Choice Group

There are many decision contexts in which we require accurate information on animal welfare, but many of the methods currently used for estimating welfare are subjective and unreliable. Here, I look at how we might apply principled methods from animal welfare science to arrive at more accurate scores, which will then help us in making the best decisions for animals. I construct and apply a framework of desiderata for welfare measures, to assess the best of the currently available methods and argue that a combined use of both a whole-animal measure and a combination measurement framework for assessing welfare will give us the most accurate answers to guide our action.

PhD Students Charles Sherwood and Ze’ev Goldschmidt present their research to the Choice Group.

I will look at cases in which a proposition is supported by an agent's evidence at an earlier time but not by their evidence at a later time, even though the agent does not receive any new information that is relevant to the proposition. In such a case, I argue, the agent should remain confident that the proposition is true. They should not proportion their beliefs to their evidence.

A variety of findings in psychology and economics support the idea that some types of evidence are more "ambiguous" than others. Although widely discussed, there is no generally-accepted model of ambiguous evidence. I propose a new one: evidence is ambiguous iff it warrants higher-order uncertainty, i.e. warrants being uncertain about how uncertain it warrants being. I'll argue that this theory is formally tenable and philosophically attractive. Then I'll put it to empirical work: understanding ambiguity in terms of higher-order uncertainty helps to explain a variety of empirical effects, including biased processing of evidence, overconfidence and conservatism, and ambiguity aversion.

Abstract: TBA

This event will take place online via Zoom. Everyone is welcome to join using a computer with access to the internet and Zoom. To take part just follow these instructions: Download Zoom Join the event using this link: https://uci.zoom.us/j/98439516195?pwd=cjNpei9VdWRxeXFsOE5UL0JzNWMwUT09 Please note that these events are routinely recorded, with the edited footage being made publicly available on our website and YouTube channel. We…

Abstract: TBA

Abstract: TBA

Abstract: TBA

I argue that extant, precise analyses of the two-envelopes problem are not fully satisfactory. Although it is true that concerns about conditionally convergent series block the argument from conditional expected value to unconditional expected value, this is only a partial resolution. I think the standard analysis (John Norton, Arntzenius and McCarthy, David Chalmers) leaves the version of the problem where a prize is revealed unresolved. There are other intuitive features of the case that no precise probability analysis can correctly capture. I also discuss Ned Markosian’s “simple solution”; while not correct, I think his argument contains a compelling insight to the effect that we should really want an analysis on which the agent is required to be determinately indifferent about switching (in the versions of the problem I discuss). I provide two new solutions to the problem which model the agent’s beliefs with imprecise probabilities. The first is very simple, evidentially well-motivated, and captures more of the intuitive judgments about the case than the standard line. However, it doesn’t achieve the desideratum of indifference about switching; so, I provide a second solution which does. It is very slightly less simple than the first, and I’m not yet quite sure what the most compelling evidential justification is.

Abstract: Few philosophical positions are as unpopular as radical subjective Bayesianism. In this paper, I seek, if not to rehabilitate subjectivism, at least to show its critic what is attractive about the position. I argue that what is at stake in the subjectivism/anti- subjectivism debate is not, as is commonly thought, which norms of rationality are true, but rather, the conception of rationality that we adopt: there is an alternative approach to the widespread telic approach to rationality, which I call the poric approach, on which subjectivism is an attractive position. I end by considering the prospects for escaping subjectivism, and I suggest that they are bleak.

Belief polarisation occurs when two agents’ posterior beliefs move farther away from one another with respect to the same proposition or set of propositions. Polarisation has traditionally been regarded as a failure of rationality, e.g., the result of cognitive biases influencing the belief states of at least one of the polarising agents. However, polarisation is increasingly recognised as a potentially rational phenomenon that can result from: different evidence, different levels of trust, different priors, and more. In the extreme, two perfect Bayesian agents can receive the same increasing and infinite stream of non-misleading evidence and yet polarise. We argue that this raises a sceptical puzzle for Bayesians, since it casts into doubt not only our confidence across the board, but the truth conduciveness of Conditionalization itself. In short: when two agents polarise with respect to a single proposition, one must move away from the truth, even if both are perfectly rational and confident in their assessment of the evidence. So if you are one such agent, you cannot tell ‘from the inside’ whether you are in the good case—converging on the truth—or the bad case—converging on the false. Moreover, now that you know that rational polarisation is possible, you possess higher-order evidence that your reasoning process may be epistemically faulty, even in the absence of another agent with polarised views. Whether you are in the good or bad case turns on facts about your priors that we may reasonably describe as a matter of luck. This should induce sceptical doubt.

There has been recent interest in the phenomenon of 'awareness growth' - where an agent starts off unaware of a proposition and so assigns it no credence, and then becomes aware of it and assigns it a credence, redistributing credences in other propositions accordingly. This phenomenon creates a problem for Bayesian epistemologists who standardly claim that a rational agent's credences change only by conditionalization. I show that we can handle these cases if we adopt a contextualist account of credences. I describe this contextualist account of credences, and show how cases of apparent awareness growth can be understood in light of this account. I argue that this approach dissolves a number of problems that philosophers working on awareness growth have faced.

The philosophical literature on consequentialism regularly distinguishes between “person-affecting” and “impersonal” moral justifications or accounts. The “person-affecting”/”impersonal” distinction can be interpreted in various ways. I understand it as follows. A person-affecting justificatory framework sees individuals’ well-being gains and losses—well-being effects on persons—as the fundamental moral considerations that underlie the moral goodness of outcomes. My research has investigated the implications of the person-affecting framework, using the concept of “claims-across-outcomes”—a concept that seeks to make the framework more rigorous and to draw clear implications from it. This talk will present and synthesize the results of this research program. In a nutshell: the claims-across-outcomes framework argues for a moral-goodness ranking that satisfies an equity axiom (the Pigou-Dalton axiom), as opposed to utilitarianism; is neutral to individual differences in desert; and (extended to the variable-population context) implies the Repugnant Conclusion. In short, person-affecting consequentialism is equity-regarding, desert-neutral, and repugnant. Surprisingly, perhaps, the simple idea that moral goodness is grounded on well-being gains and losses has these upshots.