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552249.398683
One of the central aims of James Buchanan’s long and fruitful career was to identify constitutional rules that could contain rent seeking. A central task for constitutional theorists is to identify constitutional rules that prohibit or limit rent seeking, in order to ensure that a society’s economic system benefits all and preserves their liberty. However, there is a related, but equally dangerous phenomenon that Buchanan does not explicitly address as a variant of rent seeking: the attempt by sectarian groups to capture governmental apparatus to impose their values on others. The goal of these ideologues is not economic gain, but evaluative gain. Co-opting state power, they force those with different values to share or at least submit to their own sectarian vision of the good society. Like rent seeking, this activity tends to undermine the gains from trade in a market order. These activities give the sectarian an unequal gain in utility and may impose a utility loss on others. In this broad sense, sectarian ideologues collect a rent. If we can specify the sense in which ideologues collect a rent, we can expand the reach of Buchanan’s research program. Towards this end, I develop an account of what I shall call ideological rent seeking and the ideological rent seeker. I then extend Buchanan’s approach to constitutional choice to cover the mitigation of ideological rents. The best constitutional rules are those that constrain a weighted sum of economic and ideological rent seeking.
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554706.398822
Matthew Leisinger (2020) argues that previous interpretations of John Locke’s account of akrasia (or weakness of will) are mistaken and offers a new interpretation in their place. In this essay, we aim to recapitulate part of this debate, defend a previously articulated interpretation by responding to Leisinger’s criticisms of it, and explain why Leisinger’s own interpretation faces textual and philosophical problems that are serious enough to disqualify it as an accurate reconstruction of Locke’s views. In so doing, we aim to shed further light on Locke’s views on the various ways in which humans are prone to err in their pursuit of happiness.
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554727.398837
In this paper, we consider two ways in which traditional approaches to testing lay moral theories have oversimplified our picture of moral psychology. Based on thought experiments (e.g., Foot 1967 and Thomson 1976) concerning the moral permissibility of certainly killing one to certainly saving five, psychological experiments (e.g., Cushman et al.
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554754.398856
This article summarizes John Locke’s considered views on freedom, explaining that freedom is a power of the mind to act in accordance with its volitions, that freedom is a power that can belong only to substances, that we have the freedom to will in many cases, including the power to hold our wills undetermined and thereby suspend the prosecution of our desires. This is a seemingly reasonable account of how our minds work, and should work, when we make (important) decisions. But Locke takes us to be morally responsible and accountable, not just for suspending when it is appropriate, but also for spending our time wisely during suspension, in the proper investigation of what would most conduce to our happiness. The problem is that we are prone to motivated irrationality during suspension when deciding what to investigate and for how long to do so. And thus we need to stop and consider whether we are succumbing to such irrationality before making the ultimate decision. This, I argue, leads to an infinite regress and forces Locke into an unsurmountable dilemma.
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561527.398869
A lot of discussion of memory theories of personal identity invokes science-fictional thought experiments, such as when memories are swapped between two brains. One of the classic papers is Shoemaker’s “Persons and their Pasts”. …
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567294.39888
The concept of white ignorance refers to phenomena of not-knowing that are produced by and reinforce systems of white supremacist domination and exploitation. I distinguish two varieties of white ignorance, belief-based white ignorance and practice-based white ignorance. Belief-based white ignorance consists in an information deficit about systems of racist oppression. Practice-based white ignorance consists in unresponsiveness to the political agency of persons and groups subject to racist oppression. Drawing on the antebellum political thought of Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, I contend that an antiracist politics that conceives of its epistemic task in terms of combating practice-based white ignorance offers a more promising frame for liberatory struggle. A focus on practice-based white ignorance calls for a distinctive form of humility that involves recognition of the limits of one ’s own political agency in relation to others, which is integral to democratic relations between free, equal, yet mutually dependent persons.
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577243.398892
During the past few decades, fitness-centered and trait-centered definitions of natural selection have coexisted in the philosophical literature. The former render natural selection definitionally dependent on the presence of fitness differences, where “fitness” is understood as a distinct property from actual reproductive success. On the other hand, trait-centered definitions see selection as definitionally dependent on the presence of a causal relation between a trait (not necessarily fitness) and reproductive success. Interestingly, endorsers of these definitions have rarely – and usually only cursorily – critically engaged the views of the other camp. Therefore, a critical comparison of the two kinds of definitions is lacking in the literature. This paper starts filling this void by opening a discussion about which of the two kinds of definition is more appropriate. I first argue that fitness-centered definitions have difficulties in accommodating cases of opposing selection on correlated traits, whereas trait-centered views have no such problems. To do so, I revisit an old argument put forth by Elliott Sober and I show that recent attempts from the fitness-centered camp to reply to Sober’s charge are unsuccessful. I then show that fitness-centered views also have problems with a different type of case, namely opposing selection on a single trait; trait-centered views, on the other hand, may accommodate such cases if, as I propose here, we specify that the causal relation that figures prominently in them is understood as a relation of contributing causation. These arguments suggest that trait-centered definitions of selection are preferable to fitness-centered ones.
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577292.398904
In recent years, the dissemination of machine learning (ML) methodologies in scientific research has prompted discussions on theory-ladenness. More specifically, the issue of theory-ladenness has re-emerged as questions about whether and how ML models (MLMs) and ML modelling strategies are impacted by the domain theory of the scientific field in which ML is used and implemented (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology, etc). On the one hand, some have argued that there is no difference between ‘traditional’ (pre-ML) and ML-assisted science.
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601868.398915
Introductory note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.2
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624977.398926
In republican political philosophy, citizenship is a status that is constituted by one’s participation in the public life of the polity. In its traditional formulation, republican citizenship is an exclusionary and hierarchical way of defining a polity’s membership, because the domain of activity that qualifies as participating in the polity’s public life is highly restricted. I argue that Black American abolitionist Frederick Douglass advances a radically inclusive conception of republican citizenship by articulating a deeply capacious account of what it means to participate in the public life of the polity. On Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship, what it means to contribute to the polity, and thereby be a citizen, is to act in ways that contest and shape what the polity values. We contest and shape what the polity values not only through public discourse traditionally conceived or grand political acts like revolt, but also through quotidian forms of social interaction. In his pre-American Civil War political thought, Douglass deployed his radically inclusive account of republican citizenship as the conceptual foundation of his stance that enslaved and nominally free Black Americans were already, in the 1850s, American citizens whom the polity ought to acknowledge as such. The everyday resistance in which enslaved Black Americans engaged—their plantation politics—is, for Douglass, a paradigmatic type of citizenship-constituting activity, because it involves modes of collaboration and confrontation that enact a recognition of mutual vulnerability and embody the assertion that one matters. Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship offers a normative framework for emancipatory struggles that strive to secure meaningful membership for the marginalized through the transformation of unjust polities.
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634941.398938
This paper discusses the role of data within scientific reasoning and as evidence for theoretical claims, arguing for the idea that data can yield theoretically grounded models and be inferred, predicted, or explained from/by such models. Contrary to Bogen and Woodward's skepticism regarding the feasibility and epistemic relevance of data-to-theory and theory-to-data inferences, we draw upon scientific artificial intelligence literature to advocate that: a) many models are routinely inferred and predicted from the data and routinely used to infer and predict data: b) such models can, at least in some contexts, play the role of theoretical device.
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634964.398949
We argue that there are neither scientific nor social reasons to require gathering ethno-racial data, as defined in the US legal regulations if researchers have no prior hypotheses as to how to connect this type of categorisation of human participants of clinical trials with any mechanisms that could explain alleged interracial health differences and guide treatment choice. Although we agree with the normative perspective embedded in the calls for the fair selection of participants for biomedical research, we demonstrate that current attempts to provide and elucidate the criteria for the fair selection of participants, in particular, taking into account ethno-racial categories, overlook important epistemic and normative challenges to implement the results of such race-sorting requirements. We discuss existing arguments for and against gathering ethno-racial statistics for biomedical research and present a new one that refers to the assumption that prediction is epistemically superior to accommodation. We also underline the importance of closer interaction between research ethics and the methodology of biomedicine in the case of population stratifications for medical research, which requires weighing non-epistemic values with methodological constraints.
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634988.398959
In this paper we present novel conceptions of identity arising in and motivated by a recently emerged branch of mathematical logic, namely, Homotopy Type theory (HoTT). We consider an established 2013 version of HoTT as well as its more recent generalised version called Directed HoTT or Directed Type theory (DTT), which at the time of writing remains a work in progress. In HoTT, and in particular in DTT, identity is not just a relation but a mathematical structure which admits for an interpretation in terms of Homotopy theory (directed Homotopy theory in the case of DTT), which in its turn is supported by common intuitions concerning identity of material objects through time, change and locomotion. The DDT-based conception of identity presented in the paper is non-symmetric: here identity is “directed” or has a “sense”. We compare the HoTT-based conceptions of identity with standard theories of identity based on the Classical Predicate calculus, and show how the HoTT-based identity helps to treat traditional logical and philosophical problems related to identity and time. In the concluding part of the paper we explore some ontological implications of the HoTT-based identity and show how HoTT and DTT can serve for designing formal process ontologies. The paper is self-contained and comprises expositions and informal explanations of all relevant philosophical, logical and mathematical contents.
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635015.398968
In 2016 Vladimir Voevodsky sent the author an email message where he explained his conception of mathematical structure using a historical example borrowed from the Commentary to the First Book of Euclid’s Elements by Proclus; this message was followed by a short exchange where Vladimir clarified his conception of structure. In this Chapter Voevodsky’s historical example is explained in detail, and the relevance of Voevodsky’s conception of mathematical structure in Homotopy Type theory is shown. The Chapter also discusses some related historical and philosophical issues risen by Vladimir Voevodsky in the same email exchange. This includes a comparison of Voevodsky’s conception of mathematical structure and other conceptions of structure found in the current literature. The concluding part of this Chapter includes relevant fragments of the email exchange between Vladimir Voevodsky and the author.
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641714.398977
Suppose Bob paid professional killer Alice to kill him on a day of her choice in the next month. Next day, Bob changes his mind, but has no way of contacting Alice. A week later, Bob sees Alice in the distance aiming a rifle at him. …
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653528.398987
A couple of years ago I showed how to construct hyperreal finitely additive probabilities on infinite sets that satisfy certain symmetry constraints and have the Bayesian regularity property that every possible outcome has non-zero probability. …
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653529.398997
I’ve finished my two-year leave at OpenAI, and returned to being just a normal (normal?) professor, quantum complexity theorist, and blogger. Despite the huge drama at OpenAI that coincided with my time there, including the departures of most of the people I worked with in the former Superalignment team, I’m incredibly grateful to OpenAI for giving me an opportunity to learn and witness history, and even to contribute here and there, though I wish I could’ve done more. …
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657182.399012
The evolutionary relationships between species are typically represented in the biological literature by rooted phylogenetic trees. However, a tree fails to capture ancestral reticulate processes, such as the formation of hybrid species or lateral gene transfer events between lineages, and so the history of life is more accurately described by a rooted phylogenetic network. Nevertheless, phylogenetic networks may be complex and difficult to interpret, so biologists sometimes prefer a tree that summarises the central tree-like trend of evolution. In this paper, we formally investigate methods for transforming an arbitrary phylogenetic network into a tree (on the same set of leaves) and ask which ones (if any) satisfy a simple consistency condition. This consistency condition states that if we add additional species into a phylogenetic network (without otherwise changing this original network) then transforming this enlarged network into a rooted phylogenetic tree induces the same tree on the original set of species as transforming the original network. We show that the LSA (lowest stable ancestor) tree method satisfies this consistency property, whereas several other commonly used methods (and a new one we introduce) do not. We also briefly consider transformations that convert arbitrary phylogenetic networks to another simpler class, namely normal networks.
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667634.399023
D espite F. A. Hayek s apparent rejection of the very idea of social justice, this essay develops a theory of social justice from entirely Hayekian components. Hayek recognizes two concepts of social justice—local and holistic. Local social justice identifies principles that can be used to judge the justice of certain specific economic outcomes. Hayek rejects this conception of social justice on the grounds that specific economic outcomes are not created by moral agents, such that social justice judgments are a category mistake, like the idea of a “moral stone” (Hayek 1978, 78). But if one understands social justice as the principles that ought to govern the social order as a whole, as John Rawls ([1971] 1999) did, then Hayek is on board. Hayek agrees with Rawls that we cannot use contractarian principles to evaluate particular economic outcomes, and he supports Rawls’s attempt to identify the general principles that should govern social systems (Hayek 1978, 100).
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667655.399033
This essay explores and criticizes Matteo Bonotti’s argument that parties and partisans in a publicly justified polity should appeal primarily, if not exclusively, to accessible justificatory reasons to fulfill their political duties. I argue that political parties should only support coercive policies if they rationally believe that the coercive law or policy in question can be publicly justified to those subject to the law or policy in terms of their own private—specifically intelligible—reasons. I then explore four practical differences between our two approaches. In contrast to Bonotti’s accessible reasons approach, the intelligibility approach (1) facilitates the provision of assurance between citizens and political officials, (2) requires that parties and partisans support fewer coercive policies, (3) allows more exemptions from generally applicable laws, and (4) facilitates logrolling and alliance formation.
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667711.399043
Catholic integralism claims that governments must secure the earthly and heavenly common good. God authorizes two powers to do so. The state governs in matters temporal, the Catholic Church in matters spiritual. Since the church has the nobler end of salvation, it may direct the state to help enforce church law. The integralist adopts two seemingly conflicting norms of justice: (a) coercion into the faith is always unjust, but (b) coercion to keep the faith is just. But if religious coercion is wrong at the start of the Christian life, why is it permitted after that? The integralist answer is baptism. Baptism serves as a normative transformer: it transforms religious coercion from unjust to just. My thesis is that baptism fails as a normative transformer. I critique Thomas Aquinas’ approach to this question and then adapt gratitude, associative, and natural duty theories of political obligation to repair his argument. These strategies fail.
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693149.39906
In case it’s not obvious, I’m a vain man. I can’t remember a time I wasn’t. Whenever anyone tells me, “Your advice improved my life,” I’m all ears. I’m most thrilled, of course, by the hundreds of people who declare that I convinced them to have more kids. …
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725454.399094
by a factor of at least sixteen. She also presents a positive thesis, namely that the Great Fact occurred when Western societies began toascribe dignityand liberty tothe bourgeoisie by changing their rhetoric. I argue that McCloskey’s positive thesis can benefit from an illuminating moral psychological distinction between what Peter Strawson has called “social morality” and “individual ideal” or what I shall refer to as moral rules and personal ideals or aspirations. McCloskey’s positive thesis can be mapped onto these two categories and thus separated into two distinct theses: the Imperatival Thesis and the Aspirational Thesis. The former holds that societies that stopped blaming and ostracizing the bourgeoisie for their characteristic activities were the first to develop, whereas the latter holds that societies stopped ostracizing the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie started innovating because they took on new aspirations and ideals. These twin theses help to explain how the ideas of dignity and rhetoric operate in Bourgeois Dignity.
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725567.399111
Gerald Gaus was one of the leading liberal theorists of the early twenty-first century. He defended liberal order based on its unique capacity to handle deep disagreement and pressed liberals toward a principled openness to pluralism and diversity. Yet, almost everything written about Gaus’s work is evaluative: determining whether his arguments succeed or fail. This essay breaks from the pack by outlining underlying themes in his work. I argue that Gaus explored how to sustain moral relations between persons in light of the institutional threats of social control, evaluative pluralism, and institutional complexity, and the psychological threat of acting solely from what I shall call the mere first-personal point of view. The idea of public justification is the key to sustaining moral relations in the face of such challenges. When a society’s moral and political rules are justified to each person, moral relations survive the threats they face.
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725597.399126
This essay defends Catholic integralism. Integralists propose that governments exist to secure the common good: temporal and spiritual. God authorizes two powers to govern humankind: the state governs in matters temporal, the church in matters spiritual. When their missions intersect, the church is sovereign owing to its nobler purpose. Christian states must make their authority available to the church to secure religious ends. Despite rejecting integralism, most Catholic political philosophers are perfectionist: states exist to promote the authentic individual and common good. These natural law perfectionists agree that states exist to promote natural goods: goods, such as health and friendship, that anyone can see as such through the use of reason. Yet in contrast with integralism, they deny that states should promote supernatural goods: goods, such as faith and hope, that we only grasp through revelation. Most Catholic perfectionists treat natural and supernatural goods asymmetrically. Integralists reject the asymmetry. God authorizes the church to promote supernatural goods, and the church may direct the state to advance its mission. On this basis, I argue that integralists can mount a powerful philosophical argument against standard natural law perfectionism—the symmetry argument. It claims that natural law perfectionists cannot justify their asymmetric treatment of goodness. Integralism, in contrast, treats the good symmetrically.
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735373.399136
This paper offers a new theory of donkey anaphora that does not include any dynamic component. Even if the approach is not dynamic, it retains a key aspect of the dynamic tradition, namely the view that information states include not just factual information about the world, but also information about discourse referents, e.g., variables. It also makes crucial use of plural assignment functions (sets of standard assigments, cf. van der Berg 1996; Nouwen 2003; Brasoveanu 2008). Unlike dynamic approaches, sentences are evaluated as true or false relative to a pair (w, G), where w is a possible world and G is a plural assignment, with no reference to contexts or information states, and compositional semantics does not refer in any way to context update. In order to predict adequate meanings and felicity conditions, I combine two ingredients that have been used to account for presupposition projection, namely Trivalence (Peters 1979; Beaver and Krahmer 2001) and Schlenker’s Transparency Principle(Schlenker 2007, 2008).
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750348.399145
In a previous paper, we have shown that an ontology of quantum mechanics in terms of states and events with internal phenomenal aspects, that is, a form of panprotopsychism, is well suited to explaining the phenomenal aspects of consciousness. We have proved there that the palette and grain combination problems of panpsychism and panprotopsychism arise from implicit hypotheses based on classical physics about supervenience that are inappropriate at the quantum level, where an exponential number of emergent properties and states arise. In this article, we address what is probably the first and most important combination problem of panpsychism: the subject-summing problem originally posed by William James. We begin by identifying the physical counterparts of the subjects of experience within the quantum panprotopsychic approach presented in that article. To achieve this, we turn to the notion of subject of experience inspired by the idea of prehension proposed by Whitehead and show that this notion can be adapted to the quantum ontology of objects and events. Due to the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics and its causal openness, this ontology also seems to be suitable for the analysis of the remaining aspects of the structure combination problem, which shows how the structuration of consciousness could have evolved from primitive animals to humans. The analysis imposes conditions on possible implementations of quantum cognition mechanisms in the brain and suggests new problems and strategies to address them. In particular, with regard to the structuring of experiences in animals with different degrees of evolutionary development.
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750385.399155
This paper explores some implications of the account of explanation defended in Woodward, 2003 (hereafter the w-account) for issues having to do with the role of truth or, more precisely, truthlike commitments in successful explanation. I will say more about what is meant by "truthlike" below, but I have in mind features like being a good approximation or being part of an “effective" theory in the sense in which physicists use that notion . I will also discuss some connections between the w-account, inference to the best explanation and scientific realism. Here one of my main concerns be to find a version of realism that fits well with the w-account. Or, to approach matters from the other direction, I will ask, given a plausible version of realism, what account of explanation fits best with it? And-- not to leave the reader in suspense-- my conclusion will be that the w-account and a version of structural realism are the positions that fit together best and provide the most accurate description of scientific practice.
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750409.399164
Although fundamental arguments have been presented to support the value-laden nature of all scientific research, they appear to be difficult to apply to at least some cases of basic research in physics. I explain why this is the case. I argue that basic research in physics is, in a very specific sense, often value-laden to a lesser degree. To spell this out, I refer to the different signal-to-noise ratios that can be achieved in different fields of research. I also argue that having a very low degree of value-ladenness in the very specific sense that I identify does not mean that the research in question is not value-laden at all.
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783337.399175
In The Order of Public Reason, Gerald Gaus uses Hayekian insights to give a contractarian justification for the specific social rules the rules that comprise the social order of a free people. But in doing so, Gaus inadvertently endorses a kind of skepticism about our ability to justify the institutions that comprise our social order as a whole. The disadvantage of a political theory so pervasively skeptical is that, while contractors can arrive at a series of specific solutions to their social problems, they have no way to assure themselves that their moral nature and their moral practices as a whole are sufficiently sound that the rules they endorse are genuinely morally binding. I argue that this problem can be solved in political practice through the adoption of a civil religion. Civil religions provide narratives and social practices that assure members of free orders that their regimes are good or justified on the whole. In this way, we can introduce the idea of civil religion into contractarian political theory as a social technology for sustaining a free social order.