Choice Group

Abstract: Social epistemic pathologies plague our society. We perpetually find polarization, pluralistic ignorance, the spread of fake news, online mobbing, and others. Some scholars attribute these social pathologies to individual irrationality. Fake news spreads because people are not careful consumers of news. Polarization occurs because of irrational attachments to political positions. And so on. In this talk, I will argue…

Special PhD Session including two talks! What makes life meaningful? Speaker: Kangyu Wang, PhD student at LSE Philosophy Abstract: What, if anything, gives rise to the meaning of life? I aim to propose a novel subjectivist answer, which I shall call meaning-in-deed. I will, after introducing the background, proceed as follows: first, I explain meaning-in-deed and clarify some crucial points.…

Special PhD Session including two talks! On the possibility of Act Contractualism Speaker: Lea Bourguignon, PhD student at LSE Philosophy Abstract: A well-known debate in the normative ethical literature is that between proponents of Act Consequentialism and Rule Consequentialism. Given the structural similarities between Rule Consequentialism and Scanlonian Contractualism, one might expect a similar debate to arise among contractualists. However, this…

Abstract: Although philosophical opinion has begun to shift in the last decade, it remains the dominant view in philosophy that all normative reasons for belief are in a broad sense alethic – that they related to the truth or indicators of the truth of the belief for which they are reasons. In this talk, I shall present what might be…

Abstract: Causal Decision Theory has difficulty dealing with the possibility that our choices are predetermined. Many have responded to this problem by suggesting that rational decision-making in some sense presupposes that our choices are free. In this talk I offer a new decision theory—Libertarian Decision Theory—which precisely formalises this idea while retaining what Causal Decision Theory gets right. The primary…

  This event has been cancelled.    

Abstract: Sometimes, some individual could be the proximate cause of a bad outcome; however, if they do not play this role, someone else will, with even worse consequences. In such cases, act-consequentialism provides reasons for agents to cause the bad outcome themselves: even though, if everybody refrained from such actions, the outcome would be better. Call these cases of pre-emption. Such…

Abstract: This paper seeks to understand decision set constituents, that is, options. When agents form intentions and make choices, the intending and choosing is only meaningful because the agent is selecting from a set of options. In much theorizing about intending, choosing and acting, including philosophical approaches to neuroscience and free will as well as decision theory, the presence of a…

Abstract: A standard view in political philosophy holds that citizens are entitled to trust their own political judgment and that they thus can’t be required to politically defer to others. The entitlement for political self-trust appears to be well-supported on political, moral, and epistemic grounds. Yet, contemporary political debate appears to be hampered by too much political self-trust. Excessive political self-trust…

Abstract: The application of deontological moral principles in contexts of factual uncertainty has received increased attention within moral philosophy in recent years. While consequentialist reasoning is thought to be easily extendable to such contexts via standard decision theory, there is less consensus regarding how deontologists should approach moral deliberation when potentially relevant empirical facts are unknown. This talk surveys some…

Abstract: According to fragmentation theories of belief, our decision making is guided by a multiplicity of independent, compartmentalized belief states. In this paper, I raise a challenge to this increasingly popular view, arguing that the purported benefits of fragmentation come at the cost of abandoning some of the central explanatory roles of belief. This is not a price worth paying. Adequately addressing this challenge,…

Abstract: As an indirect ethical theory, rule-consequentialism first evaluates moral codes in terms of how good the consequences of their general adoption are and then individual actions in terms of whether the optimific code authorises them or not. There are three well-known and powerful objections to rule-consequentialism’s indirect structure: the ideal world objection, the rule worship objection, and the incoherence objection.…

Abstract: What makes practical rationality a good idea? Hume's answer was that a rational person's means are suited to their ends. If Hume was right (and he was), then the transitivity of preference is not a requirement of rationality. Nor are Sen's principles alpha and beta. But gamma is. Arif Ahmed has been Professor of Philosophy (Grade 12) since October…

Abstract: Incommensurability is often introduced with the small improvement argument. Options A and B are shown to be incommensurable when it is neither the case that A is preferred to (or better than) B nor that B is preferred to (or better than) A, but a slightly improved version of A (A+) is still not preferred to B. Since A+…

Abstract: It is often said that consequentialism violates the separateness of persons. But what does this mean? Many different interpretations have been offered, and yet the core of the separateness of persons objection remains unclear. This paper explores an alternative interpretation of the separateness of persons objection. Note that consequentialism determines principles of right action by looking at features such as…

Abstract: Some activities, like setting off dynamite or owning wild animals, are typically subject to no-fault or stricttort liability—a person who participates in them can be liable to pay compensation if they wind up harming someone, even if they took every reasonable precaution to protect other people from harm. But for most ordinary activities, fault is a necessary condition for legal liability:…

Abstract: Agents sometimes become able to entertain new propositions which they had previously been unable to entertain. Much illuminating work modelling this phenomenon and understanding its normative consequences has been done under the heading of awareness growth. Theorists in this tradition often assume that awareness satisfies an agglomeration axiom: if an agent is aware of p and they are aware of…

Abstract: The gender productivity gap (GPG) is the phenomenon that in academia, women publish fewer articles than men. A recent proposal highlights women’s expectation of gender bias in peer review – motivating them to put more effort into each article – as a potential explanation. Using a rational choice model in which academics act as credit seekers, I investigate when…