. So, trolling can contribute to the degradation of both individual trolls’ belief systems and broader online environments.
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1358487.275876
Battisti argues that it is morally problematic to use AI tools for improving the quality of a message sent to a romantic partner as it may no longer authentically reflect one’s personality. If AI is used in this manner, there is a risk that what Battisti refers to as an “authenticity-based obligation” is violated. According to Battisti, authenticity-based obligations are nontransferable because they are inherently tied to specific people. […] the value of the result lies in the person performing the task, that is, in who undertakes the cognitive and emotional process required to bring it about1 While we find the discussion of authenticity-based obligations interesting, we doubt that this is the right criterion to apply in this context, for at least four reasons.
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1363476.275881
I present a heretofore untheorised form of lay science, called extitutional science, whereby lay scientists, by virtue of their collective experience, are able to detect errors committed by institutional scientists and attempt to have them corrected. I argue that the epistemic success of institutional science is enhanced to the extent that it takes up this extitutional criticism. Since this uptake does not occur spontaneously, extitutional interference in the conduct of institutional science is required. I make a proposal for how to secure this epistemically beneficial form of lay interference.
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1367638.275886
I often find myself thinking that the conventional wisdom in moral philosophy gets a lot of things backwards. For example, I’ve previously discussed how deontology is much more deeply self-effacing (making objectively right actions, and not just bungled attempts to act rightly, lamentable) than consequentialism. …
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1474532.275891
Some important policies will change future mortality rates (like climate mitigation), change future fertility rates (like public education), or respond to the emerging challenges of global depopulation. Any such policy will change each of the quality of lives, the quantity of lives, and who will live in the future. Hence, to evaluate economic policies, we need to assess both social risk and variable population. A standard principle for economic policy evaluation is Expected Total Utilitarianism, which maximizes the expected value of the sum of individuals’ transformed lifetime well-being. Despite the prominent use in public economics of both additive utilitarianism and expectation-taking under risk, these methods remain questionable in welfare economics, in part because existing axiomatic justifications make strong assumptions (Fleurbaey, 2010; Golosov et al., 2007).
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1479072.275908
In a recent paper, Harriet Fagerberg argues that the disease debate in the philosophy of medicine makes little sense as conceptual analysis but instead should proceed on the assumption that disease is a real kind. I propose an alternative view. The history and practice of medicine give us reasons to doubt that the category of disease forms a real kind. Instead, drawing on work by Quill R. Kukla, I argue that the disease debate makes good sense on an understanding of disease as an institutional kind. As well as explaining key features of the disease debate, this can facilitate a philosophical understanding of disease that captures the eclectic scope of medicine and the complex reasons why conditions get classified as diseases.
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1536819.275913
That science is value-dependent has been taken to raise problems for the democratic legitimacy of scientifically-informed public policy. An increasingly common solution is to propose that science itself ought to be ‘democratised.’ Of the literature aiming to provide principled means of facilitating such, most has been largely concerned with developing accounts of how public values might be identified in order to resolve scientific valuejudgements. Through a case-study of the World Health Organisation’s 2009 redefinition of ‘pandemic’ in response to H1N1, this paper proposes that this emphasis might be unhelpfully pre-emptive, pending more thorough consideration of the question of whose values different varieties of epistemic risk ought to be negotiated in reference to. A choice of pandemic definition inevitably involves the consideration of a particular variety of epistemic risk, described here as ontic risk. In analogy with legislative versus judicial contexts, I argue that the democratisation of ontic risk assessments could bring inductive risk assessments within the scope of democratic control without necessitating that those inductive risk assessments be independently subject to democratic processes. This possibility is emblematic of a novel strategy for mitigating the opportunity costs that successful democratisation would incur for scientists: careful attention to the different normative stakes of different epistemic risks can provide principled grounds on which to propose that the democratisation of science need only be partial.
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1756338.275919
As part of the summer break, I’m publishing old essays that may be of interest for new subscribers. This post has been originally published March 27, 2024. If not already the case, do not hesitate to subscribe to receive free essays on economics, philosophy, and liberal politics in your mailbox! …
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1861403.275924
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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1943496.275929
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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1943524.275934
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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1943598.27594
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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1943678.275945
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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1943773.27595
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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1943794.275955
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.