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60698.920118
A light form of value realism is defended according to which objective properties of comparison objects make value comparisons true or false. If one object has such a better-making property and another lacks it, this is sufficient for the truth of a corresponding value comparison. However, better-making properties are only necessary and usually not sufficient parts of the justifications of value comparisons. The account is not reductionist; it remains consistent with error-theoretic positions and the view that there are normative facts.
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96195.920287
This is the summer break and I’m publishing old essays written when the audience of this newsletter was confidential. This post has been originally published April 5, 2022. In a previous post, I briefly mentioned the suggestion made by the philosopher Paul Weithman about a possible Rawlsian account of the populist vote. …
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162275.920298
Has the “abandon significance” movement in statistics trickled down into philosophy of science? A little bit. Nowadays (since the late 1990’s [i]), probabilistic inference and confirmation enter in philosophy by way of fields dubbed formal epistemology and Bayesian epistemology. …
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169377.920305
Ethics is easy when autonomy and beneficence converge: of course people should be allowed to do good things.1 And I’m enough of a Millian to think that in general, promoting human capacities and individual autonomy may be our most robustly secure route to creating a better future. …
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201666.920311
In this work I defend moral realism, the thesis that there are objective moral truths, by defending “epistemic realism.” Epistemic realism is the thesis that epistemic judgments, e.g., judgments that some belief is epistemically reasonable, or justified, or known or should be held, are sometimes true and made true by stance-independent epistemic facts and properties.
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236005.920317
This paper will investigate justice requirements that a pluralist stance on concepts of mental disorder should meet for use on a global scale. This is important given that different concepts of mental disorder are connected to particular interventions which may be more or less successful in specific contexts. While taking a broadly normative view on mental disorders, I will describe relevant concepts in a more fine grained manner, referring to their connections to particular approaches to biology, the self, or community. Drawing on research on epistemic injustice, I highlight the requirement that the set of multiple concepts be sufficiently flexible to enable the participation of those possessing relevant local knowledge. Using insights from health justice, I point out that the set of concepts should be conducive to distributive and procedural justice with regard to mental health and should support interventions on social determinants of health. These requirements apply to two dimensions of pluralism: regarding what concepts to include and how to relate them to one another. I conclude by explaining how an ontology of partial overlaps connected to a concept of health as metaphysically social can help address the challenges arising particularly regarding the latter dimension.
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258301.920322
With three books down—Parfit’s Ethics, An Introduction to Utilitarianism, and Questioning Beneficence1—I’m finally writing a monograph that sets out my own approach to ethical theory. With apologies to Nietzsche, I couldn’t resist the title: Beyond Right and Wrong. …
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429565.920328
According to subject-sensitive invariantism (SSI), whether S knows that p depends not only on the subject’s epistemic position (the presence of a true belief, sufficient warrant, etc.) but also on non-epistemic factors present in the subject’s situation; such factors are seen as “encroaching” on the subject’s epistemic standing. Not the only such non-epistemic factor but the most prominent one consists in the subject’s practical stakes. Stakes-based SSI holds that two subjects can be in the same epistemic position with respect to some proposition but with different stakes for the two subjects so that one of them might know the proposition while the other might fail to know it. It is remarkable that the notion of stakes has not been discussed much in great detail at all so far. This paper takes a closer look at this notion and proposes a detailed, new analysis. It turns out that there is more than one kind of stakes, namely event-stakes, knowledge-stakes and action-stakes. I discuss several issues that even plausible notions of stakes raise and propose solutions.
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432238.920337
This is the summer break and I’m publishing old essays written when the audience of this newsletter was confidential. This post has been originally published March 17, 2022. Spoiler Alert: the following lines reveal important details of the story told by Ken Follett in his novel Never. …
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549851.920343
In grand ceremony King Lear parcels out his kingdom, intending afterwards to retire, and “unburdened crawl toward death.” But who shall get what? For this he runs a royal bonus round, and the contestants, his daughters, must answer, “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” After insincere speeches from Goneril and Regan, Cordelia, his favorite, won’t play—“I love your Majesty according to my bond, no more nor less.” Furious, Lear disowns her: “I disclaim all my parental care...and as a stranger to my heart and me hold thee from this forever.” Soon the elder sisters, newly-empowered, strip Lear of his armed attendants and his dignity, in a delicious Shakespearean phrase:
Be then desired By her that else will take the thing she begs, A little to diquantity your train,
and Lear is left out in a storm, helpless, in the company of fools and madness. …
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618395.920349
TLDR: You’re unsure about something. Then it happens—and you think to yourself, “I kinda expected that.” Such hindsight bias is commonly derided as irrational. But any Bayesian who is (1) unsure of exactly what they think, and (2) trusts their own judgment should exhibit hindsight bias. …
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627664.920359
I led a session of a workshop, recently, on how to write a “trade book” in philosophy. I don’t love the phrase “trade book,” which I’ve put in protective scare-quotes. And I feel some discomfort, too, in being cast as an authority. …
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708858.920365
Whenever we communicate, we inevitably have to say one thing before another. This means introducing particularly subtle patterns of salience into our language. In this paper, I introduce ‘order-based salience patterns,’ referring to the ordering of syntactic contents where that ordering, pretheoretically, does not appear to be of consequence. For instance, if one is to describe a colourful scarf, it wouldn’t seem to matter if one were to say it is ‘orange and blue’ or ‘blue and orange.’ Despite their apparent triviality, I argue that order-based salience patterns tend to make the content positioned first more salient – in the sense of attention-grabbing – in a way that can have surprising normative implications. Giving relative salience to gender differences over similarities, for instance, can result in the activation of cognitively accessible beliefs about gender differences. Where those beliefs are epistemically and/or ethically flawed, we can critique the salience pattern that led to them, providing an instrumental way of evaluating those patterns. I suggest that order-based salience patterns can also be evaluated on constitutive grounds; talking about gender differences before similarities might constitute a subtle form of bias. Finally, I reflect on how the apparent triviality of order-based salience patterns in language gives them an insidious strength.
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709133.92037
In this paper I aim to undermine Stoic and Neo-Stoic readings of Benedict de Spinoza by examining the latter’s strong agreements with Epicurus (a notable opponent of the Stoics) on the nature and ethical role of pleasure in living a happy life. Ultimately, I show that Spinoza and Epicurus are committed to three central claims which the Stoics reject: (1) pleasure holds a necessary connection to healthy natural being, (2) pleasure manifests healthy being through positive changes in state and states of healthy being per se, and (3) pleasure is by nature good. The Stoics reject these three claims due to their views on pleasant sensations as preferred moral indifferents and passionate pleasures as diseases of the soul, views which Spinoza (due to the above-mentioned commitments) is strongly opposed to, thereby placing him (at least on the subject of pleasure) outside the realm of merely following or improving on Stoic doctrines. From this comparative analysis we also gain deeper insight into both Spinoza’s engagement with ancient Greek philosophy and the value of Epicureanism and Spinozism in helping us achieve and maintain happiness in the present day, particularly with respect to the benefits and harms of bodily and mental pleasures.
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758864.920376
It is an honor to have been asked to contribute a paper to a Festschrift for John Martin Fischer and it is a pleasure to do so. A paper to be included in a volume honoring a scholar need not, speaking strictly, address that scholar’s work, but I would not dream of contributing an essay to a book honoring John that was not about his work. That resolution, however, confronts me with a problem, for the only things worth anyone’s attention that I have to say about John’s contributions to philosophy pertain to his well-known and influential work on the relation (or lack thereof) between determinism and moral responsibility, and those things I have already said —and said as well as I shall ever be able to. The only solution to this problem seems to me to be to reply to one of John’s criticisms of my own work—which carries the danger of my own work, rather than John’s, becoming the topic of this chapter. My only excuse for risking this unseemly outcome is that when I tried to think of a topic for the essay that addressed John’s work and about which I had something to say that I had not already said, only this came to mind.
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771605.920382
Last month I was on the wonderful Joe Walker Podcast. You can watch the full video, or read the unabridged transcript. Joe handpicked the following highlights:
What did you learn about Japanese urbanism? …
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793694.920387
This is the summer break and I’m publishing old essays written when the audience of this newsletter was confidential. This post has been originally published March 16, 2022. This morning, I almost fell off from my chair (fortunately, I was in my bed) when I read an op-ed (gated, in French) from Cécile Philippe, head of the libertarian French think tank Molinari Institute. …
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1037074.920393
Sometimes, stakes are high. Plausible examples include:
Climate change could be very bad (and very likely will be significantly bad—well worth mitigating, even on relatively optimistic forecasts). As longtermists rightly point out, astronomical opportunity costs would make human extinction the worst thing ever, so it’s very well worth investing in reasonable precautions regarding AI, biosecurity, nuclear diplomacy, etc. …
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1087416.920398
Poverty has traditionally been conceived of as a state of deprivation. To be poor is to lack something essential to human flourishing. How that something is understood—in terms of welfare, resources, or capabilities—and how it is measured—in absolute terms or relative to a social standard—has been the subject of much debate within the development literature. In this paper, I put forward an account of poverty rooted in the philosophy of action. I argue that poverty essentially involves being in a context in which a reasonable agent’s future-directed agency is systemically undermined. Centering this dimension of poverty allows us to attend to aspects of poverty that are easily overlooked on existing accounts.
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1156975.920404
It’s hard to believe, with daily news of fevered disagreement and of actual fighting, but human beings excel at cooperation. We mostly trust each other to do our part. Thomas Hobbes wrote, in Leviathan, that the state of nature was a war of all against all, exited only when our ancestors signed a social contract, waived their rights to take what they could, and authorized a King’s enforcement of their pledge. …
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1224864.920409
Preliminary note: This essay is the last one before my summer break. The newsletter will not stop completely, though. See at the end of the post for more information. A couple of weeks ago, Eric Schliesser published an essay on Gerald Gaus’s criticism of Isaiah Berlin’s account of value pluralism. …
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1278878.920415
Imagination is often celebrated for its freedom. Hume, for example, famously claimed that nothing is more free than human imagination. Yet as expansive as imagination might be, its freedom is not entirely without bounds. In fact, even in the course of celebrating the freedom of imagination, Hume himself pointed to one limit: imagination “cannot exceed that original stock of ideas, furnished by the internal and external senses” (Hume 1748/1977: 31). On Hume’s view, the freedom of imagination consists in its “unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing” the ideas of the senses (Hume 1748/1977: 31). But even if Hume is right that imagination operates without limits on the material with which it is provided, when that material itself is impoverished, then so too is imagination.
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1632972.920422
Since French President Emmanuel Macron announced the dissolution of the Assemblée nationale (the French lower parliamentary chamber) in the wake of the large victory of the far-right in the European elections, a large majority of the French people have been living in anguish. …
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1758909.920428
I’m listening to In a Silent Way, the Miles Davis album that opened his electric period, but I’m not really listening. Also drawing my attention are reviews of all of his other albums, which I’m scanning as I contemplate which to listen to next. …
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1805369.920434
A curious feature of human nature is that we’re very psychologically invested in seeing ourselves as good. Teaching applied ethics, it’s striking how resistant students often are to any hint of moral self-critique. …
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1839781.920439
Two things are common ground in books that purport to teach you how to be a stand-up comic. No-one can be taught to be funny, only how to turn their innate comedic sensibility into art.1
On the received model, the spigot of humour is turned on or off by the time one hits the age of reason. …
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1907253.920444
Parts 3-4 of this series developed and defended a reason-responsive consequentialist theory of rational inquiry for bounded agents. The next order of business is to apply this theory to shed light on bounded rationality, the Standard Picture, and the epistemology of inquiry. …
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2001037.920454
Yesterday’s post developed a reason-responsive consequentialist theory of rational inquiry for bounded agents. Today’s post gives three arguments for that view. 2. The argument from minimal criteria
A good theory of bounded rationality should satisfy at least three minimal criteria. …
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2068512.92046
I want to begin by discussing the Latin word norma. And I will! But first: I am brought up short by the fact that Cavell would not begin in that way. As evidence of this: when Cavell argues with Benson Mates about the use of English “voluntary,” he says nothing about the Latin voluntarius. Long before English was a language, however, voluntarius was used in relevant ways. Cicero, for example, rejects Plato’s assertion that philosophers, loving only truth, must be perfectly just: For [while] they attain one kind of justice, as they harm no one by inflicting injury, they fall into another; for, impeded by their zeal for learning, they desert those who ought to be protected.
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2084780.920466
What is Left of the Invisible Hand? On the Legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment
My wife and I are back from a short trip to Scotland. We arrived at Edinburgh and then went to the North in the region of Glencoe, had a boat ride on the Loch Ness, and ended up at the seaside at Nairn. …