‘Intentionalist’ approaches portray self-deceivers as “akratic believers”, subjects who deliberately choose to believe p despite knowing that p is false. In this paper I argue that the intentionalist model leads to a number of paradoxes that seem to undermine it. I claim that these paradoxes can nevertheless be overcome in light of the rival hypothesis that self-deception is a non-intentional process that stems from the influence of emotions upon cognitive processes. Furthermore, I propose a motivational interpretation of the phenomenon of (...) ‘hyperbolic discounting bias’ which highlights the role of emotional biases in akratic behavior. Finally, I argue that we are not the helpless victims of our irrational attitudes, insofar as we have the ability – and arguably the epistemic obligation – to counteract motivational biases. (shrink)

Within siting literature there is strong agreement that compensation for environmental risks is a necessary condition for local acceptance of waste treatment facilities. In-kind compensation is commonly pushed forward as being more effective than financial benefits in reducing local opposition. By forcusing on the siting of a sanitary landfill in Santiago, Chile, this paper explores the performance of both types of compensation and relates the analysis to the notion of social norms of exchange. These are understood as being based on (...) three main types of social relations: care, justice and freedom. Whereas monetary compensation is associated with market relations based on freedom and the offer of in-kind compensation to egalitarian relations based on justice, the absence of compensation is linked to fraternal relations based on care. It is argued that in-kind compensation is more acceptable than monetary payments or not compensation because people tend to understand siting conflicts more as matters of justice rather than as matters of freedom or care. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the limits of constitutional reform. Some constitutions, for example, the German (art. 79, sec. 3), the Italian (art. 139), the Portuguese (art. 288), the French (art. 89, sec. 5), and the Brazilian (art. 60, sec. 4), contain an “essential core” of rights, which is usually understood as being immune to change. The initial focus in the paper is on the discussion on whether and to what extent these “essential cores” are indeed immune (...) to change. A second focus is on Ross's paradox. Here I analyse and reject Ross's own solution to the paradox and I show, too, that the paradox admits no solution that does not imply a discontinuity in the legal system. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to show that externalist compatibilism in the debate on personal autonomy and manipulated freedom is as yet untenable. I will argue that Alfred R. Mele’s paradigmatic, history-sensitive externalism about psychological autonomy in general and autonomous deliberation in particular faces an insurmountable problem: it cannot satisfy the crucial condition of adequacy “H” for externalist theories that I formulate in the text. Specifically, I will argue that, contrary to first appearances, externalist compatibilism does not resolve the CNC (...) manipulation problem. After briefly reflecting on the present status of responses to the manipulation problem in the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists of various stripes, I will draw the over-all pessimistic conclusion that no party deals with this problem satisfactorily. (shrink)

Humans have a strong sense of who should be punished, when, and how. Many features of these intuitions are consistent with a simple adaptive model: Punishment evolved as a mechanism to teach social partners how to behave in future interactions. Yet, it is clear that punishment as practiced in modern contexts transcends any biologically evolved mechanism; it also depends on cultural institutions including the criminal justice system and many smaller analogs in churches, corporations, clubs, classrooms, and so on. These institutions (...) can be thought of as a kind of ‘exaptation’: a culturally evolved set of norms that exploits biologically evolved intuitions about when punishment is deserved in order to achieve cooperative benefits for social groups. (shrink)

A comprehensive theory of rational prudence would explain how a person should adjudicate among the conflicting interests of her past, present, future and counterfactual selves. For example, when a person is having an identity crisis, perhaps because she has suddenly become disabled, she may be left with no sense of purpose to keep her going. In her despondent state, she may think it prudent to give up on life now even if she would soon adopt a different set of values (...) that would give her a renewed sense of meaning. Yet we may think that, in many cases, it would be irrational for such a person to allow herself to die. My aim is to explain this prudential intuition by developing a partial framework of rational prudence that interprets and applies the idea that a prudent person acts in ways that are justifiable to herself over time. (shrink)

Some propositions are structurally unknowable for certain agents. Let me call them ‘Moorean propositions’. The structural unknowability of Moorean propositions is normally taken to pave the way towards proving a familiar paradox from epistemic logic—the so-called ‘Knowability Paradox’, or ‘Fitch’s Paradox’—which purports to show that if all truths are knowable, then all truths are in fact known. The present paper explores how to translate Moorean statements into a probabilistic language. A successful translation should enable us to derive a version of (...) Fitch’s Paradox in a probabilistic setting. I offer a suitable schematic form for probabilistic Moorean propositions, as well as a concomitant proof of a probabilistic Knowability Paradox. Moreover, I argue that traditional candidates to play the role of probabilistic Moorean propositions will not do. In particular, we can show that violations of the so-called ‘Reflection Principle’ in probability need not yield structurally unknowable propositions. Among other things, this should lead us to question whether violating the Reflection Principle actually amounts to a clear case of epistemic irrationality, as it is often assumed. This result challenges the importance of the principle as a tool to assess both synchronic and diachronic rationality—a topic which is largely independent of Fitch’s Paradox—from a somewhat unexpected source. (shrink)

Economists use tastes as a source of information about personal welfare and judge the effects of policies upon preference satisfaction; neoclassical welfare economics is the analytical embodiment of this preference sovereignty norm. For an initial distribution of wealth, the welfare-maximizing outcome is the one that exhausts all possible gains from trade. Gains from trade are defined relative to fixed ordinal preferences. This analytical apparatus consists of both the Pareto principle, which implies that externality-free voluntary trades increase welfare, and applied costbenefit (...) analysis, which attempts to weight costs and benefits when evaluating policies that are not Pareto improvements. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that ordinary cases of self-deception and akrasia derive from the phenomenon of motivated irrationality. According to the ‘motivational’ account, self-deception is typically induced by the influence that desires and emotions exert upon our cognitive faculties, and thereby upon the process of belief formation. Crucially, I show that this hypothesis is consistent with the empirical research carried out by social psychologists, and that it avoids a number of paradoxes that undermine the ‘intentionalist’ account. But motivated irrationality (...) also seems to account for most cases of akrasia, insofar as desires are equally liable to affect the evaluative judgments through which we assess feasible options. This analysis thus set the premises for a unified account of irrationality. (shrink)

Cultural selection models aim to explain cultural phenomena as the products of a selective process, often characterising institutions, practices, norms or behaviours as adaptations. I argue that a lack of attention has been paid to the explanatory power of cultural selection frameworks. Arguments for cultural selection frequently depend on demonstrating only that selection models can in principle be applied to culture, rather than explicitly demonstrating the explanatory payoffs that could arise from their application. Understanding when and how cultural selection generates (...) powerful explanations is crucial to evaluating cultural selection, as well as realising its promised epistemic and practical benefits. I argue that the ability for cultural selection to explain ‘design without a designer’ is crucial to successful and powerful cultural selection explanations. I introduce the strategy of comparing cultural selection to goal-directed agent accounts in order to evaluate when cultural selection can provide distinctive explanatory payoffs, drawing on two case studies to illustrate the benefits of this strategy. I argue that a focus on phenomena which cannot be explained through intention or agency-based explanations in particular could provide a fruitful avenue to identifying the cases where cultural selection can be insightfully applied. (shrink)

Departing from Bourdieu's collective habitus, this essay develops a theory of the subjectivity of habitus, meaning the social-psychological processes comprising the agent and fueling deliberation. By incorporating George Ainslie's theory of the will and deliberation as the intertemporal bargaining of a population of interests, I theorize the “saturated agent” composed of an economy of interests, analogous to Bourdieu's “economy of practices” invested and saturated with cultural capital. Here culturally saturated interests negotiate strategically within the agent, with the ending balance constituting (...) the habitus. Additionally, reflexivity becomes amenable to habitus as “desaturation” or suspending the commitment to a set of culturally saturated interests as a result of a crisis, followed by “resaturation”, the restructuring of the economy of interests. (shrink)

This paper proposes a way to understand transformative choices, choices that change ‘who you are.’ First, it distinguishes two broad models of transformative choice: 1) ‘event-based’ transformative choices in which some event—perhaps an experience—downstream from a choice transforms you, and 2) ‘choice-based’ transformative choices in which the choice itself—and not something downstream from the choice—transforms you. Transformative choices are of interest primarily because they purport to pose a challenge to standard approaches to rational choice. An examination of the event-based transformative (...) choices of L. A. Paul and Edna Ullman-Margalit, however, suggests that event-based transformative choices don’t raise any difficulties for standard approaches to rational choice. An account of choice-based transformative choices—and what it is to be transformed—is then proposed. Transformative choices so understood not only capture paradigmatic cases of transformative choice but also point the way to a different way of thinking about rational choice and agency. (shrink)

In this essay; I explore the ambiguity of the competition’s title “Constitutions as Chains”; and distinguish between two intergenerational challenges in constitution-making: the challenge of intergenerationally just constitutional provisions; and the challenge of creating a stable institution which is accepted by successive generations. I prioritise the latter. After contrasting classic ideas of Burke and Paine; I discuss different ways of addressing the challenge; such as the amendability of a constitution; eternity clauses or recurring constitutional assemblies. A flexible approach towards existing (...) constitutional provisions; which is open to future developments; gets the nod. However; a need for empirical research remains. (shrink)

In the past 150 years there have been many attempts to draw parallels between cultural and biological evolution. Most of these attempts were flawed due to lack of knowledge and false ideas about evolution. In recent decades these shortcomings have been cleared away, thus triggering a renewed interest in the subject. This paper offers a critical survey of the main issues and arguments in that discussion. The paper starts with an explication of the Darwinian algorithm of evolution. It is argued (...) that this ‘formula’ is substrate-neutral, which means that biological evolution might not be the only Darwinian process. Other dynamic systems could evolve as well provided that certain conditions are met. In the case of human culture this seems to be the case. The paper then focuses on the notion of niche construction. It is argued that niche construction plays a crucial role in human evolution because it has altered the sources of natural selection and thus the path of evolution. Next two approaches to cultural evolution are discussed: sociobiology and memetics. I will argue that both approaches have flaws because they either underestimate the influence of culture or they stretch analogies too far. Finally two common objections against the idea of cultural evolution are addressed: Lamarckian inheritance and the issue of guided variation. I will argue that although cultural evolution differs from biological evolution in several respects, these discrepancies do not jeopardize the claim that cultural evolution is essentially Darwinian. (shrink)

One of the fundamental components of the concept of economic rationality is that preference orderings are “complete,” i.e., that all alternative actions an economic agent can take are comparable. The idea that all actions can be ranked may be called the single utility assumption. The attractiveness of this assumption is considerable. It would be hard to fathom what choice among alternatives means if the available alternatives cannot be ranked by the chooser in some way. In addition, the efficiency criterion makes (...) sense only if one can infer that an individual's choice reflects the best, in expected welfare terms, among all choices that individual could have made. The possibility that a rearrangement of resources could make someone “better off” without making others “worse off” can be understood only if the post-rearrangement world is comparable with the pre-rearrange-ment world. (shrink)

There are two interrelated but distinct programs which go by the name evolutionary epistemology. One attempts to account for the characteristics of cognitive mechanisms in animals and humans by a straightforward extension of the biological theory of evolution to those aspects or traits of animals which are the biological substrates of cognitive activity, e.g., their brains, sensory systems, motor systems, etc. (EEM program). The other program attempts to account for the evaluation of ideas, scientific theories and culture in general by (...) using models and metaphors drawn from evolutionary biology (EET program). The paper begins by distinguishing the two programs and discussing the relationship between them. The next section addresses the metaphorical and analogical relationship between evolutionary epistemology and evolutionary biology. Section IV treats the question of the locus of the epistemological problem in the light of an evolutionary analysis. The key questions here involve the relationship between evolutionary epistemology and traditional epistemology and the legitimacy of evolutionary epistemology as epistemology. Section V examines the underlying ontological presuppositions and implications of evolutionary epistemology. Finally, section VI, which is merely the sketch of a problem, addresses the parallel between evolutionary epistemology and evolutionary ethics. (shrink)

I argue that by constructing an identity of Bohemian whim and spontaneity one can make what was previously an akratic action into a fully rational action, since in performing the action, one asserts one identity.

The problem of intertemporal choice arises when outcomes are received in different moments of time. This paper presents an axiomatic model of intertemporal choice when consumption in the previous moment of time contributes to utility evaluation of consumption in the current moment. This model generalizes classic discounted utility theory (also known as constant or exponential discounting) in two ways. First, in every moment of time, a decision maker derives utility not only from current consumption but also from “residual” consumption in (...) the previous moment of time. Second, these utilities are discounted with weights that are essentially a quasi-hyperbolic discounting function. The paper presents an application of the proposed model to the problem of optimal consumption and savings given a fixed income (wealth). When a decision maker derives satisfaction from both instantaneous consumption as well as a share of consumption in the previous moment of time, optimal consumption path is cyclic—periods of relatively high consumption are interchanged with periods of relatively low consumption. These cycles decay over time. Asymptotically, the consumption path exhibits conventional properties (constant, increasing or decreasing over time when a gross interest rate multiplied by discount factor is correspondingly equal to, greater than, or less than one). (shrink)

Though falling turnout in recent decades has been recognised as a problem for democracy, the solutions that have been proposed have mostly been drawn from the realms of the marketplace and society, rather than that of democracy. The inadequate empirical theory that subtends many policy initiatives designed to improve turnout accounts for why these initiatives have largely failed to achieve their stated aims. I argue that electoral participation should be seen through the conceptual lens of collective action, and that this (...) approach suggests mandatory electoral participation as an equitable and effective coordination device. I further argue that compulsory turnout offers a good fit with democratic norms of equality, rights and political obligation. (shrink)

Previous literature has demonstrated the important role that trust plays in developing and maintaining well-functioning societies. However, if we are to learn how to increase levels of trust in society, we must first understand why people choose to trust others. One potential answer to this is that people view trust as normative: there is a social norm for trusting that imposes punishment for noncompliance. To test this, we report data from a survey with salient rewards to elicit people’s attitudes regarding (...) the punishment of distrusting behavior in a trust game. Our results show that people do not behave as though trust is a norm. Our participants expected that most people would not punish untrusting investors, regardless of whether the potential trustee was a stranger or a friend. In contrast, our participants behaved as though being trustworthy is a norm. Most participants believed that most people would punish someone who failed to reciprocate a stranger’s or a friend’s trust. We conclude that, while we were able to reproduce previous results establishing that there is a norm of reciprocity, we found no evidence for a corresponding norm of trust, even among friends. (shrink)

In Bermúdez 2013 I argued against David Lewis’s well-known and widely accepted claim that Newcomb’s problem and the prisoner’s dilemma are really notational variants of a single problem. Mark Walker’s paper in this journal takes issue with my argument. In this note I show how Walker’s criticisms are misplaced. The problems with Walker’s argument point to more general and independently interesting conclusions about, first, the relation between deliberation and decision and, second, the differences between the prisoner’s dilemma, which is a (...) strategic choice problem, and Newcomb’s problem, which is a parametric choice problem. (shrink)

As a general rule, whenever a hearer is justified in forming the belief that p on the basis of a speaker’s testimony, she will also be justified in assuming that the speaker has formed her belief appropriately in light of a relevantly large and representative sample of the evidence that bears on p. In simpler terms, a justification for taking someone’s testimony entails a justification for trusting her assessment of the evidence. This introduces the possibility of what I will call (...) “evidential preemption.” Evidential preemption occurs when a speaker, in addition to offering testimony that p, also warns the hearer of the likelihood that she will subsequently be confronted with apparently contrary evidence: this is done, however, not so as to encourage the hearer to temper her confidence in p in anticipation of that evidence, but rather to suggest that the (apparently) contrary evidence is in fact misleading evidence or evidence that has already been taken into account. Either way, the speaker is signalling to the hearer that the subsequent disclosure of this evidence will not require her to significantly revise her belief that p. Such preemption can effectively inoculate an audience against future contrary evidence, and thereby creates an opening for a form of exploitative manipulation that I will call “epistemic grooming.” Nonetheless, I argue, not all uses of evidential preemption are nefarious; it can also serve as an important tool for guiding epistemically limited agents though complex evidential scenarios. (shrink)

Transcendence, defined as the capacity to perceive the immediate stimulus environment in relation to long-range or abstract concerns, is a key aspect of self-control, and indeed self-regulation often breaks down because attention becomes focused exclusively on the immediate stimuli (i.e., transcendence fails). Factors that restrict attention to the here and now will weaken self-control, whereas factors that promote transcendence will enhance it. Guilt may be one example of the latter.

Contrary to his own perspective, Rachlin introduces a ghostly inner cost to explain the persistence of behavioral patterns and agency to explain their origins. Both inconsistencies can be set straight by taking account of history and a context larger than the pattern itself. Persistence is explained by stimulus control, if one assumes that defection from a pattern has stimulus properties and is punished. The origins of patterns are understood as an outcome of selection in the larger context of cultural or (...) biological evolution. (shrink)

This article examines a frequent assumption of sociological accounts of knowledge: the idea that knowledge acts. The performativity of knowledge claims is here analysed through the prism of ‘sociological excuses’: the idea that sociological explanations can act as ‘excuses’ for otherwise unacceptable behaviour. The article builds on Austin’s distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary effects to discuss the relationship between sociological explanation, sociological justification and sociological critique. It argues that understanding how (and if) sociological explanations can act requires paying attention to (...) social and political conditions of performativity and their transformation in late liberalism. (shrink)

Antinatalism is an emerging philosophy and practice that challenges pronatalism, the prevailing philosophy and practice in reproductive matters. We explore justifications of antinatalism—the arguments from the quality of life, the risk of an intolerable life, the lack of consent, and the asymmetry of good and bad—and argue that none of them supports a concrete, understandable, and convincing moral case for not having children. We identify concentration on possible future individuals who may or may not come to be as the main (...) culprit for the failure and suggest that the focus should be shifted to people who already exist. Pronatalism’s hegemonic status in contemporary societies imposes upon us a lifestyle that we have not chosen yet find almost impossible to abandon. We explicate the nature of this imposition and consider the implications of its exposure to different stakeholders with varying stands on the practice of antinatalism. Imposition as a term has figured in reproductive debates before, but the argument from postnatal, mental, and cultural imposition we launch is new. It is the hitherto overlooked and underdeveloped justification of antinatalism that should be solid and comprehensible enough to be used even by activists in support of their work. (shrink)

The models of internal self-control that have recently been proposed by behavioral economists do not depict motivational interaction that occurs while temptation is present. Those models that include willpower at all either envision a faculty with a motivation (“strength”) different from the motives that are weighed in the marketplace of choice, or rely on incompatible goals among diverse brain centers. Both assumptions are questionable, but these models’ biggest problem is that they do not let resolutions withstand re-examination while being challenged (...) by impulsive alternatives. The economists’ models all attempt to make a single equilibrium preference predictable from a person’s prior incentives. This was the original purpose of these models’ hyperboloid (“β–δ”) delay discount functions, which have been widely justified by the assumption that a person’s intertemporal inconsistency (impulsiveness) can be accounted for by the arousal of appetite for visceral rewards. Although arousal is clearly a factor in some cases of intertemporal inconsistency, it cannot be blamed for others, and furthermore does not necessarily imply hyperboloid discounting. The inadequacy of β–δ functions is particularly evident in models of internal self-control. I have reviewed several of these models, and have argued for a return to pure hyperbolic discount function as originally proposed, the relatively high tails of which can motivate a recursive process of self-prediction and thereby the formation of self-enforcing intertemporal contracts. Such a process does not require a separately motivated faculty of will, or incompatible goals among brain centers; but it also does not permit the prediction of unique preferences from prior incentives. (shrink)

A commitment to truth requires that you are open to receiving new evidence, even if that evidence contradicts your current beliefs. You should be open to changing your mind. However, this truism gives rise to the paradox of empathy. The paradox arises with the possibility of mental corruption through transformative change, and has consequences for how we should understand tolerance, disagreement, and the ability to have an open mind. I close with a discussion of how understanding this paradox provides a (...) new explanation for a certain kind of standoff between the believer and the skeptic with regard to religious belief. (shrink)

This study will answer the question, what do students expect to learn from philosophy teachers in the 21st century. by framing a response based on the following: The researcher’s teaching philosophy developed over 30 years, a survey conducted of UAEU students, and a discussion of the changing role and purpose of philosophy in the academy and current pedagogical philosophy in teaching. The study has focused on how philosophical questions have been changed over time, using new technology to teach philosophy, what (...) are the characteristics of philosophy teachers and students, the new direction for teaching philosophy, and career opportunities. The practical frame of this research will be analyzed students survey conducted on female students from United Arab Emirates University. I will use the method of content analysis to investigate and trace this phenomenon to determine its meaning, developing philosophical questions, and the new direction for teaching philosophy. Then I will examine the data taken from the theoretical and practical sources for the purpose of diagnosing and reaching conclusions a process which is called in philosophy synthesis, therefore the approach of the research would be analysis and synthesis. (shrink)

I argue for a soft compatibilist theory of free will, i.e., such that free will is compatible with both determinism and indeterminism, directly opposite hard incompatibilism, which holds free will incompatible both with determinism and indeterminism. My intuitions in this book are primarily based on an analysis of meditation, but my arguments are highly syncretic, deriving from many fields, including behaviorism, psychology, conditioning and deconditioning theory, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, simulation theory, etc. I offer a causal/functional analysis of (...) meta-mental control, or 'metacausality', cashed out in counterfactual terms, to solve what I call the easy problem of free will. (shrink)

Rachlin's view of self-control is rejected on the grounds that his arguments do not establish the possibility of abstract, external, stimulus patterns and that his experiments, although they show that pigeons and human beings do sometimes choose postponed rather than immediate gratification, do not challenge the commonly held view that internal factors are involved in the former choice.

Simon’s bounded rationality , the first scientific research program to seriously take the cognitive limitations of decision makers into account, has often been conflated with his more restricted concept of satisficing—choosing an alternative that meets or exceeds specified criteria, but that is not guaranteed to be unique or in any sense “the best.” Proponents of optimization often dismiss bounded rationality out of hand with the following “hallway syllogism” : bounded rationality “boils down to” satisficing; satisficing is “simply” a theory of (...) search for alternatives that takes into account the costs of computation. Hence, bounded rationality is “just a minor tweak” on optimal search theory. (shrink)