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81500.231534
What makes a group an epistemic and moral agent? In this article, I argue the answer is: its decision-making procedures. The article begins by describing and motivating three popular positions in theories of group agency: functionalism, summativism, and organizationism. It explains how these three positions play out within Jessica Brown’s recent book Groups As Epistemic and Moral Agents. I explain how a focus on decision-making procedures can clarify and unify Brown’s account. Ultimately, the article proposes ‘proceduralism’ about group agency: we should figure out whether a group is an epistemic and moral agent by asking what decision-making procedures it has; group decision- making procedures are necessary and sufficient for group agency; and the group decision-making procedures explain group agency.
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209587.231784
In this contribution I will start in Section 2 by introducing epistemic competence. I will stress that like Bussmann, I regard it as fundamental that people in a democratic society possess epistemic competence and that it would be important to teach epistemic competence at school. In Section 3 I show that even for countries where the epidemiological situation is roughly the same or very similar such as Austria, Germany and Switzerland, there are often very different recommendations concerning vaccinations. In Section 4 I will identify and discuss five rational reasons that can alone or in combination lead to different vaccine recommendations. Finally, section 5 will reflect on epistemic competence and vaccine recommendations. In particular, I will point out that different vaccine recommendations are an example where students can develop epistemic competence. Further, I will stress that different vaccine recommendations are an example where epistemic competence among the general population is desirable; if it is not present, this can lead to science scepticism and mistrust about science.
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298955.231806
What are the conditions under which an agent is morally responsible
for some action that they have performed? Put another way, and
acknowledging that this rephrasing might be contentious, what are the
conditions under which it would be appropriate to praise or blame the
agent for something they have done? (Strawson 1962; Wallace 1998;
Coates & Tognazzini 2013). An account of moral responsibility
supplies answers to these questions. (See the entry on
“Moral Responsibility” ). Most theorists agree that moral responsibility requires satisfying at
least two core conditions. The first is a control condition;
the agent must have the right sort of control over what they do
(Dennett 1984; Fischer & Ravizza 1998; Shepherd 2014).
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298975.231822
Experimental jurisprudence (or “X-Jur”) addresses
questions of jurisprudence or legal philosophy by complementing
traditional philosophical analysis with empirical methods. Often those
methods include survey experiments that examine laypeople’s
intuitions about legal-philosophical thought experiments and concepts
of legal significance (e.g., causation, intent, reasonableness). Other
times, experimental jurisprudence focuses on the cognitive processes
underlying legal reasoning. This entry reviews representative work in
experimental jurisprudence and discusses major objections and
critiques.
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346870.231836
Very short summary: This essay argues that local governance is less prone to succumb to populism because, compared to national politics, citizens are more empowered and monitoring of elected officials is easier. …
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377978.231848
Let’s say we want to identify effective strategies for multi-agent games like the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma or more complex environments (like the kind of environments in Melting Pot). Then tournaments are a natural approach: let people submit strategies, and then play all these strategies against each other in a round-robin tournament. …
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413696.231864
Greetings from Kyoto, Japan! Here’s an excerpt from Unbeatable’s last chapter. [from Chapter 6: Four Candid Conversations]
This is the dialogue chapter, where I argue against a wide variety of fictional archetypes. …
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465646.231878
Guess I’m A Rationalist Now
A week ago I attended LessOnline, a rationalist blogging conference featuring many people I’ve known for years—Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Zvi Mowshowitz, Sarah Constantin, Carl Feynman—as well as people I’ve known only online and was delighted to meet in person, like Joe Carlsmith and Jacob Falkovich and Daniel Reeves. …
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498077.23189
In the “information age”, the world’s knowledge is at everybody’s fingertips: all one needs is a device connected to the internet. As information becomes more accessible than ever, optimists expected a corresponding rise in scientific education and knowledge—with the passing of time, superstitions and misconceptions that fly in the face of scientific consensus would be destined to disappear. Yet, as we know all too well, this reassuring prophecy did not come true. Scientifically disproven misconceptions are still alive and well, and continue to be fairly widespread among digital citizens.
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578788.231905
The World Bank classifies 40 countries as 'small states' on the basis of having a population smaller than 1.5 million (though, oddly, this list excludes some rich tiny countries like Luxembourg and Estonia). …
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609331.231918
Millstein’s comprehensive but accessible work brings back to the present the importance of Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic”. It functions as much more than a revisiting of his most famous work, A Sand County Almanac, but opens modern conservationism to the light of Leopold’s ideas and critique.
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718052.231931
The neurodiversity movement grew out of the autism community but is now being applied to many neurological types, from dyslexia to schizophrenia. The resulting neurodiversity paradigm maintains that these neurological differences are normal variations in the human species, like race and sexual orientation, which should be valued and accommodated, not “fixed” or eliminated. Yet some clear-eyed individuals view their brain differences as deficits and would continue to seek treatment in the absence of discrimination or lack of accommodation. I argue that fully appreciating cognitive diversity requires more nuanced normative claims that respect individual differences and fluid circumstances. Although analogies to minority statuses can be useful, variations in personality traits provide a more flexible and inclusive model for neurodivergence. Despite ultimately rejecting the biodiversity metaphor, a more nuanced neuro-diversity paradigm emphasizing our shared humanity can promote compassion, respect, and support for all.
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740361.231944
My paper ‘Preference and Prevention: A New Paradox of Deontology’ has just been published in the inaugural issue of the open access journal Free & Equal.1 As is often the case with ambitious papers, finding a good home took several years and tens of thousands of words of revisions and responses to referees, but I’m very happy with how it turned out in the end!2 I’m especially delighted that it’s open access—and I hope my paper helps contribute to a good start for Free & Equal.3
Overview
The paper undertakes three main tasks. …
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902758.231957
This article offers a hybrid account of regulatory kinds and subjective fit to explain why the oft-invoked analogy between gender transition and so-called race transition fails both conceptually and normatively. The argument—recently circulated in popular commentary and endorsed by figures such as Richard Dawkins—suggests that if gender transition is legitimate on the basis of social construction, then racial transition should be equally so. Yet since racial transition is generally regarded as illegitimate, the analogy concludes that gender transition must be suspect. I argue that this inference rests on a category error: it conflates social construction with norm-governed intelligibility.
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902824.231969
This article analyzes some of the methodological tensions that can be observed in the regulation of science and technology, and that often manifest themselves as controversies. We offer a three-way classification of such tensions. The latter can arise from: 1) external (non-cognitive) factors that are specific to a particular regulation; 2) external (non-cognitive) factors of wider societal importance that are not related to any particular regulatory process; and 3) internal (non-cognitive, as well as cognitive) factors related to the cognitive, as well as practical limitations of a particular scientific methodology in the context of regulatory decision making. We analyze case studies of regulation of, among other, pharmaceuticals, chemical products, health claims on foods, as well as genetically modified organisms. The analysis shows that most often such methodological tensions are driven, directly or indirectly, by different stances with respect to non-cognitive factors that underlie the fundamental choices of methods and standards, and therefore the data that underpin regulatory decisions. Our paper makes clear an important feature of regulatory science: cognitive factors (like improved scientific data or accepted best practices), that in academic science facilitate the resolution of debates, in regulatory science do not suffice for achieving closure with respect to such tensions. Any attempt at closure has to deal primarily with the relevant non-cognitive factors.
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1066770.231983
Our adversarial system of international relations poses substantial risks of violent catastrophe and impedes morally urgent initiatives and reform collaborations. The domestic politics of more evolved societies provide guidance toward a better world governed by just rules, which ensure that basic human needs are met, inequalities constrained, and weapons and wealth marginalized as tools for influencing political and judicial outcomes. Impartial administration, adjudication, and enforcement of just rules require a strong normative expectation on officials and citizens to fully subordinate their personal and national loyalties to their shared commitment to the just and fair functioning of the global order. As we have fought nepotism within states, we must fight nepotism on behalf of states to overcome humanity’s great common challenges. To moralize international relations, states can plausibly begin with reforming the world economy toward ending severe poverty, thereby building the trust and respect needed for more difficult reforms.
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1067082.231996
I argue that moral dialogue concerning an agent’s standing to blame facilitates moral understanding about the purported wrongdoing that her blame targets. Challenges to a blamer’s standing serve a communicative function: they initiate dialogue or reflection meant to align the moral understanding of the blamer and challenger. On standard accounts of standing to blame, challenges to standing facilitate shared moral understanding about the blamer herself: it matters per se whether the blamer has a stake in the purported wrongdoing at issue, is blaming hypocritically, or is complicit in the wrongdoing at issue. In contrast, I argue that three widely recognized conditions on standing to blame—the business, non-hypocrisy, and non-complicity conditions—serve as epistemically tractable proxies through which we evaluate the accuracy and proportionality of blame. Standing matters because, and to the extent that, it indirectly informs our understanding of the purported wrongdoing that an act of blaming targets.
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1104919.232022
A general challenge in life is how to avoid being duped or exploited by clever-sounding but ultimately facile reasoning. One thing’s for sure, you don’t want to internalize the following norm:
(Easy Dupe): Whenever you hear an argument for doing X, and you can’t immediately refute it, you are thereby rationally committed to doing X. …
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1191173.232035
|A University Occupation in The Netherlands - via de Volkskrant|
Here is my best effort to reconstruct the reasoning behind these occupations. Premise 1. The Israeli government is doing terrible things in Gaza and should stop
P2. …
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1289873.232049
My daughter, S, who is five, has a special stuffed unicorn who she received for her third Christmas. Once white, she is now gray: the color of love—and drool. Once replete with a magnificent mane of pale pink yarn, she now boasts a tangled, grizzled, dishwater-colored ‘do. …
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1364257.232061
It can be convenient to personify moral theories, attributing to them the attitudes that would be fitting if the theory in question were true: “(Token-monistic) utilitarianism treats individuals as fungible mere means to promoting the aggregate good.” “Kantianism cares more about avoiding white lies than about saving the life that’s under threat from the murderer at the door.”
If a theory has false implications about what attitudes of care or concern are actually morally fitting, then the theory is false. …
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1411913.232074
Suppose that believing that your cancer will probably be cured would improve your chances of survival and your quality of life. Or suppose that believing that your son committed a violent crime would cause you and your relationship with him serious harm. Are practical considerations like these normative reasons for and against these beliefs? That is, do these considerations genuinely count in favor of and against having these respective beliefs in the sense that they bear on what you really ought to believe? That’s the question at the heart of the pragmatism-anti-pragmatism debate: pragmatists say, “yes,” while anti-pragmatists say, “no.” According to the anti-pragmatist, the only normative reasons for or against belief are epistemic considerations, which are those that have to do with believing the truth and avoiding error. For example, the anti-pragmatist insists that, if the evidence suggests that your cancer will probably not be cured and that your son committed a violent crime, these evidential considerations are reasons for believing these things, which bear on whether you ought to believe them; the fact that believing these things would be good or bad for you is entirely irrelevant to whether you ought to believe them.
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1422730.23209
How ought scarce health research resources be allocated, where health research spans “basic”, translational, clinical, health systems and public health research? In this paper I first outline a previously suggested answer to this question: the “fair-share principle” stipulates that total health research funding ought to be allocated in direct proportion with suffering caused by each disease. Second, I highlight a variety of problems the fair-share principle faces. The principle is inattentive to problems of aggregation and distribution of harms incurred from disease and benefits accrued from research, and neglects considerations of cost-effectiveness. Moreover, the principle fails to recognise that using Global Burden of Disease Study estimates as proxies for “suffering” underdetermines health research resource allocation. Importantly, in drawing on these estimates, which are disease-centric and only take “proximal” causes of health loss into account, the fair-share principle disregards the social determinants of health. Along with them, the principle ignores public health research, which often focusses on “distal” causes of health loss to improve population health and reduce health inequalities. Following the principle therefore leads to inequitable priority-setting. I conclude that despite relatively widespread appeals to it, the fair-share principle is not an ideal to aim for during priority-setting.
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1528972.232107
In the early 1830s, Black abolitionist Maria Stewart articulated a republican politics suited to the political condition of Black Americans in the antebellum United States. She did so by reimagining the core republican concepts of domination and civic virtue. Stewart argued that Black Americans, both enslaved and nominally free, were reduced by the white-dominated polity to a position of servitude: as merely fit to serve the good of the white Americans who dominated them and lacking any claim upon the polity’s common good themselves. At the same time, Stewart drew a nuanced distinction between servitude and service that cast Black mothers as exemplars of republican virtue, engaged in social reproductive labor that supported the common good of Black Americans as a people, in which Black mothers themselves partook. Furthermore, Stewart emphasized the liberatory power of partial sympathy- - fellow feeling among the dominated-- as a foundation for racialized civic virtue and solidarity organized around the common good of Black Americans as a people. Stewart’s is a republican politics in which the dominated struggle for their common good in the face of a polity that denies them a claim upon its own.
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1537312.232125
PEA Soup is pleased to introduce this month’s Ethics discussion, featuring David Sobel and Steven Wall’s paper ‘The Subjective/Objective Distinction in Well-Being‘ with a précis by Chris Heathwood. Précis and commentary on Sobel and Wall, “The Subjective/Objective Distinction in Well- Being” (Ethics, 2025) for PEA Soup ‘Ethics discussion’
Chris Heathwood May 26, 2025
Précis
Theories of well-being aim to identify those things that are basically or fundamentally good for subjects of well-being. …
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1595882.232141
In this critical response to John Doris's book "Character Trouble: Undisciplined Essays on Moral Agency and Personality," I analyze his updated take on character skepticism—the view that character traits have surprisingly limited influence on behavior across diverse situations—from a philosophy of science perspective. While I find his updated view compelling, I challenge his reliance on Cohen's conventional effect size benchmarks, arguing that qualitative labels for effect sizes obscure rather than clarify the practical significance of results. I propose that Doris's strongest argument lies in what I call the "disproportion thesis"—the view that personality variables exert less influence, and situational variables more influence, on behavior than our intuitive expectations would predict, creating a disconcerting gap. However, I argue that this thesis requires a more explicit quantification of those prior expectations. I conclude that character skepticism would benefit from formulations of its insights in a way that directly addresses character theorists' empirical commitments, avoiding vague benchmarks and contextualizing effects.
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1596115.232154
Social scripts specify the normal way for people to interact in certain situations. For example, a social script for a restaurant conversation explains why the world over, these conversations take a similar form. I develop an account of how social scripts can structure people’s sexual agency—sometimes, for the worse. I show how people’s sexual agency can be constrained by the presence of a linear social script for heteronormative sexual encounters that escalate in intimacy and terminate in male orgasm. By marking off certain sexual options as deviant, as breaches of social obligations, or as sanctionable, this script can combine with certain motivations and circumstances to explain why people voluntarily take part in sexual encounters that they would ideally like to avoid. I discuss how this situation could be ameliorated by alternative social scripts. For example, in conjunction with changes to ancillary social norms, people would be more empowered if they had social scripts for using safe words to end sexual encounters.
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1596135.232167
I offer a new interpretation of Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety in Being and Time as an account of the relationship between individual agents and the public normative practices of their communities. According to a prominent recent interpretation, Heidegger’s discussions of anxiety, death and the “call of conscience” together explain how we can respond to the norms of our practices as reasons and subject them to critical reflection. I argue that this is only part of the story. Anxiety is an occasion for Dasein to take responsibility for its ongoing activity of interpreting the possibilities for living and acting made available by the normative practices of its community, which is presupposed and overlooked from the perspective of everyday Dasein. Public normativity underdetermines Dasein’s conception of what it would mean to take up any of the possibilities available in its world as a way of living its own life.
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1596158.23218
This paper critically assesses Tommie Shelby’s Marxist definition of racism as a kind of ideology. I argue that institutional racism does not necessarily presuppose the Marxist idea of racist ideology, although it always presupposes the idea of race. The idea of race that is necessary to account for institutional racism is clarified. This paper has three main sections. I first analyze (in §1) the Marxist conception of ideology and explain its relationship to institutional racism. Marxist ideology is pejorative in that it entails cognitive distortion for those in the grip of ideology. Hence, Shelby’s Marxist conception of racism—“racism is racist ideology”—entails that racists are necessarily in the grip of cognitively distorted beliefs. Against this view, I argue (in §2) that it is possible to imagine a form of institutional racism that involves racial cognition but no cognitive distortion, hence no ideology in the pejorative sense. The theoretical portion of my paper (§3) analyzes Shelby’s analysis of race and draws attention to a significant theoretical problem (that I call “Shelby’s dilemma”) plaguing Shelby’s conception of racism.
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1596225.232193
Utilitarianism is often contrasted with egalitarianism, and sometimes rejected for its alleged neglect of egalitarian concerns. Utilitarians, it appears, do not care who gets what or how we relate to one another, so long as overall well-being is maximized. Egalitarians, on the other hand, prefer social arrangements in which the degree to which some have more than others, or that some are placed above others, is less. I argue, however, that utilitarianism should be considered an egalitarian theory. Real-world egalitarian movements aim to reduce inequalities in wealth and hierarchical social relations. Utilitarianism, I argue, shares these aims, and does so in similar way to contemporary egalitarian theories. If I am right, utilitarianism should not be rejected for failing to be egalitarian, but engaged with as an egalitarian theory—and utilitarians should take egalitarian concerns seriously.