1. 13833.797824
    We examine the relationship between scientific knowledge and the legal system with a focus on the exclusion of expert testimony from trial as ruled by the Daubert standard in the US. We introduce a simple framework to understand and assess the role of judges as “gatekeepers”, monitoring the admission of science in the courtroom. We show how judges face a crucial choice, namely, whether to limit Daubert assessment to the abstract reliability of the methods used by the expert witness or also to check whether the application of those methods was correct. Undesirable outcomes result from both choices, thereby giving rise to the “gatekeeper’s dilemma.” We illustrate the dilemma by analyzing in some detail two well-known cases of Daubert challenges to economic experts. Finally, we present reasons for the absence of straightforward solutions to the dilemma and for its likely endurance.
    Found 3 hours, 50 minutes ago on PhilSci Archive
  2. 63302.798111
    Person-affecting views in population ethics state that (in cases where all else is equal) we’re permitted but not required to create people who would enjoy good lives. In this paper, I present an argument against every possible variety of person-affecting view. The argument takes the form of a dilemma. Narrow person-affecting views must embrace at least one of three implausible verdicts in a case that I call ‘Expanded Non- Identity.’ Wide person-affecting views run into trouble in a case that I call ‘Two-Shot Non-Identity.’ One plausible practical upshot of my argument is as follows: we individuals and our governments should be doing more to reduce the risk of human extinction this century.
    Found 17 hours, 35 minutes ago on PhilPapers
  3. 63373.79813
    According to a prominent view, discrimination is wrong, when it is, because it makes people worse off. In this paper, I argue that this harm-based account runs into trouble because it cannot point to a harm, without making controversial metaphysical commitments, in cases of discrimination in which the discriminatory act kills the discriminatee. That is, the harm-based account suffers from a problem of death. I then show that the two main alternative accounts of the wrongness of discrimination—the mental-state-based account and the objective-meaning account—do not run into this problem.
    Found 17 hours, 36 minutes ago on PhilPapers
  4. 72476.798145
    A large majority of American college students — almost three-quarters — go to public schools. For four-year colleges, it’s about two-thirds. Yet strangely, these “public” schools aren’t equally open to the entire public. …
    Found 20 hours, 7 minutes ago on Bet On It
  5. 108564.79816
    In Who’s afraid of A. C. Bradley?comes out in favor of “talk[ing] about Shakespeare’s characters as if they were people.” If “character criticism” is abandoned, you’ll miss most of what is good and important in the plays. …
    Found 1 day, 6 hours ago on Mostly Aesthetics
  6. 239375.798175
    Intolerance and polarization are on the up, or so the headlines say. If true, it’s happened before, and been far worse. Thomas Jefferson wrote, it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. …
    Found 2 days, 18 hours ago on Mostly Aesthetics
  7. 239399.798189
    Randomized Controlled Trials: Could you be any more scientific? The book I’m now writing, Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets, insists that the randomistas of the economics profession actually have a thinly-veiled political agenda. …
    Found 2 days, 18 hours ago on Bet On It
  8. 239458.798203
    This paper investigates the connection between temporal attitudes (attitudes characterised by a concern (or lack thereof) about future and past events), beliefs about temporal ontology (beliefs about the existence of future and past events) and temporal preferences (preferences regarding where in time events are located). Our aim is to probe the connection between these preferences, attitudes, and beliefs, in order to better evaluate the normative status of these preferences. We investigate the hypothesis that there is a three-way association between (a) being present-biased (that is, preferring that positive events are located in the present, and negative events are located in the non-present), (b) believing that past and future events do not exist and (c) tending to have present-focused rather than non-present-focused temporal attitudes. We find no such association. This suggests that insofar as temporal preferences and temporal attitudes are connected to the ways we represent time, they are not connected to the ways we represent temporal ontology; rather, they are more likely connected to the ways we represent relative movement in, or of, time. This has important consequences for, first, explaining why we exhibit these preferences and, second, for their normative evaluation.
    Found 2 days, 18 hours ago on Natalja Deng's site
  9. 244572.798232
    Physicist Percy Bridgman has been taken by Heather Douglas to be an exemplar defender of an untenable value-free ideal for science. This picture is complicated by a detailed study of Bridgman’s philosophical views of the relation between science and society. The normative autonomy of science, a version of the value-free ideal, is defended. This restriction on the provenance of permissible values in science is given a basis in Bridgman’s broader philosophical commitments, most importantly, his view that science is primarily an individual commitment to a set of epistemic norms and values. Considerations of external moral or social values are not, on this view, intrinsic to scientific practice, though they have a broader pragmatic significance. What Bridgman takes as the proper relation between science and society is shown through analysis of his many writings on the topic and consideration of his rarely remarked upon involvement in the most problematic example of “Big Science” of his day: the atomic bomb. A reevaluation of Bridgman’s views provides a unique characterization of what is at stake in the values in science debate: the normative autonomy of science.
    Found 2 days, 19 hours ago on PhilSci Archive
  10. 305585.798247
    Aaron Ross Powell has an interesting essay about the arguments against the use of AI to create “intellectual” content such as art or pieces of writing. Powell identifies three such arguments: “The most common arguments against the use of LLM technology—the chatbots like ChatGPT that produce text from a prompt, or the image generators like Midjourney that produce visual works—take a few forms. …
    Found 3 days, 12 hours ago on The Archimedean Point
  11. 409701.798265
    In metaethics, evolutionary debunking arguments combine empirical and epistemological premises to purportedly show that our moral judgments are unjustified. One objection to these arguments has been to distinguish between those judgments that evolutionary influence might undermine versus those that it does not. This response is powerful but not well understood. In this paper I flesh out the response by drawing upon a familiar distinction in the natural sciences, where it is common to distinguish folk judgments from theoretical judgments. I argue that this in turn illuminates the proper scope of the evolutionary debunking argument, but not in an obvious way: it is a very specific type of undermining argument that targets those theories where theoretical judgments are inferred merely from folk judgments. One upshot of this conclusion is that it reveals a verboten methodology in metaethics. The evolutionary debunking argument is therefore much less powerful than its proponents have supposed, but it nevertheless rules out what is perhaps a common way of attempting to justify moral judgments.
    Found 4 days, 17 hours ago on PhilPapers
  12. 414692.79828
    According to pragmatic encroachment, whether an epistemic attitude towards p has some positive epistemic status (e.g., whether a belief is epistemically rational or justified, or it amounts to knowledge) partially depends on practical factors such as the costs of being wrong or the practical goals of the agent. Depending on such factors, a belief may count as justified or as knowledge in some circumstances but not in others. Pragmatic encroachment is typically contrasted with purism, according to which the epistemic status of an individual depends exclusively on truth-relevant factors, such as the quantity and quality of evidence or the reliability of belief-forming methods. Pragmatic encroachment comes in many varieties. This survey article provides an overview of different kinds of pragmatic encroachment (hereafter, PE). It focuses on three dimensions under which kinds of PE differ: the type of epistemic status affected by practical factors (§1), the type of practical factors affecting the epistemic status (§2), and the type of normative considerations encroaching on the epistemic status (§3).
    Found 4 days, 19 hours ago on Jie Gao's site
  13. 418557.798294
    (See all posts in this series here.) Philosophers have been debating implicit biases for some time. In Chapter 5 of MoM, I argue that automatic attention provides a scrutable type of implicit bias, scrutable because we understand well automatic attention across various domains and the automatic biases that engender it. …
    Found 4 days, 20 hours ago on The Brains Blog
  14. 475807.798321
    This entry offers a broad historical review of the origin and development of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection through the initial Darwinian phase of the “Darwinian Revolution” up to the publication of the Descent of Man in 1871. The development of evolutionary ideas before Darwin’s work has been treated in the separate entry evolutionary thought before Darwin. Several additional aspects of Darwin’s theory of evolution and his biographical development are dealt with in other entries in this encyclopedia (see the entries on Darwinism; species; natural selection; creationism).
    Found 5 days, 12 hours ago on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  15. 475827.798335
    Many important debates in contemporary ethics centre on idealized thought experiments in which agents are assumed to have perfect information about the effects of their actions and other morally relevant features of the choices they face. If Abe turns the trolley, one person will certainly be killed; if he does not, five people will certainly be killed (Foot 1967); how the one and the five got into that situation, whether blamelessly or recklessly (Thomson 1976: 210–11), is also a matter of certainty. If Betty conceives a child now, it will certainly have a life that is hard but worth living, while if she waits, her child’s life will certainly be better—and the two choices will certainly result in different children being born (Parfit 1984: 358).
    Found 5 days, 12 hours ago on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  16. 585102.79835
    It’s no secret that I like (something close enough to) utilitarianism as a moral theory. But there’s one area where I think the utilitarian tradition really falls short, which is that it tends not to acknowledge the full range of normative concepts. …
    Found 6 days, 18 hours ago on Good Thoughts
  17. 588292.798366
    I recently stumbled upon Wikipedia’s article on the “Model minority myth.” Which instantly raises the question: “What precisely is mythical about this ‘myth’?” The article’s bias is so astounding that I shall critique it line-by-line. …
    Found 6 days, 19 hours ago on Bet On It
  18. 590998.798387
    The value-free ideal (VFI) for science has been an important topic of debate for hundreds of years (Proctor 1991), and it has played a particularly significant role in the recent philosophical literature on “values and science.” Heather Douglas, whose critique of the VFI has been foundational for this recent philosophical literature, defines the VFI as the view that “the value judgments internal to science, involving the evaluation and acceptance of scientific results at the heart of the research process, are to be as free as humanly possible of all social and ethical values” (2009, 45). At this point, the dominant position among philosophers of science is that the VFI should be rejected (Brown under review; Douglas and Branch 2024; Parker 2024). By adopting this conclusion, scholars have opened up a range of important questions about how to manage the influences of values in science and how to distinguish appropriate roles for values from inappropriate roles (e.g., Holman and Wilholt 2022).
    Found 6 days, 20 hours ago on PhilSci Archive
  19. 671583.798406
    On a conventionalist theory of promises, there is a social institution of promising, somewhat akin to a game, and a promise is a kind of communicative action that falls under the rules of that institution. …
    Found 1 week ago on Alexander Pruss's Blog
  20. 831626.798422
    This is widely agreed: liberalism, and by extension, the social and political order we call “liberal democracy,” are in crisis. The sources of this crisis are many, some essentially exogenous and others more endogenously tied to liberal thought and the way liberal democracies actually work. …
    Found 1 week, 2 days ago on The Archimedean Point
  21. 865260.798437
    When does power dominate? This discussion explores whether a version of James Bohman’s status-centric view of domination (Bohman 2012) can provide a promising general answer to this question. Roughly, on this view, power dominates where it harmfully denies statuses that power should not deny. I shall suggest that, properly understood, the view meets various desiderata that a general view of the conditions of domination should meet. En route, I critically engage prominent arbitrary power views of (non)domination and explore the impact of domination in epistemic and discursive status in public justification. Before I say more on the aims of this discussion, I provide some needed context.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on PhilPapers
  22. 865283.798452
    How can the Biblical God be the Lord and King who, being typically unseen and even self-veiled at times, authoritatively leads people for divine purposes? This article’s main thesis is that the answer is in divine moral leading via human moral experience of God (of a kind to be clarified). The Hebrew Bible speaks of God as ‘king,’ including for a time prior to the Jewish human monarchy. Ancient Judaism, as Martin Buber has observed, acknowledged direct and indirect forms of divine rule and thus of theocracy. This article explores the importance of divine rule as divine direct leading, particularly in moral matters, without reliance on indirect theocracy supervised by humans. It thus considers a role for God as Über-King superior to any human king, maintaining a direct moral theocracy without a need for indirect theocracy. The divine goal, in this perspective, is a universal commonwealth in righteousness, while allowing for variation in political structure. The article identifies the importance in the Hebrew Bible of letting God be God as an Über-King who, although self-veiled at times, leads willing people directly and thereby rules over them uncoercively. It also clarifies a purpose for divine self-veiling neglected by Buber and many others, and it offers a morally sensitive test for unveiled authenticity in divine moral leading.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on PhilPapers
  23. 865312.798471
    How might a society wrong people by the way in which it remembers its past? In recent years, philosophers have articulated serval ways in which people may be wronged by dominant historical narratives. My focus will be on a way in which we may wrong people which has yet to feature in this discussion: the consigning of people to history. This paper investigates the wrongs involved in collective narratives that consign certain identities to a country’s past but not its present or future. I will argue that these narratives can wrong people by exiling them from the imagined community, which in turn leads to several other significant harms. I will begin by examining this phenomenon before going on to articulate the distinctive wrongs and harms involved in consigning to history. I then argue that people have a prima facie duty not to develop or employ national narratives that consign people to history and a responsibility to challenge and resist the use of such narratives. This responsibility will be especially strong for powerful and privileged people, for people with a special interest in resisting such narratives and for those able to draw on the resources of existing collectives.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on PhilPapers
  24. 923018.798485
    In his erudite essay, Stephen Turner invites us to use Feyerabend to reflect on the “distinctive coercive power of the new technology of digital world.” I like his treatment of the way ‘disinformation’ itself has become a “novel form of coercion, based on a novel form of authority over what is treated as true.” And he is right to suggest that the very idea presupposes an ideal theory deviation from whose elements “is taken to be a source of error.” Turner and I agree that our epistemic environment is always populated by strategic actors (including ourselves) constituted, in part, by differential power relations.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on PhilPapers
  25. 923108.798499
    The growing field of social metaphysics is centrally concerned with social properties— properties like being a woman, being Black, being disabled, being money, being art, and so on, that have claim to being both socially significant and socially constructed. Social constructionism about social properties suggests, in turn, the truth of conferralism, the view that social properties are neither intrinsic to the things that have them nor possessed simply by virtue of their causal or spatiotemporal relations to other things, but are somehow bestowed (intentionally or not, explicitly or not) upon them by persons who have both the capacity and the standing to bestow them. The most carefully and thoroughly worked-out version of conferralism is the one developed in Ásta’s Categories We Live By; and so, although our target is broader, that is the version we focus on here. Ásta’s view has a great deal of intuitive appeal—so much so that even many of her critics seem at least sympathetic to it, and some have adopted modified versions of it. But, as we shall argue, conferralism faces a dilemma: either it is viciously circular, or it is limited in scope in a way that undercuts its motivation.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on PhilPapers
  26. 931008.798513
    Bet On It reader Vanja Månborg knows a lot about rent control in Sweden. If you think the Sweden is a country of thoughtful technocrats where government intervention works well, reading his guest post may make you think again. …
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on Bet On It
  27. 980858.798528
    Much attention has been paid to moral understanding as an individual achievement, when a single agent gains insight into distinctly moral matters. Crucially overlooked, I argue, is the phenomenon of shared moral understanding, when you and I understand moral matters together, in a way that can’t be reduced to each of us having moral understanding on our own. My argument pays close attention to two central moral practices: justifying our actions to others, and apologizing for wrongdoing. I argue that, whenever I owe you a justification or an apology, I thereby owe it to you to aim at our coming to a shared moral understanding. My argument has two upshots. The first is a novel explanation of the importance of moral understanding in our lives, one that emphasizes the importance of understanding moral reasons together. The second is a better understanding of the very obligations involved in two of our most central interpersonal moral practices.
    Found 1 week, 4 days ago on PhilPapers
  28. 980881.798552
    Human emotional expressions can communicate the emotional state of the expresser, but they can also communicate appeals to perceivers. For example, sadness expressions such as crying request perceivers to aid and support, and anger expressions such as shouting urge perceivers to back off. Some contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) systems can mimic human emotional expressions in a (more or less) realistic way, and they are progressively being integrated into our daily lives. How should we respond to them? Do we have reasons to reply to the appeals made by AI emotional expressions? In this paper, we examine the conditions under which AI emotional expressions could give us prudential or even moral reasons to change our behavior. We argue that these conditions do not depend on whether the emotional expression is genuine or not, but rather on the presence of features some of which can be implemented in emotive AI given our current level of technological development. We extract recommendations and warnings for the development of emotive AI.
    Found 1 week, 4 days ago on PhilPapers
  29. 980906.798566
    We provide a general argument against value incomparability, based on a new style of impossibility result. In particular, we show that, against plausible background assumptions, value incomparability creates an incompatibility between two very plausible principles for ranking lotteries: a weak “negative dominance” principle (to the effect that Lottery 1 can be better than Lottery 2 only if some possible outcome of Lottery 1 is better than some possible outcome of Lottery 2) and a weak form of ex ante Pareto (to the effect that, if Lottery 1 gives an unambiguously better prospect to some individuals than Lottery 2, and equally good prospects to everyone else, then Lottery 1 is better than Lottery 2). After spelling out our results, and the arguments based on them, we consider which principle the proponent of incomparability ought to reject.
    Found 1 week, 4 days ago on PhilPapers
  30. 1017404.798578
    I first met Sheldon Richman at the Mises University at Stanford in 1989. I adored him from the get-go, and got to know him well when he was the Cato Institute’s intern shepherd in 1991. We’ve been friends ever since. …
    Found 1 week, 4 days ago on Bet On It