Choice Group Seminar by Lea Bourguignon (LSE) and Dominic Ede (LSE)

Lea Bourguignon (LSE): ‘What if everyone did that? Act Contractualism and repeated iteration cases’

Abstract: Rule-based views such as Rule Consequentialism and Rule Contractualism rely on a process of universalisation – that is, they evaluate what would happen in an ideal world in which everyone behaved a certain way and make prescriptions based on these hypothetical evaluations. This makes them vulnerable to an important challenge known as the Ideal World Objection. Act-based views such as Act Consequentialism and Act Contractualism do not face this objection, because they do not rely on a process of universalisation. However, they struggle to accommodate what I call “repeated iteration cases”, which are cases in which what would happen if many people performed a certain action, or if one person was called upon to perform a certain action repeatedly, does matter. In this paper, I show that Act Contractualism can handle repeated iteration cases. As such, it is uniquely placed to address important objections that plague other moral views.

Lea Bourguignon is a PhD candidate at the LSE.

Dominic Ede (LSE): Constraints on the Value of Chances in Ellsberg’s Paradox

Abstract: Bradley (2016) proposes that, contrary to the usual treatment, Ellsberg’s paradox can be explained under standard SEU (e.g. Savage or Jeffrey) by reframing the outcomes to be maximally specific. This requires rejecting linearity in the vN-M axioms so that an agent can be risk-averse to chances. This was done under coarse-graining the possible distribution of balls in the urn. Here I fine-grain the distribution, showing that an individual’s credences for possible ball distributions in the urn are tightly constrained, and then go on to suggest that there appears to be a hard upper limit to how risk averse an agent can be by adding some further constraints to the Ellsberg’s urn. Finally I turn to implications for chance risk aversion and hope to get some help as to whether these results have any normative significance for a decision theoretic framework where chances of obtaining goods are valued non-linearly.

Dominic Ede is a PhD candidate at the LSE.

This event will take place in person on LSE’s campus. However, those unable to attend in person will have the option of taking part online.

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