If you ask someone to divide a pie between two imaginary recipients, they are likely to recommend a 50/50 split. Philosophers like Brian Skyrms and Jason Alexander have employed evolutionary game theory to explain why such 'fair' divisions are almost universally observed in experimental work, and to explain the ubiquity of stated norms of fairness in human societies. When one moves away from an idealized lab setting, however, resource division is rarely governed by these stated norms. In particular, distributive injustice seems to be the rule for many interactions between those in different social categories - men and women, for example, or white people and people of color. In this talk, I use evolutionary game theory to show why unequal patterns of division often emergence between social groups. In particular, I present new modeling work showing how the power of social groups can compound through the emergence of bargaining norms.

Wednesday, 28 September, 5.30-7pm

No seminar this week.

Wednesday, 5 October, 5.30-7pm

Roberto Veneziani & Marco Mariotti (QML)

The Liberal Ethics of Non-Interference

We analyse the liberal ethics of noninterference in social choice. A liberal principle, capturing noninterfering views of society and inspired by John Stuart Mill's conception of liberty, is examined. The principle expresses the idea that society should not penalise individuals after changes in their situation that do not affect others. An impossibility for liberal approaches is highlighted: every social decision rule that satisfies unanimity and a general principle of noninterference must be dictatorial. This raises some important issues for liberal approaches in social choice and political philosophy.

Wednesday, 12 October, 5.30-7pm

Bernhard Salow (Cambridge)

Avoiding Risk and Avoiding Evidence (with Catrin Campbell-Moore)

Lara Buchak defends a decision theory designed to allow for rational risk avoidance, and shows that it entails that rational agents can be instrumentally required to avoid evidence. We argue that, if Buchak's theory is correct, then rational agents can also be epistemically required to avoid evidence. We also argue that both of these consequences rely only on very weak assumptions about how rational agents respond to evidence.

Wednesday, 19 October, 5.30-7pm

No seminar this week.

Wednesday, 26 October, 5.30-7pm

No seminar this week.

Wednesday, 2 November, 5.30-7pm

No seminar this week.

Wednesday, 9 November, 5.30-7pm

Eric Olson (Sheffield)

Why definitions of death don’t matter

Definitions of death are said to be important because they tell us at what point someone dies, which ethicists need to know in order to work out when someone loses the intrinsic moral status of the living. This paper argues we need not know what death is or when it occurs in order to answer these ethical questions. Questions about the significance of death are really questions about the significance of the various specific losses that figure in definitions of death. Which of those losses amounts to death makes no difference.

Wednesday, 16 November, 5.30-7pm

Johanna Thoma (LSE)

Temptation and Preference-Based Instrumental Rationality

In the dynamic choice literature, temptations are usually understood as temporary shifts in an agent’s preferences. What has been puzzling about these cases is that, on the one hand, an agent seems to do better by her own lights if she does not give into the temptation, and does so without engaging in costly commitment strategies. This seems to indicate that it is instrumentally rational for her to resist temptation. On the other hand, resisting temptation also requires her to act contrary to the preferences she has at the time of temptation. But that seems to be instrumentally irrational as well. I here consider the two most prominent types of argument why resisting temptation could nevertheless be instrumentally rational, namely two-tier and intra-personal cooperation arguments. I establish that the arguments either fail or are redundant. In particular, the arguments fail under the pervasive assumption in both decision theory and the wider literature on practical rationality that the agent’s preferences over the objects of choice are themselves the standard of instrumental rationality. And they either still fail or they become redundant when we give up that assumption.

Wednesday, 23 November, 5.30-7pm

Davide Grossi (Liverpool)

Mutual Persuasion

Two agents are faced with a choice between two options. They are uncertain about which option is the right one and are endowed with a personal bias, each in favor of a different option. They first acquire independent information by observing a private signal with known quality. They then need to reveal their private signal to the other agent, but may decide to manipulate some of the evidence the signal provides, in order to persuade the other agent in the direction of their own bias. In this talk I present a Bayesian model capturing this form of persuasion, analyze the strategies available to the agents and characterize the possible outcomes of the interaction. The model applies to a variety of phenomena, like political discussions, settlement negotiations and trade. This is joint work with Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci (Amsterdam Center for Law and Economics, University of Amsterdam).

Wednesday, 30 November, 5.30-7pm

TBA

Wednesday, 7 December, 5.30-7pm

Jossi Berkovitz (Toronto))

De Finetti’s Instrumentalist Philosophy of Probability