Ignorance frequently provides an excuse in moral cases, but only if the ignorance is not itself culpable. One can avoid being culpably ignorant by satisfying one’s ‘procedural epistemic obligations’, which is just the requirement that one take care when forming beliefs that inform actions with potentially harmful consequences. One way to take care would be to pay attention when an epistemic peer – someone with similar reasoning abilities and access to the same evidence – disagrees with you. But what happens in cases when disagreement has been suppressed? This paper explores the problems of suppressed disagreement in the context of assessing cases of culpable ignorance.

Catherine Greene

A possible problem with counterfactual analysis in the Social Sciences

I aim to highlight a problem with counterfactual analysis in certain social science cases. Specifically, my worry is with the applicability of Woodward's notion of 'hypothetical experiments'. I argue that even when we are clear about our 'hypothetical experiment' it is often possible to come to multiple, plausible, but contradictory conclusions which we have no clear way of deciding between. The idea that we have flexibility in filling in counterfactual scenarios, and that differences in the way we do so affects the conclusions of counterfactual analysis has been discussed by Reiss (and others) as it applies to backtracking counterfactuals. However, I believe it is a wider problem, which applies even in cases where we don't need to backtrack.

Wednesday, 4 May, 5.30-7pm, PAR1.03 (Parish Hall)

LSE PhD student session:

Goreti Faria

A Preference for Late Resolution of Uncertainty

Kreps and Porteus (1978) (KP) offer an axiomatic approach to dynamic decision problems that allows us to explicitly model preferences regarding how a decision is made. In particular, their model makes it possible to explicitly model preferences for the timing of the resolution of uncertainty. In the orthodox framework (vNM) uncertainties resolving at different times are indistinguishable from one another. I present an example where the agent has a preference for late resolution of uncertainty, and I solve it using KP’s model. I then argue that the only way the orthodox model can accommodate such a preference is via an unsatisfactory individuation strategy, and I argue that the advantages of KP’s modelling of the situation surpass its disadvantages.

James Nguyen

Moving Beyond Arrow's Theorem: Social Choice and Theory Choice

Okasha (2011) suggests that the problem of theory choice in science — how to choose between multiple competing theories, models, or scientific alternatives — can be construed as a social choice problem. His gambit is to identify theoretical virtues (accuracy, simplicity, scope …) as providing preference rankings over the alternatives, and theory choice becomes a matter of aggregating these rankings. But if the Arrovian conditions apply, then rational theory choice is impossible. In this talk I investigate two possible escape routes. Firstly, as suggested by Morreau (2015) some scientific virtues are `rigid’, in the sense that they cannot but provide the preference ranking they provide. I prove a possibility result over the resulting restricted domain, but show that it comes at a cost. Secondly, I investigate aggregating to a non-binary choice function, as opposed to a preference ranking. I argue that it is unclear what sort of independence (of irrelevant alternatives) condition applies in this context, and offer a novel way of proving Sen’s (1993) impossibility result that demonstrates the role played by his `Independent Decisiveness’ condition.

Wednesday, 11 May, 5.30-7pm

Michael Morreau (UiT: Arctic University of Norway)

From Diverse Grading standards to Collective Acuity

Juries, committees and expert panels appraise all manner of things. Often they do so by awarding grades: ordered evaluative predicates such as Excellent, Average and Poor, or the qualitative probability expressions Likely, Tossup and Unlikely. Grades are as if tailor made to facilitate individual and collective judgement. For one thing they are coarse grained, enabling timely and accurate individual inputs. Also, they express absolute judgements, not comparative ones. This means we can aggregate the several grades assigned to any one thing by the different members of the group; and that, it turns out, is enough to avoid the problem about aggregating ordinal information that Arrow’s “impossibility” theorem reveals. There is another prominent feature that may be expected to pull in the other direction, though. Different people have different thresholds or standards for assigning grades, and they have different ones on different occasions. That can lead to biases, equivocation and misunderstandings. We’ll see that when there is uncertainty about the extent of diversity in grading standards, collective judgements based on grades can be misleading. In extreme cases, they are under reasonable assumptions completely meaningless; this follows as a corollary of Arrow’s theorem. What’s really surprising, though is that diverse grading standards are not just the liability they might seem. Under certain conditions they can in fact enable the group to make more fine-grained distinctions than the individual members can, and thus to discover objective rankings on which well-informed decisions depend. This acuity effect is explained by a simple mechanism and illustrated using a multi-agent computer simulation of a risk panel.

Wednesday, 18 May, 5.30-7pm

Erik Olsson (Lund)

Linking as Voting: Condorcet-style Theorems for the World Wide Web

A webmaster’s decision to link to a webpage can be interpreted as a “vote” for that webpage. But how far does the parallel between linking and voting extend? In the talk I will provide several “linking theorems” showing that link-based ranking tracks importance on the web in the limit as the number of webpages grows, given independence and minimal linking competence. The theorems are similar in spirit to the voting, or jury, theorem famously attributed to the 18th century mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet. I will argue that the linking theorems provide a fundamental epistemological justification for link-based ranking on the web, analogous to the justification that Condorcet’s theorems bestow on majority voting as a basic democratic procedure. I will also look at various ways of incorporating a bias for linking to what other people link to into the model.

Wednesday, 25 May, 5.30-7pm

Wlodek Rabinowicz (Lund and LSE)

Incommensurability Meets Risk

The problem to be discussed in this talk concerns interaction between value incommensurability and risk, More specifically, it focuses on value comparisons between risky actions whose outcomes are guaranteed to be mutually incommensurable in value: they will be incommensurable whatever state the world is in. It might seem that the actions compared should themselves in all such cases be incommensurable. But this intuition, as we shall see, might well be challenged; indeed, it should be challenged. The problem in its main outline is originally due to Caspar Hare (2010). Later it was taken up by Miriam Schoenfield (2014) and by Bales, Cohen & Handfield (2014). While Hare views it as a problem for rational preferences and rational choice, I here present it as primarily a challenge for formal axiology – a general account of value relations. Both Schoenfield and Bales et al. combine these two perspectives: As they present it, the problem arises for rational choice insofar as the latter is guided by considerations of value. All these authors’ contributions will need to be discussed in the paper I am in the process of writing. In my talk, however, I want to describe the problem as such and suggest how I think it should be solved. I will propose a solution, but then I will also identify a residual problem that I don’t know how to solve.

Wednesday, 1 June, 5.30-7pm

No choice group due to Auguste Comte Memorial Lectures.

Wednesday, 8 June, 5.30-7pm

Geoff Brennan (ANU and UNC)

Do Normative Facts Matter… to what is feasible?

Lent 2016

Wednesday, 13 January, 5.30-7pm

No seminar this week.

Wednesday, 20 January, 5.30-7pm

No seminar this week.

Wednesday, 27 January, 5.30-7pm

No seminar this week.

Wednesday, 3 February, 5.30-7pm

No seminar this week.

Wednesday, 10 February, 5.30-7pm

No seminar this week.

Wednesday, 17 February, 5.30-7pm

No choice group due to behavioural economics seminar.

Wednesday, 24 February, 5.30-7pm

Gerald Lang (Leeds)

Equality and Variation

Egalitarians usually task themselves with answering the ‘equality of what?’ question, having assumed that we already enjoy a status as ‘abstract’ equals. But what is it about us which is such that we are owed an equal amount of something-or-other? This is what Jeremy Waldron calls ‘basic equality’. Human beings come in all shapes and sizes, and exhibit striking differences ‘from weight lifting to the calculus’, as Bernard Williams puts it. These differences are not thought to undermine our status as abstract equals. But that point merely places greater demands on the question of what it is about us that qualifies us as equals in the first place. This paper questions the need to commit deeply to the basic equality project, and attempts to pinpoint the faulty temptations that have led an increasing number of political philosophers to assume otherwise. On the view presented here, the search for basic equality reflects various confusions, the most important of them being the failure to respect the difference between the normative and the descriptive. I conclude with some thoughts about what sort of deep theorizing might fit the bill instead.

Wednesday, 2 March, 5.30-7pm

Massimo Renzo (KCL)

Political Self-Determination and Wars of National Defense

A war of national defense (WND) is a war waged by a victim state (V)
to defend itself against an attack whose aim is not to kill any of the
members of V, but rather to acquire control over certain “political
goods.” These political goods include: i) the control of V’s political
institutions; ii) the imposition of certain political and cultural
values on V’s population; iii) the acquisition of V’s territory; iv)
the seizure of V’s natural resources. To be sure, WND do involve some
killing, but only to the extent that the victims of the attack resist
the aggression. If the victims surrender, no blood will be spilled.
Both international law and common sense morality regard WND as the
paradigm of justified wars. However, “revisionist” approaches to just
war (according to which justified wars are ultimately reducible to the
sum of a number of acts of killing, each of which is permissible
according to the principles of interpersonal morality) struggle to
justify the permissibility of waging WND. This is because the interest
that individuals have in being part of a community that retains
control over a certain territory and/or political institutions does
not seem weighty enough to warrant: a) intentionally killing enemy
combatants; b) unintentionally but foreseeably killing civilians as a
side-effect. And if this is true, it looks as if interpersonal
morality would rule out WND as disproportionate: victims have a duty
to surrender instead of waging such wars. A number of philosophers,
including Cecile Fabre, Jeff McMahan and Helen Frowe, have offered
revisionist arguments for the permissibility of waging WND. I argue
that these accounts are ultimately unsuccessful and outline an
alternative one, based on the value of political self-determination.

Wednesday, 9 March, 5.30-7pm

LSE PhD student session:

Mantas Radzvilas

Hypothetical Bargaining and the Equilibrium Selection Problem

Orthodox game theory is sometimes criticized for its inability to single out intuitively compelling solutions in non-cooperative one-shot games with multiple Nash equilibria. An example is the Hi-Lo game, in which two players independently and simultaneously choose one from a pair of available options: Hi or Lo. If both choose Hi, they get a payoff of £2 each. If both choose Lo, they both get a payoff of £1. If one chooses Hi while the other chooses Lo, they both get £0. The game has two Nash equilibria: (Hi, Hi) and (Lo, Lo). Yet (Lo, Lo) does not intuitively strike as a rational outcome in this game. Experimental results support this by revealing that over 90% of the time people opt for Hi. I argue that ordinal bargaining solutions for finite choice sets can serve as a basis of a more general theory of how players resolve the equilibrium selection problems in non-cooperative one-shot games. To support my claim, I discuss an ordinal solution to the equilibrium selection problem, based on the comparisons of cardinalities of sets of players’ preferred alternative agreements. I show that this solution does not rely on the existence of a unique non-agreement point, and has a number of intuitively desirable properties: invariance under order-preserving transformations of payoffs, symmetry, and independence of irrelevant alternatives.

Aron Vallinder

Imprecise Bayesianism and Extreme Belief Inertia

Traditional Bayesianism requires that agents have precise, real-valued credences. However, many have argued that our evidence is rarely rich enough to justify this precision, and that we should instead model our credal state as a set of precise credence functions. On this view, the credal state should include all credence functions that are in some sense compatible with the evidence. One known problem for this view is that in certain cases, our imprecise credence in a particular proposition will remain the same no matter how much evidence we receive. I argue that the problem is much more general than has been appreciated so far, and that it’s difficult to avoid it without compromising the initial evidentialist motivation.

Wednesday, 16 March, 5.30-7pm

No choice group due to workshop: "Explanation, Normativity, and Uncertainty in Economic Modelling."

Wednesday, 23 March, 5.30-7pm

Wulf Gärtner (University of Osnabrück)

Burden Sharing in Deficit Countries: A Questionnaire-Experimental Investigation

[Joint work with Lars Schwettmann.]

Background for this study on how to share a burden is the most recent economic situation in several countries in Southern Europe and in Ireland. These countries were forced to introduce severe budget cuts after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 which had unleashed a financial crisis in many industrialised countries of the Western world. We do not ask how the burden was actually split in each country examined but how the burden should have been shared among different income groups of society. In order to answer this question, a questionnaire-experimental investigation was run among students from Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Our study offered the students seven different schemes of taxation amongst which we had specified a proportional rule and two progressive schemes of differing severity. A key result within our investigation is the finding that a large majority of students in all countries involved did not opt for a proportional rule of burden sharing but picked one of the two progressive schemes instead. The other rules received only minor support. Time permitting, we shall also present first results on our experimental “game of losses” that we ran so far at two German universities as well as in Galway and Madrid.

Michaelmas 2015

Wednesday, 30 September, 5.30-7pm

No seminar this week.

Wednesday, 7 October, 5.30-7pm

No seminar this week.

Wednesday, 14 October, 5.30-7pm

No seminar this week.

Wednesday, 21 October, 5.30-7pm

Luke Elson (Reading)

Indeterminacy and Permissibility

I defend a decision theory for action under indeterminacy: we ought to maximise an analogue of expected value. I argue that this decision theory renders the right result in the standard puzzling cases of action under indeterminacy, and allows indeterminism about vagueness to capture the decision-theoretic advantages of epistemicism. A surprising upshot of the view is that it is sometimes permissible and required to choose an option that is determinately less than the best.

Wednesday, 28 October, 5.30-7pm

Luke Fenton-Glynn (UCL)

Probabilistic Actual Causation

Suzy will throw a stone at a particular bottle if and only if Billy does not throw a stone at the bottle. Suzy is a better shot than Billy. In fact, Billy throws his stone at the bottle and, as luck would have it, he hits and breaks the bottle. Here Suzy's intention to throw iff Billy doesn't raises the probability of the bottle's breaking (because there is some chance of Billy's not throwing), but is not a cause of its breaking. On the other hand, Billy's throw causes the bottle to break but lowers the probability of its breaking (because it prevents Suzy - who is a better shot - from throwing). The problems of probability-raising non-causation and of non-probability-raising causation that are illustrated by this example continue to pose difficulties for analysing probabilistic actual (i.e. token) causation. I appeal to the formal tools of probabilistic causal models to propose a new solution to these difficulties.

Wednesday, 4 November, 5.30-7pm

Peter Dennis (LSE)

What is Interpersonal Justification?

We seek not only to be justified in our beliefs, but also to justify our beliefs to one another. While traditional epistemology has focused on the former kind of justification (viz. personal justification), it is through the latter kind (viz. interpersonal justification) that our most successful forms of enquiry make progress. Contrary to the received view, I argue that interpersonal justification cannot be analysed in terms of personal justification. Instead, it is a form of collective deliberation which allows us to place one another under irreducibly second-personal intellectual obligations. Epistemology must therefore reckon with it directly if it is to be relevant to our best epistemic practices.

Wednesday, 11 November, 5.30-7pm

Joe Mazor (LSE)

The Moral Foundations of Fair Division

The “fair division” approach to problems of distribution is increasingly prominent in welfare economics. Complex variations of hypothetical problems like dividing a cake have been analysed in detail, and the solutions have been applied to real world problems such as dividing an inheritance and allocating land rights. Although the problems of heterogeneity and indivisibility that are considered in these contexts are important, at the heart of the fair division literature is a controversial and under-explored commitment to resourcism. In the homogeneous good case, fair division recommends giving each claimant an equal amount of the resource. This talk will explore the normative foundations of resourcist fair division. The key argument in favor of resourcism given by welfare economists is a rejection of interpersonal comparisons of welfare. However, I will argue that this commitment is implausible and in any case is insufficient to justify a resourcist fair division. Instead, I will argue that a more plausible foundation for a resourcist fair division are the commitments to rejecting aggregative conceptions of equality and rejecting other-responsibility. I then explain why, in at least some cases, the rejection of other-responsibility is plausible. However, a resourcist notion of equality is, by itself, insufficient. Some concern with the aggregate is also necessary to make fair division plausible (otherwise, a solution in which no claimant receives anything would be acceptable). I argue that, at least in the homogeneous good case, waste-freeness is the right resourcist condition to endorse rather than Pareto efficiency. I conclude by briefly considering the heterogeneous good case. I argue that the envy-free condition is indeed a plausible analogue to the equal-amount condition used in the homogeneous good case. I also argue that Kaldor-Hicks efficiency (rather than Pareto efficiency or Dworkin’s procedural fairness) is the plausible analogue to the waste-free condition advocated in the homogeneous good case.

Wednesday, 18 November, 5.30-7pm

Ralf Bader (Oxford)

Separability, choice consistency, and transitivity

This paper focuses on the problem of option individuation as it arises in the context of separability, choice consistency and transitivity.

Wednesday, 25 November, 5.30-7pm

Hilary Greaves (Oxford)

Against the badness of death

Orthodox choice-theoretic approaches (decision theory, social choice theory and so on) take the primary axiological notion to be an overall ordering of possible worlds. This is appropriate, since it is only via such an overall ordering that axiology plausibly connects to normativity. In possible contrast, many moral philosophers are more directly concerned with the goodness or badness of certain 'subworld' entities - individual events within worlds, for instance. This latter mode of theorising need not in principle be misguided, since it is not in principle in tension with the former mode. However, in practice, theorising directly in terms of the goodness/badness of subworld entities tends to lead moral philosophers and others into important mistakes. I discuss two ways in which this has happened in the literature on "the badness of death". The first concerns Jeff McMahan's "time-relative interests" account of the badness of death. The second concerns the way in which the notion of the badness of (child) death has figured in cost-benefit analyses for developing-world family planning interventions.

Wednesday, 2 December, 5.30-7pm

Ofra Magidor (Oxford)

Reflections on Reasons

In this paper (co-authored with John Hawthorne), we offer a series reflections on the rather complex ideology of reasons. We start by introducing some common notions in the reasons literature: normative reasons; possessed normative reasons; and motivating reasons. In the first part of the paper we argue for a series of theses concerning these notions: that the normative reason construction is factive, that possession of a normative reason requires knowledge, and that ascriptions of possession of reasons can be factored into a normative reason construction and a possession claim. One important theme that runs through these discussions is the following: there is typical range of cases where, since an agent does not know a pertinent worldly fact that might otherwise serve as a motivating reason, one might be tempted to fall-back on describing an agent’s motivating reasons using a psychological ascription (e.g., in the case where an agent is hallucinating a tiger and runs, we might revert to ‘Her reason for running was that she thought there was a tiger in the room’). We maintain that in many such cases the psychological fact cited is not after all a motivating reason, and indeed that in such cases the agent often acts for no motivating reason. In the second part of the paper we turn to compare two prominent views concerning the nature of normative reasons: Kearns and Star’s view of reasons as evidence that one ought to phi, and John Broome’s view of reasons as explanations for why one ought to phi. While both views have significant merit, we argue that they also face some non-trivial challenges, and discuss a range of considerations that can help to adjudicate between these two conceptions of reasons.

Wednesday, 9 December, 5.30-7pm

Magda Osman (Queen Mary University of London)

The Value of Effort

The aim of this presentation is to provide psychological insights into the relationship between rewards and effort. The association between the two may seem trivially simple, that is, we put more in to get more back. In addition to this, other simple assumptions that are held in psychological and behavioural economic literature (i.e. effort is aversive, effort aversion is overcome by rewards, choice behaviour regarding metal and physical effort is the same) are also critically considered in this talk. The main point of the talk is to suggest the following. For us to understand effort and its relationship to reward, we need to make a distinction between choice behaviour and execution of action. That is to say, we process rewards and effort differently when anticipating performing an action, from when we are about to perform the action (be it mental or physical).