Event Categories: BSPS Choice Group Conjectures and Refutations Popper Seminar Sigma Club

Events for 27 October 2020
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2:00 pm
Marius Backmann (LSE): “Time for Freedom”
Views on free will are classically classified along their compatibility with determinism. Accounts that require a power to do otherwise require the existence of alternative future possibilities, which are taken to be incompatible with determinism. I argue that determinism does not automatically imply that the future is not settled, and neither does indeterminism automatically imply an open future, depending on other basic ontological assumptions about the nature of laws and temporal ontology. It is thus not determinism, but the question whether the future is open that should be the crucial issue in the free will debate. Given that one of the results of this discussion is that accounts of freedom that require the power to do otherwise are incompatible with temporal ontologies with a fixed future, I will at the end briefly outline an intermediary position between classical incompatibilist libertarianism and classical compatibilism, which is compatible with a fixed future.
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Lives versus Livelihoods: Evaluating policies to address COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic appears to force governments to make difficult trade-offs, including between limiting its direct health impacts and maintaining economic activity. Welfare economics offers tools to conceptualize this trade-off: value of statistical life (VSL), value of statistical life years (VSLYs), quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), and social welfare analysis.
In this webinar, panellists will discuss the value of these tools for assessing policies that impact health and wealth. Panellists will also discuss the usefulness and limitations of formal modelling, the impacts of policies that intend to suppress the virus, and those that instead attempt more lenient control of the spread. Finally, panellists will examine how feasible policies and associated trade-offs depend on country circumstances: how should the policy response in India or Lebanon differ from the policy response in France or the UK?
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