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11896.019158
Humans have evolved culturally and perhaps genetically to be unsustainable. We exhibit a deep and consistent pattern of short-term resource exploitation behaviours and institutions. We distinguish agentic and naturally selective forces in cultural evolution. Agentic forces are quite important compared to the blind forces (random variation and natural selection) in cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolution. We need to use the agentic policy-making processes to evade the impact of blind natural selection. We argue that agentic forces became important during our Pleistocene history and into the Anthropocene present. Human creativity in the form of deliberate innovations and the deliberate selective diffusion of technical and social advances drove this process forward for a long time before planetary limits became a serious issue. We review models with multiple positive feed-backs that roughly fit this observed pattern. Policy changes in the case of large-scale existential threats like climate change are made by political and diplomatic agents grasping and moving levers of institutional power in order to avoid the operation of blind natural selection and agentic forces driven by narrow or short-term goals. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis’.
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97391.019366
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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170573.019378
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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237201.019386
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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237243.019392
A recent dispute in political science raises issues about the objectivity of measures of democracy. Political scientists Little and Meng argue that democracy indices using country experts as coders show a greater degree of democratic backsliding than measures that are objective. They worry that this discrepancy may reflect coder bias. I distinguish three aspects of objectivity and offer a reconceptualization of objectivity as coherence objectivity. I argue that coherence objectivity is better suited for evaluating measures of social science concepts like democracy than the understanding of objectivity implicit in Little and Meng’s discussion.
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259497.019398
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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433434.019408
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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469453.019418
A principal would like to decide which of two parties deserves a prize. Each party privately observes the state of nature that determines which of them deserves the prize. The principal presents each party with a text that truthfully describes the conditions for deserving the prize and asks each of them what the state of nature is. The parties can cheat but the principal knows their cheating procedure. The principal “magically implements” his goal if he can come up with a pair of texts satisfying that in any dispute, he will recognize the cheater by applying the “honest-cheater asymmetry principle”. According to this principle, the truth is with the party satisfying that if his statement is true, then the other party (using the given cheating procedure) could have cheated and made the statement he is making, but not the other way around. Examples are presented to illustrate the concept.
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551047.019428
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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628860.019444
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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710054.01945
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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710125.019456
For several decades, intercultural philosophers have produced an extensive body of scholarly work aimed at mutual intercultural understanding. They have focused on the ideal of intercultural dialogue that is supported by dialogue principles and virtuous attitudes. However, this ideal is challenged by decolonial scholarship as one which neglects power inequalities. Decolonial scholars have emphasized the differences between cultures and worldviews, shifting the focus to colonial history and radical alterity. In return, intercultural philosophers have worried about the very possibility of dialogue and mutual understanding in frameworks that use coloniality as their singular pole of analysis. In this paper, we explore the complex relations between decolonial
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760060.019462
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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772801.019468
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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794890.019474
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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930095.019479
The sex binary can be a useful idealization in scientific models; a fiction helpful for sorting people into two categories in order to investigate the possible mechanisms driving the differences we observe. However, attempts to say that the sex binary is anything more than that are not only misguided. Alisa Bokulich’s account of credentialed fictions will help substantiate this point in order to articulate a more nuanced view of the fictional sex binary in modeling terms. I will argue that, despite often treating it as such, the sex binary is not an approximation of biological sex nor is it explanatory.
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1038270.019485
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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1088612.019491
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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1158171.019496
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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1226060.019502
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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1280074.019508
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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1315323.019522
Chairman of the KPA Group;
Senior Research Fellow, the Samuel Neaman Institute, Technion, Haifa;
Chairman, Data Science Society, Israel
What’s happening in statistical practice since the “abandon statistical significance” call
This is a retrospective view from experience gained by applying statistics to a wide range of problems, with an emphasis on the past few years. …
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1487945.019531
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is said to pose many risks, be they catastrophic, existential and otherwise. This paper discusses whether the notion of risk can apply to AGI, both descriptively and in the current regulatory framework. The paper argues that current definitions of risk are ill-suited to capture supposed AGI existential risks, and that the risk-based framework of the EU AI Act is inadequate to deal with truly general, agential systems.
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1622040.019538
Journalists are often the adult public’s central source of scientific information, which means that their reporting shapes the relationship the public has with science. Yet philosophers of science largely ignore journalistic communication in their inquiries about trust in science. This paper aims to help fill this gap in research by comparing journalistic norm conflicts that arose when reporting on COVID-19 and tobacco, among other policy-relevant scientific topics. I argue that the public’s image of scientists – as depositories of indisputable, value-free facts, trustworthy only when in consensus – makes it particularly difficult for journalists to ethically communicate policy-relevant science rife with disagreement. In doing so, I show how journalists, like scientists, face the problem of inductive risk in such cases. To overcome this problem, I sketch a model of trust in science that is grounded in an alternative image of scientists – what I call the responsiveness model of trust in science. By highlighting the process of science over its product, the responsiveness model requires scientists to respond to empirical evidence and the public’s values to warrant the public’s trust. I then show why this model requires journalists to be the public’s watchdogs by verifying and communicating whether scientists are being properly responsive both epistemically and non-epistemically.
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1634168.019548
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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1806565.019555
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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1840977.01956
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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2002233.019568
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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2085976.019575
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. …
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2136423.019581
In the world of literary non-fiction, John McPhee is a god. Through his New Yorker essays, and prize-winning books McPhee has mastered the art of narrative non-fiction. In fact, he pretty much invented the genre. …