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176663.415369
Some philosophers hold that unstructured groups themselves, as opposed to the members of these groups, can have moral duties. There are different accounts of how such collective duties might be grounded in facts about individual duties of the group members. In this paper, I highlight and discuss some questions for these accounts that seem to warrant more exploration than they have received so far. First, if there is a collective duty to ϕ that is grounded in individual duties, how does ϕ-ing feature in the individual duties? The accounts that ground a collective duty to ϕ in individual duties specify these individual duties with reference to ϕ- ing. But if a collective duty to ϕ is grounded in individual duties, then, on pain of circularity, the individual duties cannot be specified in terms of a collective duty to ϕ. Second, are the individual duties that ground collective moral duties themselves also moral duties? Or are the individual duties, rather, rational duties? I will suggest that the individual duties should be classified neither as purely moral nor as purely rational, but rather as rational duties of moral agents. Finally, are the grounding individual duties perspective-dependent, i.e., do they depend on the epistemic situation of the members, as several philosophers have suggested? I argue that accounts of collective obligations should not commit themselves to an answer to this question, but rather leave the question to general ethical theories that do not focus on contexts of collective duties.
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176715.415711
| The boundary problem in normative democratic theory is the problem of who should be entitled to participate in which democratic decision-making. The boundary problem is at the heart of many pressing political issues, including voting rights of resident aliens in their host countries and of expats in their home countries, the legitimacy of border regimes, the justi!ability of global democracy, and the democratic representation of future generations. The two most popular answers to the boundary problem are the
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193817.415757
Wouldn’t it be great if Democrats prioritized a drastic increase in American productivity, thereby deprioritizing safetyism, wokeness, and redistribution? That’s definitely my view, so I’m delighted that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (henceforth KT) have written a whole book — Abundance sans subtitle — defending that position. …
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196783.415771
Very short summary: In this essay, I discuss Gerald Gaus’s argument about the possibility of moral reconciliation in diverse societies. Like Gaus, I use an agent-based model to explore the conditions under which convergence toward a single social rule happens. …
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198313.415783
Recent philosophical literature on the epistemology of measurement has relegated measurement uncertainty to a secondary issue, concerned with characterizing the quality of a measurement process or its product. To reveal the deeper epistemological significance of uncertainty, we articulate the problem of usefulness, which is concerned with the tension between the specificity of the conditions under which particular measurements are performed and the broader range of conditions in which measurement results are intended to be – and are – used. This is simultaneously an epistemological and a practical problem.
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283229.415808
Spears and Geruso’s After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People releases today! In Part 1 of my review, I explained why we should be worried about below-replacement global fertility and subsequent depopulation. …
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369670.415818
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My point is simple: knowledge is knowledge. Where it comes from doesn’t matter to its epistemic status. What matters is whether it deserves to be believed. The scientific revolution has provided a general approach – systematic inquiry into the independent evidential basis of claims (e.g. …
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456213.415828
David Suzuki is an 89-year-old Canadian geneticist, science broadcaster and environmental activist. In this interview he says some things that I’ve come to agree with. • ‘It’s too late’: David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost, iPolitics, 2 July 2025. …
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539566.415837
Apparently, Italy requires residents to secure a medical certificate before joining a gym, sports club, or other source of regular physical exercise. This is (very loosely) estimated to prevent a few deaths per year from sudden cardiac events but at a net cost of thousands of QALYs lost due to exercise deterrence. …
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628845.415847
How badly would it suck to die because a person who could have saved your life (along with the lives of four others tied to the train tracks beside you) preferred “allowing” to “doing”? A second was just about to save you when they realized that the side track—where just one person awaited as collateral damage—later loops back, turning the purportedly-collateral damage into an instrumental killing. …
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630265.415857
Scenarios and pathways, as defined and used in the “SSP-RCP scenario framework”, are key in last decade’s climate change research and in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In this framework, Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) consist of a limited set of alternative socioeconomic futures, that are both represented in short qualitative narratives and with quantitative projections of key drivers. One important use of the computationally derived SSP-scenarios is to do mitigation analysis and present a “manageable” set of options to decision-makers. However, all SSPs and derivatively SSP-scenarios in this framework assume a globally growing economy into 2100. This, in practice, amounts to a value-laden restriction of the space of solutions to be presented to decision-makers, falling short of IPCC’s general mandate of being “policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive”. Yet, the Global Economic Growth Assumption (GEGA) could be challenged and in practice is challenged by post-growth scholars.
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715369.415866
Very short summary: This essay provides an account in favor of a progressive consumption tax, in light of the efficiency and fairness issues that affect the more common progressive income tax. I argue that the progressive consumption tax not only avoids the standard incentive problem but also responds to Hayek’s critique of the unfairness of progressive taxation. …
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795369.415876
I’m a non-conformist, but not a reflexive contrarian. My chief goal is to enjoy every day of my life, and my non-conformism is only a means to that end. But what a means it is! By the power of non-conformism, I weasel out of hours of daily drudgery. …
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803035.415886
A common criticism of medicine is that there is too much focus on treating symptoms instead of patients. This criticism and its sentiment – among other factors – have motivated many ‘humanistic,’ ‘holistic,’ and ‘non-reductionist’ approaches to medicine including the biopsychosocial model, patient-centered medicine, ‘gentle’ medicine, and others. Much has been said detailing and defending these approaches. My aim here is not to further defend one or any of these. Rather, my aim is to better understand what is at the heart of the ‘common criticism,’ i.e., that treating symptoms – not patients – is bad. What does this mean? Are symptoms not something patients have? By treating symptoms, do clinicians not necessarily treat the patients that have them?
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974421.415896
It was a particularly cruel heckling. Ketel Marte, a star baseball player for the Arizona Diamondbacks, was brought to tears by a heckler who shouted derogatory comments about Marte’s late mother, Elpidia Valdez, who died in a car crash in 2017. …
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1062131.415905
Scientists decide to perform an experiment based on the expectation that their efforts will bear fruit. While assessing such expectations belongs to the everyday work of practicing scientists, we have a limited understanding of the epistemological principles underlying such assessments. Here I argue that we should delineate a “context of pursuit” for experiments. The rational pursuit of experiments, like the pursuit of theories, is governed by distinct epistemic and pragmatic considerations that concern epistemic gain, likelihood of success, and feasibility. A key question that arises is: what exactly is being evaluated when we assess experimental pursuits? I argue that, beyond the research questions an experiment aims to address, we must also assess the concrete experimental facilities and activities involved, because (1) there are often multiple ways to address a research question, (2) pursuitworthy experiments typically address a combination of research questions, and (3) experimental pursuitworthiness can be boosted by past experimental successes. My claims are supported by a look into ongoing debates about future particle colliders.
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1062179.415919
This article revisits Taurek’s famous question: Should the greater number be saved in situations of resource scarcity? At the heart of this debate lies a central issue in normative ethics—whether numerical superiority can constitute a moral pro tanto reason. Engaging with this question helps to illuminate core principles of normative theory. Welfarismmin presents a pro-number position. The article first outlines Taurek’s original argument. It then examines non-welfarist responses and explains why they remain unsatisfactory. Finally, it identifies the main shortcomings of the hybrid welfarismmin approach and suggests a possible alternative for more adequately addressing the Taurek problem.
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1135547.415931
Tarot is widely disdained as a way of finding things out. Critics claim it is bunk or—worse— a wretched scam. This disdain misunderstands both tarot and the activity of finding thing out. I argue that tarot is an excellent tool for inquiry. It initiates and structures percipient conversation and contemplation about important, challenging, and deep topics. It galvanises creative attention, especially towards inward-looking, introspective inquiry and openminded, collaborative inquiry with others. Tarot can cultivate virtues like epistemic playfulness and cognitive dexterity.
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1147139.415946
Very short summary: This is a two-part essay on the crisis of contemporary liberalism. I argue that this crisis reflects the growing influence of a conception of the political as a praxis that is beyond human rationality and reason. …
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1314800.415973
It is commonplace to note that libertarians about free will face a compatibility problem of their own. Indeterminism appears to be at odds with freedom rather than a condition for it, since it injects only chance or luck into the etiology of action. This problem, the luck problem, is widely regarded as unique to libertarians. However, this is false. Compatibilists face the same luck problem that animates libertarians. In this paper, I set out what the luck problem is and why compatibilists face it too. I then show that the most natural resources one might think a compatibilist should use to solve the problem are insufficient. I close with a proposal for compatibilists.
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1414543.415998
Imagine living in a society where most people (at least in the privileged classes) regularly participate in perpetuating a moral atrocity—slavery, say, or factory farming; any practice you’re deeply appalled by will do. …
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1566210.416009
For Raz, “the fundamental point about authority [is that] it removes the decision from one person to another.” It is a good question why you should allow someone else to decide for you what you are to do. One plausible response is to observe that, under the right conditions, by allowing someone else to decide for you, you are more likely to do what you ought to do anyway than if you decide what to do for yourself. That, in a nutshell, is the diagnosis of and solution to the problem of authority that Raz offers us. I agree that Raz raises an important question, and I shall not dispute his answer. I do maintain that there is a narrower and perhaps less tractable problem with “authority” that Raz misses— a problem about obedience. My aim is to bring this concern into clearer focus.
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1743885.416019
Political meritocracy is the idea that political institutions should aim to empower those people who are particularly well-suited to rule. This article surveys recent literature in democratic theory that argues on behalf of institutional arrangements that aim to realize the ideal of political meritocracy. We detail two prominent families of meritocratic proposals: nondemocratic meritocracy and weighted voting. We then describe and briefly evaluate five potentially important criticisms of political meritocracy related to the coherence of merit as an ideal, the demographic objection, rent-seeking, political inequality, and social peace. We also consider the key ways in which existing electoral democracies create spaces for institutionally meritocratic forms. Finally, we highlight the importance of exploring institutional innovations that allow democracies to effectively incorporate expertise without, at the same time, becoming vulnerable to the criticisms of political meritocracy that we discuss.
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1981983.416031
I was delighted that Good Thoughts passed 5,000 (mostly free) subscribers a few months ago: that’s at least 4,800 more people interested in moral philosophy than I was expecting! (And it continues to grow at ~100 new subscribers each month, with no sign of a cap as yet.) …
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2011272.416041
Have the points in Stephen Senn’s guest post fully come across? Responding to comments from diverse directions has given Senn a lot of work, for which I’m very grateful. But I say we should not leave off the topic just yet. …
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2071320.416052
Most recent theorists take social norms to arise from certain attitudes, such as expectations on others, perhaps along with conforming practices. Challenging this view, we argue that social norms are instead grounded in a social norming process: an (often non-verbal) social communication process that institutes or ‘makes’ the norm. We present different versions of a process-based account of social norms and social normativity. The process-based view brings social norms closer to legal norms, by taking social norms to arise through ‘expressive acts’, just as some laws and contracts arise through acts of voting or signing, not through mere attitudes. Social norms should be distinguished from social pressures, which often co-exist with social norms but are caused by attitudes.
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2078673.416063
I’m so frustrated by low-decoupling academics who refuse to acknowledge basic evaluative facts (like that, all else equal, it’s better to have smarter, healthier children) because they’re terrified of what they—mistakenly!—imagine to be the implications. …
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2148618.416073
There is large consensus across clinical research that feelings of worthlessness (FOW) are one of the highest risk factors for a patient’s depression becoming suicidal. In this paper, I attempt to make sense of this empirical relationship from a phenomenological perspective. I propose that there are purely reactive and pervasive forms of FOW. Subsequently, I present a phenomenological demonstration for how and why it is pervasive FOW that pose a direct suicidal threat. I then outline criteria, contingent upon empirical verification, by which clinicians can more confidently identify when a patient’s FOW place them at high risk of suicide.
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2275671.416083
A confession: at any given moment, I am liable to know the amount of money in my savings account, my uber rating, my Wordle scores from the last five days, and my h-index on Google scholar. For at least three months after publication, and probably more like six, I would be able to tell you the goodreads rating of my latest book. …
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2366588.416092
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.