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Social Decision Making and Allocations with Multiple Criteria

Satoshi’s research project aims to construct reasonable social decision criteria and allocation rules for economic resources in societies by taking trade-offs among various criteria into account. In particular, he is trying to consider the following problems.

(i) Constructing Social Welfare Orderings.

He characterizes a class of acceptable SWOs combining normative criteria such as utilitarianism, leximin, and sufficientarianism.

(ii) Constructing Allocation rules.

He characterizes the allocation rules that incorporate and compromise seemingly contracting principles: marginalism and egalitarianism.

This project forms part of a larger programme to investigate how continuous spacetime structure could arise from an underlying quantum or semi-quantum discrete structure. This summer, the project will approach this in two ways.  On the mathematical side, it will explore the properties of the Spacetime Algebra Cl(3,1), which provides an algebraic representation of Mikowski Space and its transformations. In particular, the aim is to investigate the symplectic strucure of this object, and how it relates to classical and quantum phase spaces.  On the philosophical side, the project will respond to recent debates around the Relational interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, with the goal of clarifying what a quantized spacetime might look like ontologically. 

Apart from this, Calum has a general interest in the theology of science, and also in Neoplatonism and its development in the Christian and Islamic traditions.

Practical Evaluation Methods Using Efficient and Equitable Social Welfare Orderings

Norihito’s research project aims to provide reasonable and practical methods for the following three issues through axiomatic and normative analysis.

(i) Acceptable Social Welfare Orderings with Variable Populations

He characterizes a class of acceptable SWOs with variable populations and proposes some practical applications for comparing international income or wealth. Moreover, he shows some possibility/ impossibility results by revisiting classical dilemmas in population ethics.

(ii) Reexamination of Classical Normative Concepts and Ideas

He classifies and scrutinizes some classical concepts of normative ideas such as egalitarianism, sufficientarianism, responsibility, liberalism, etc. Moreover, he shows some logical relationships among these ideas.

(iii) Acceptable Social Welfare Orderings under Risky or Uncertain Situations

He characterizes a class of acceptable SWOs axiomatically under uncertain or risky situations. In addition, he compares and classifies some alternative solutions such as the precautionary principle and simple cost-effectiveness analysis.

Physical laws and the application of mathematics

This investigation addresses the problem of the effectiveness of mathematics in the articulation of physical laws. Since Eugene Wigner’s (1960) landmark statement of the problem, scientists, philosophers, and historians of science have reflected on whether mathematics’ effectiveness had to be deemed unreasonable after all.

One aspect of our research is this. We bring together two fields of research, namely: the history and philosophy of laws of nature, and the recent philosophy of applied mathematics, the latter including issues concerning modelling, representation, abstraction, and idealisation. From this perspective, the project has three main goals: first, to develop a philosophical framework for understanding the various contributions of mathematics to physical laws; second, to provide an analysis of nomic modality that accounts for the contribution of both physics and mathematics to the modal space of possibilities and necessities informed by physical laws; and third, to examine the distinction between mathematical and physical structures in physical laws.

Another aspect of our research advances a pluralist interpretation of scientific practices, one of whose core tenets within the framework of our project is this: physical laws need not be a central element in ontology, nor do they need to be equally present across epistemic practices. This will prove beneficial in various ways, especially since the talk of laws is not inane: it imposes a certain understanding of scientific practices (for example, some epistemic practices are successful at finding out about laws, whereas others are not), and a way to value their results (in particular, epistemic practices informing us about laws are somehow more important, and we should grant them priority because they provide what the Newtonian tradition considers genuine scientific knowledge). We cast doubt on this interpretation. We examine, indeed, whether we are currently writing the last chapter of the biography of laws, as Lorraine Daston’s framework for the biographical approach to scientific objects may suggest. Furthermore, laws may well be dispensed with in both ontology and scientific parlance, hence giving way to rather more egalitarian concepts and less demanding ontological presuppositions. For the latter points, we shall benefit from insights coming from both the history of science and the social studies of science. 

The Human Right to Immigrate: Theoretical and Practical Dilemmas

The research project aims to determine whether the right to immigrate can be recognized as a universal moral human right. The research will be conducted in three stages: (1) The first is an analysis of selected traditional and political conceptions of human rights to establish whether the justification of these approaches can support the human right to immigrate. (2) The second is a critical analysis of selected arguments supporting and opposing the recognition of the human right to immigrate. (3) The third is a study on the usefulness of the human right to immigrate, in the context of the debate on the utopian character of human rights and the discussion on the end-state/transitional conceptions of justice.

Political Representation in Deliberative Democracies: Issues in Measurement and Theory

All modern democracies are representative deliberative democracies: citizens elect members of the polity to participate in deliberations and make decisions on their behalf. How do we best design a system of political representation such that every citizen is given a say in these deliberations and decisions? How should representatives be judged in terms of how they participate in these deliberations and decisions on behalf of their constituents? In engaging with these questions, I use normative democratic theory and formal political theory to dive deeper into what representation means in a deliberative democracy and how that representation should be carried out.