As we know, there is a difference between a simple wish and the will of an individual. Not only a concrete action is required in order to alleviate the impact of various factors that inhibit the former before it becomes ‘will’, but also a deep level of human consciousness. It implies conscientious motivation, clear goals, etc. My paper introduces some of the elements instrumental in the leap from the wish to the human will. As the issue of Free Will (...) is central to the paper because when I say ‘human will’ I refer to ‘free will’, I need to mention that my perspective on this notion is pragmatic. I. e. I understand that even though any decision we make is conditioned by various factors, we do not think of this state of affair when we carry out our activities – at least not always. Because of that we feel free – free enough to be able to function according to social norms. (shrink)

Neo-Humean instrumentalist theories of reasons for acting have been presented with a dilemma: either they are normatively trivial and, hence, inadequate as a normative theory or they covertly commit themselves to a noninstrumentalist normative principle. The claimed result is that no purely instrumentalist theory of reasons for acting can be normatively adequate. This dilemma dissolves when we understand what question neo-Humean instrumentalists are addressing. The dilemma presupposes that neo-Humeans are attempting to address the question of how to act, 'simpliciter'. Instead, (...) they are evaluating actions from the agent's normative perspective. (shrink)

This article introduces a strategic decision-game theoretic approach, the Pardoner’s Dilemma, and juxtaposes it with the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Game theory has emerged as a significant approach in the twentieth century for explaining strategic decision-making in numerous arenas, including economics, business, politics, ethics, international relations, biology, law, and war studies. ‘Game theory’ explains how and why players/actors/agents cooperate or conflict to procure their self-interests in a social world. Life is a game, and human, corporate, and artificial intelligent agents are players who (...) play different games to maximise utility or minimise disutility. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a promising game-theoretic approach that explains strategic decision-making in zero-sum and non-zero-sum games. ‘Strategic decision-making’ means that the outcome does not depend upon the actions of a player but upon all players. There are numerous essential game strategies, including tossing, negotiation, bargaining, balloting, competition, chance, power, and arbitration. Although the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a good game-theoretic approach, it does not allow players to use the key game strategies. In contrast, Pardoner’s Dilemma is a game theoretic approach that not only explains zero-sum and non-zero-sum games but also allows the players to use different game strategies, such as negotiation, bargaining, tossing, chance, balloting, competition, arbitration, and power. The article develops and defends the Pardoner’s Dilemma in the game-theoretic approach as an alternative to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The article claims that the Pardoner’s Dilemma is a more promising approach than the Prisoner’s Dilemma in the decision-game theoretic framework. By introducing the Pardoner’s Dilemma, the article enhances the scope of decision/game theory in social sciences. (shrink)

According to a tradition that we hold variously today, the relational person lives most personally in affective and cognitive empathy, whereby we enter subjective communion with another person. Near future social AIs, including social robots, will give us this experience without possessing any subjectivity of their own. They will also be consumer products, designed to be subservient instruments of their users’ satisfaction. This would seem inevitable. Yet we cannot live as personal when caught between instrumentalizing apparent persons (slaveholding) or numbly (...) dismissing the apparent personalities of our instruments (mild sociopathy). This paper analyzes and proposes a step toward ameliorating this dilemma by way of the thought of a 5th century North African philosopher and theologian, Augustine of Hippo, who is among those essential in giving us our understanding of relational persons. Augustine’s semiotics, deeply intertwined with our affective life, suggest that, if we are to own persuasive social robots humanely, we must join our instinctive experience of empathy for them to an empathic acknowledgment of the real unknown relational persons whose emails, text messages, books, and bodily movements will have provided the training data for the behavior of near-future social AIs. So doing, we may see simulation as simulation (albeit persuasive), while expanding our empathy to include those whose refracted behavioral moments are the seedbed of this simulation. If we naïvely stop at the social robot as the ultimate object of our cognitive and affective empathy, we will suborn the sign to ourselves, undermining rather than sustaining a culture that prizes empathy and abhors the instrumentalization of persons. (shrink)

The Church is facing a dilemma in how to apply and live out its message in a postmodern world. For many in the Church an understanding and application of morals and ethics has become bewildering. This assignment attempts to develop a Christian vocabulary and conceptual framework for morality. This is done by firstly elucidating the milieu out of which postmodernism arose. Modernism, through universal claims of reason and instrumental rationality, believed in the ultimate mastery of the world. The failure (...) of the Enlightenment project to develop universal morality and law led to a new perspective on reason and reality and new reflection on life, morality and meaning. Thus, I reflect on the parturition and value of postmodernism through offering an evaluation and critique of the ideology of postmodernism. Next, I propose the need for Christian ideology to be firstly separated from cultural interpretations so as to avoid ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism. After exploring the development and purpose of worldviews I argue for the building of cultural bridges and for the Gospel and Biblical worldview to be suitably encoded. After learning about God's nature as reflected in the narrative of the Prodigal Son I posit an understanding of what postmodern ethics entails and how then to define and respond to ethical issues. Through case studies I apply the key principles identified in the study. These are that moderation is a virtue; that many timeless truths are customary truths that arise in a specific historical/cultural situations; that many problems are not ethical issues but are rather a comprehension and/or a misinterpretation of the Scriptures regarding what it means to be a Christian and how we are to live our Christian profession to mention a few. I reason and plead for a Christian ethical system of incarnational engaged compassion in a postmodern world. I hope this academic paper stimulates critical theological reflection whilst hopefully illuminating and enlightening the reader. (shrink)

To the normal reasons that we think can justify one in preferring something, x (namely, that x has objectively preferable properties, or has properties that one prefers things to have, or that x's obtaining would advance one's preferences), I argue that it can be a justifying reason to prefer x that one's very preferring of x would advance one's preferences. Here, one prefers x not because of the properties of x, but because of the properties of one's having the preference (...) for x. So-revising one's preferences is rational in paradoxical choice situations like Kavka's Deterrence Paradox. I then try to meet the following objections: that this is stoicist, incoherent, bad faith; that it conflates instrumental and intrinsic value, gives wrong solutions to the problems presented by paradoxical choice situations, entails vicious regresses of value justification, falsifies value realism, makes valuing x unresponsive to x's properties, causes value conflict, conflicts with other standards of rationality, violates decision theory, counsels immorality, makes moral paradox, treats value change as voluntary, conflates first- and second-order values, is psychologically unrealistic, and wrongly presumes that paradoxical choice situations can even occur. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga has famously responded to the logical problem of evil by appealing to the intrinsic value of significant free will. A problem, however, arises because traditional theists believe that both God and the redeemed who go to heaven cannot do wrong acts. This entails that both God and the redeemed in heaven lack significant freedom. If significant freedom is indeed valuable, then God and the redeemed in heaven would lack something intrinsically valuable. However, if significant freedom is not intrinsically (...) valuable, then Plantinga’s reply to the logical problem of evil fails. In this paper, we assess three contemporary solutions to the dilemma above. The first is the love solution, which proposes that significant freedom is necessary for agents to love, and loving others is intrinsically good. The second is the soul-making solution, which argues that significant freedom is necessary for self-developing one’s moral character, and having a self-developed moral character is intrinsically good. The third is the derivative free will solution, which argues that significant freedom is necessary for derivative free will in heaven, and derivative free will is intrinsically good. We raise problems against all three solutions and instead defend a fourth solution – the ultimate responsibility solution. That is, significant freedom is instrumentally valuable as it gives agents ultimate responsibility with regards to morally significant acts. Finally, we defend the ultimate responsibility solution against two major objections. (shrink)

It is commonly accepted that what we ought to do collectively does not imply anything about what each of us ought to do individually. According to this line of reasoning, if cooperating will make no difference to an outcome, then you are not morally required to do it. And if cooperating will be personally costly to you as well, this is an even stronger reason to not do it. However, this reasoning results in a self-defeating, yet entirely predictable outcome. If (...) everyone is rational, no one will cooperate, resulting in an aggregate outcome that is devastating for everyone. This dismal analysis explains why climate change and other collective action problems are so difficult to ameliorate. The goal of this paper is to provide a different, exploratory framework for thinking about individual reasons for action in collective action problems. I argue that the concept of commitment gives us a new perspective on collective action problems. Once we take the structure of commitment into account, this activates requirements of diachronic rationality that give individuals instrumental reasons to cooperate in collective action problems. (shrink)

Experimental research suggests that people draw a moral distinction between bad outcomes brought about as a means versus a side effect (or byproduct). Such findings have informed multiple psychological and philosophical debates about moral cognition, including its computational structure, its sensitivity to the famous Doctrine of Double Effect, its reliability, and its status as a universal and innate mental module akin to universal grammar. But some studies have failed to replicate the means/byproduct effect especially in the absence of other factors, (...) such as personal contact. So we aimed to determine how robust the means/byproduct effect is by conducting a meta-analysis of both published and unpublished studies (k = 101; 24,058 participants). We found that while there is an overall small difference between moral judgments of means and byproducts (standardized mean difference = 0.87, 95% CI 0.67 – 1.06; standardized mean change = 0.57, 95% CI 0.44 – 0.69; log odds ratio = 1.59, 95% CI 1.15 – 2.02), the mean effect size is primarily moderated by whether the outcome is brought about by personal contact, which typically involves the use of personal force. (shrink)

Instrumentalists about need believe that all needs are instrumental, i.e., ontologically dependent upon ends, goals or purposes. Absolutists view some needs as non-instrumental. The aims of this article are: clearly to characterize the instrumentalism/absolutism debate that is of concern (mainly §1); to establish that both positions have recent and current adherents (mainly §1); to bring what is, in comparison with prior literature, a relatively high level of precision to the debate, employing some hitherto neglected, but important, insights (passim); (...) to show, on grounds not previously to the fore in the literature, that insofar as instrumentalism’s advocates have provided arguments for the position, these are unsound (§2); to argue against instrumentalism using a new dilemma concerning whether ‘end’, ‘goal’ and ‘purpose’ are interpreted in a mentalistic manner (§3); to elucidate the implications of the needs/need-satisfiers and preconditions/means distinctions for the debate (§4). (shrink)

David Gauthier suggested that all genuine moral problems are Prisoners Dilemmas (PDs), and that the morally and rationally required solution to a PD is to co-operate. I say there are four other forms of moral problem, each a different way of agents failing to be in PDs because of the agents’ preferences. This occurs when agents have preferences that are malevolent, self-enslaving, stingy, or bullying. I then analyze preferences as reasons for action, claiming that this means they must not (...) target the impossible, they must be able to be acted on in the circumstances, their targets must be attainable, and having the preferences must make their targets more likely. For groups of agents to have a distribution of preferences, their preferences must jointly have those four features, this imposing a kind of universalizability requirement on possible preferences. I then claim that, if all agents began with preferences satisfying these requirements, their preferences would not be of the morally problematic sort (on pain, variously, of circularity or contradiction in the specification of their targets). Instead, they would be either morally innocent preferences, or ones which put the agents in PDs. And it would then be instrumentally rational for the agents to prefer mutual co-operation. Thus if all agents initially had rationally permissible preferences and made rational choices of actions and preferences thereafter, they would never acquire immoral preferences, and so never be rationally moved to immoral actions. Further, the states of affairs such agents would be moved to bring about would be compatible with what Rawls’ agents would chose behind a veil of ignorance. Morality therefore reduces to rationality; necessarily, the actions categorically required by morality are also categorically required by rationality. (shrink)

Recent research has relied on trolley-type sacrificial moral dilemmas to study utilitarian versus nonutili- tarian modes of moral decision-making. This research has generated important insights into people’s attitudes toward instrumental harm—that is, the sacrifice of an individual to save a greater number. But this approach also has serious limitations. Most notably, it ignores the positive, altruistic core of utilitarianism, which is characterized by impartial concern for the well-being of everyone, whether near or far. Here, we develop, refine, and (...) validate a new scale—the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale—to dissociate individual differences in the ‘negative’ (permissive attitude toward instrumental harm) and ‘positive’ (impartial concern for the greater good) dimensions of utilitarian thinking as manifested in the general population. We show that these are two independent dimensions of proto-utilitarian tendencies in the lay population, each exhibiting a distinct psychological profile. Empathic concern, identification with the whole of humanity, and concern for future generations were positively associated with impartial beneficence but negatively associated with instrumental harm; and although instrumental harm was associated with subclinical psychopathy, impartial beneficence was associated with higher religiosity. Importantly, although these two dimensions were independent in the lay population, they were closely associated in a sample of moral philosophers. Acknowledging this dissociation between the instrumental harm and impartial beneficence components of utilitarian thinking in ordinary people can clarify existing debates about the nature of moral psychology and its relation to moral philosophy as well as generate fruitful avenues for further research. (shrink)

Every day, thousands of polls, surveys, and rating scales are employed to elicit the attitudes of humankind. Given the ubiquitous use of these instruments, it seems we ought to have firm answers to what is measured by them, but unfortunately we do not. To help remedy this situation, we present a novel approach to investigate the nature of attitudes. We created a self-transforming paper survey of moral opinions, covering both foundational principles, and current dilemmas hotly debated in the media. (...) This survey used a magic trick to expose participants to a reversal of their previously stated attitudes, allowing us to record whether they were prepared to endorse and argue for the opposite view of what they had stated only moments ago. The result showed that the majority of the reversals remained undetected, and a full 69% of the participants failed to detect at least one of two changes. In addition, participants often constructed coherent and unequivocal arguments supporting the opposite of their original position. These results suggest a dramatic potential for flexibility in our moral attitudes, and indicates a clear role for self-attribution and post-hoc rationalization in attitude formation and change. (shrink)

This review of Richard Tuck's Free Riding conveys Tuck's crucial distinction between the logic of collective action which fails due to the problem of causal negligibility, and free riding, which has been modeled as a Prisoner's Dilemma and involves casually impacting another actor in an adverse manner. Tuck also distinguishes the practice of voting which he argues neither fails due to the worry of causal negligibility or due to free riding; instead it represents a problem of achieving sufficiency of votes (...) representing a minimum winning coalition. This article clarifies how the problem of collective action resembles perfect free market competition which is defined to be characterized by a state in which no single agent can impact the price of a good. Similarly, in a large scale collective action, no single actor can have a causal impact on the outcome of the vast enterprise. This inability to make a difference due to the negligibility of each individual's causal power differentiates collective action and the tragedy of the commons from other social problems. (shrink)

David Lewis presented Convention as an alternative to the conventionalism characteristic of early-twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Rudolf Carnap is well known for suggesting the arbitrariness of any particular linguistic convention for engaging in scientific inquiry. Analytic truths are self-consistent, and are not checked against empirical facts to ascertain their veracity. In keeping with the logical positivists before him, Lewis concludes that linguistic communication is conventional. However, despite his firm allegiance to conventions underlying not just languages but also social customs, he pioneered (...) the view that convening need not require any active agreement to participate. Lewis proposed that conventions arise from “an exchange of manifestations of a propensity to conform to a regularity” (87–8). In reasserting the conventional quality of languages and other practices resting on mutual expectations, Lewis comfortably works within the analytic tradition. Yet he also deviates from his predecessors because his conventionalist approach is comprehensively grounded in instrumentalism. Lewis adopts an extension of David Hume's desire-belief psychology articulated in rational choice theory. He develops his philosophy of convention relying on the highly formal mid-twentieth-century expected utility and game theories. This attempt to account for language and social customs wholly in terms of instrumental rationality has the implication of reducing normativity to preference satisfaction. Lewis’ approach continues in the trend of undermining normative political philosophy because institutions and practices arise spontaneously, without the deliberate involvement of agents. Perhaps Lewis’ Convention is best seen as a resurgent form of analytic philosophy, characterized by “a style of argument, hostility to [ambitious] metaphysics, focus on language, and the dominance of logic and formalization” that solves the dilemma of “combining the analytic inheritance…with normative concerns” by reducing normativity to individuals’ preference fulfillment consistent with the axioms of rational choice. (shrink)

: The theory of objective value is the central feature in the paradigm of political economy. The Newtonian heritage plays a major role in giving political economy the status of a self-standing empirical science, and a reconstruction of this heritage casts fresh light on the idea of value and its role in the definition of the subject matter of political economy. Cognitive progress carried by classical political economy turns out to be related with the dilemmas of Newtonian epistemology and (...) the alternative between essentialist realism and instrumental conventionalism. (shrink)

En el presente estudio participaron 270 estudiantes en dos muestras; la primera con alumnos de bachillerato, la segunda con alumnos universitarios, ambos del estado de Puebla, México. La investigación fue básicamente cuantitativa, sin embargo, el instrumento utilizado permitió obtener valiosa información cualitativa. El objetivo fue contrastar los resultados históricos de test con dilemas morales clásicos. Los participantes se enfrentaron al Dilema del tranvía, al Dilema de la pasarela y al Dilema de Sofía. Los resultados demostraron que es válida la categorización (...) en cuatro posturas morales básicas: utilitarismo, emotivismo, deontología y ética de la virtud. Y si bien se obtuvieron, en una primera instancia, resultados cuantitativos catalogados como mayormente utilitarios, lo cierto es que las creencias morales exhibidas en el estudio superan el dualismo utilitarismo-emotivismo de estudios previos consultados. In the present study, 270 students participated in two samples, the first with high school students, the second with university students, both from the state of Puebla. The research was quantitative, however, the instrument used allowed obtaining valuable qualitative information. The objective was to contrast the historical test results with classic moral dilemmas. Participants faced the Trolley Dilemma, Footbridge Dilemma and Sophia’s Dilemma. The results showed that the categorization in four basic moral positions is valid: utilitarianism, emotivism, deontology and virtue ethics. And although quantitative results cataloged as mostly utilitarian were obtained in the first instance, the truth is that the moral beliefs exhibited in the study surpass the utilitarianism-emotivism dualism of previous studies consulted. (shrink)

Are workers dominated? A recent suite of neo-republican and relational egalitarian philosophers think they are. Suppose they are right; that is, suppose that some workers are governed by an unjust and arbitrary power existing in labour relations, which persists even in the presence of the actual ability to exit. My question is this: does that give us reason to impose restrictions on firms? According to the so-called Efficiency Objection there are relevant trade-offs that need to be considered between the efficiency (...) of firms and the freedom of workers, and upon considering these trade-offs, we should reject workplace democracy. In this paper, I present a dilemma for the Efficiency Objection. I argue that either the Efficiency Objection is justified on moral grounds or non-moral grounds; if the Efficiency Objection is justified on moral grounds, then it fails because efficiency cannot be valued for its own sake (it is only instrumentally good); if the Efficiency Objection is justified on non-moral grounds, then it fails because of the respect that we owe to persons as persons; therefore, the Efficiency Objection fails. (shrink)

The relationship between power, law and consent is a key feature of the Western debate on criminal law. On the one side, defining the legitimate ways of exercising the punitive power has been a critical question since the Enlightenment thought onwards and especially as to the rule of law doctrine. On the other side, the role played by public punishment in shaping consent and its communicative potential have been crucial questions for critical, as well as non-critical approaches to criminal law (...) in contemporary thought. These questions gain in strength and radicalism when it comes to international criminal law (ICL). In this case the filter of the state is not present anymore to mediate between power, law and consent, and the power to punish individuals is directly exercised by international institutions. This means, on the one hand, that traditional justifications of the power to punish and which are elaborated on in the domestic sphere are not useful anymore in legitimating international punishment. International criminal norms are not framed by an international democratically elected parliament, and their exercise is not controlled by the complex system of checks and balances typical of the rule of law. On the other hand, having not being created by a sovereign, international criminal law cannot be conceived as an instrument to build or consolidate consent around the sovereign. A double-sided dilemma therefore arises: traditional explanations are no longer apt to answer the question whether ICL is legitimate, while ICL itself can no longer be considered an instrument to build consent around the traditional power exercising it, namely the state. Although I consider both sides of the dilemma equally interesting and stimulating, I will focus here only on one side of the coin: the ability to build consent of the ICL institutions, and in particular the International Criminal Court (ICC). In other words, instead of asking whether the consent around the ICC is broad enough for the Court to be considered legitimate, I shall ask whether the ICC is able to build consent around the world order it embodies. (shrink)

Why do promises give rise to reasons? I consider a quadruple of possibilities which I think will not work, then sketch the explanation of the normativity of promising I find more plausible—that it is constitutive of the practice of promising that promise-breaking implies liability for blame and that we take liability for blame to be a bad thing. This effects a reduction of the normativity of promising to conventionalism about liability together with instrumental normativity and desire-based reasons. This is (...) important for a number of reasons, but the most important reason is that this style of account can be extended to account for nearly all normativity—one notable exception being instrumental normativity itself. Success in the case of promises suggests a general reduction of normativity to conventions and instrumental normativity. But success in the cases of promises is already quite interesting and does not depend essentially the general claim about normativity. (shrink)

Aiming at the allocation of scarce medical resources, Immanuel and other scholars have put forward a set of influential ethical values and guiding principles. It assigns the priority of resource allocation to those whose lives can be saved and maximized, those who can bring the greatest instrumental value, and those who are the worse off. For other members of society, random selection under the same conditions is adopted. Following the Rawlsian "lexical order, lexicographical" rule, this priority arrangement requires that (...) the "utilitarian principle" should be placed before the "equality principle", and the "instrumental difference principle", the "integrity difference principle" and the "fair opportunity principle" in turn acts on specific distribution agents. Although the framework and its priority rules have obvious drawbacks when faced with Medical Resources Squeeze and other dilemmas, with the help of an understanding of its internal structure, it can effectively respond to the four core issues in the allocation of scarce medical resources. (shrink)

What should we believe when epistemic and practical reasons pull in opposite directions? The traditional view states that there is something that we ought epistemically to believe and something that we ought practically to (cause ourselves to) believe, period. More recent accounts challenge this view, either by arguing that there is something that we ought simpliciter to believe, all epistemic and practical reasons considered (the weighing view), or by denying the normativity of epistemic reasons altogether (epistemic anti‐normativism). I argue against (...) both accounts and defend the traditional view. An agent can be blameworthy in doxastic dilemmas for complying with their practical but not their epistemic reasons. This reveals how epistemic reasons are normative: the concept of epistemic blame helps us track epistemic normativity. (shrink)

This is an opinionated guide to the literature on epistemic dilemmas. It discusses seven kinds of situations where epistemic dilemmas appear to arise; dilemmic, dilemmish, and non-dilemmic takes on them; and objections to dilemmic views along with dilemmist’s replies to them.

The current chapter provides an overview of research on responses in moral dilemmas where maximization of outcomes for the greater good (utilitarianism) conflicts with adherence to moral norms (deontology). Expanding on a description of the traditional paradigm to study moral-dilemma judgments (i.e., the trolley problem), the chapter reviews the most prominent dual-process account of moral-dilemma judgments, normative conclusions that have been derived from this account, and criticisms raised against this line of work. The following sections review advances in the (...) development of alternative approaches that aim to address shortcomings of the traditional dilemma paradigm as well as the implications of this work for psychological theories of moral-dilemma judgments and philosophical inferences about the normative implications of moral-dilemma research. The chapter concludes with a review of research on the links between moral-dilemma judgments and social impressions. (shrink)

Jane Friedman claims that when we inquire, there is a tension between the instrumental normativity of our inquiries and some basic epistemic norms: The former forbids what the latter permit. Moreover, she argues that since the instrumental normativity of inquiry is epistemic, the previous tension shows that our current conception of epistemic normativity is incoherent and needs to be revised. To solve the problem, she suggests that all our epistemic norms should be considered “zetetic”, namely, norms of inquiry. (...) In this paper, I will argue that the instrumental normativity of inquiry Friedman depicts is inaccurate. I will propose the following alternative picture: All our reasons to inquire and take means to answer our questions are instrumental and can be derivative from the epistemic, the practical, or both. However, developing this alternative view, I will argue that our duties to inquire and take means to answer our questions are just practical in nature. Based on this, I will show that the tension between the epistemic and the zetetic Friedman depicts is just a conflict between the practical and the epistemic: A conflict that does not show per se that the current conception of epistemic normativity is incoherent and needs to be revised. (shrink)

David Miller argues that national identity is indispensable for the successful functioning of a liberal democracy. National identity makes important contributions to liberal democratic institutions, including creating incentives for the fulfilment of civic duties, facilitating deliberative democracy, and consolidating representative democracy. Thus, a shared identity is indispensable for liberal democracy and grounds a good claim for self-determination. Because Miller’s arguments appeal to the instrumental values of a national culture, I call his argument ‘instrumental value’ arguments. In this paper, (...) I examine the instrumental value arguments and show that they fail to justify a group’s right to self-determination. (shrink)

The issue whether psychopathic offenders are practically rational has attracted philosophical attention. The problem is relevant in theoretical discussions on moral psychology and in those concerning the appropriate social response to the crimes of these individuals. We argue that classical and current experiments concerning the instrumental learning in psychopaths cannot directly support the conclusion that they have impaired instrumental rationality, construed as the ability for transferring the motivation by means-ends reasoning. In fact, we defend the different claim that (...) these experiments appear to show that psychopaths in certain circumstances are not aware of the relevant means for their ends. Moreover, we suggest how further empirical research could help to settle the issue. (shrink)

This paper introduces and motivates a solution to a dilemma from peer disagreement. Following Buchak (2021), I argue that peer disagreement puts us in an epistemic dilemma: there is reason to think that our opinions should both change and not change when we encounter disagreement with our epistemic peers. I argue that we can solve this dilemma by changing our credences, but not our beliefs in response to disagreement. I explain how my view solves the dilemma in question, and then (...) offer two additional arguments for it: one related to contents and attitudes, and another related to epistemic peerhood. (shrink)

This paper argues that instrumental rationality is more permissive than expected utility theory. The most compelling instrumentalist argument in favour of separability, its core requirement, is that agents with non-separable preferences end up badly off by their own lights in some dynamic choice problems. I argue that once we focus on the question of whether agents’ attitudes to uncertain prospects help define their ends in their own right, or instead only assign instrumental value in virtue of the outcomes (...) they may lead to, we see that the argument must fail. Either attitudes to prospects assign non-instrumental value in their own right, in which case we cannot establish the irrationality of the dynamic choice behaviour of agents with non-separable preferences. Or they don’t, in which case agents with non-separable preferences can avoid the problematic choice behaviour without adopting separable preferences. (shrink)

The Gamer's Dilemma is a much-discussed issue in video game ethics which probes our seemingly conflicting intuitions about the moral acceptability of virtual murder compared to virtual child molestation. But how we approach this dilemma depends on how we frame it. With this in mind, I identify three ways the dilemma has been conceptualized: the Descriptive Gamer's Investigation, which focuses on empirically explaining the source of our intuitions; the Gamer's Puzzle, which uses the dilemma to explore and test moral or (...) metaphysical theories; and the Applied Gamer's Dilemma, which reconstructs the moral commitments underlying the intuitions to provide action-guidance. Clearly distinguishing these framings allows us to identify the distinct methodologies and criteria of success for each approach. This tripartite framework helps resolve confusions in the debate, highlights the need for experimental philosophy to test proposed resolutions, and opens space for a serious reconsideration of consequentialism. The paper thus provides conceptual clarity to move the discussion forward productively. (shrink)

Political theorists have offered many accounts of collective decision-making under pluralism. I discuss a key dimension on which such accounts differ: the importance assigned not only to the choices made but also to the reasons underlying those choices. On that dimension, different accounts lie in between two extremes. The ‘minimal liberal account’ holds that collective decisions should be made only on practical actions or policies and that underlying reasons should be kept private. The ‘comprehensive deliberative account’ stresses the importance of (...) giving reasons for collective decisions, where such reasons should also be collectively decided. I compare these two accounts on the basis of a formal model developed in the growing literature on the ‘discursive dilemma’ and ‘judgment aggregation’ and address several questions: What is the trade-off between the (minimal liberal) demand for reaching agreement on outcomes and the (comprehensive deliberative) demand for reason-giving? How large should the ‘sphere of public reason’ be? When do the decision procedures suggested by the two accounts agree and when not? How good are these procedures at truthtracking on factual matters? What strategic incentives do they generate for decision-makers? My discussion identifies what is at stake in the choice between minimal liberal and comprehensive deliberative accounts of collective decisionmaking, and sheds light not only on these two ideal-typical accounts themselves, but also on many characteristics that intermediate accounts share with them. (shrink)

Ebola is a deadly disease with no cure; there is no vaccine developed yet. Many died during the 2014 outbreak in West Africa, and many healthcare professionals went to the virus infected area to treat the patients while placing their lives in danger. Not every medical professional placed in the field is a fully trained specialist, and sometimes one or two under-trained doctors are in charge of the entire clinic with some nurses and operating technicians. When unexpected outbreaks of the (...) virus occur in the places, the doctor(s) would encounter medical and ethical dilemmas. Should they leave or stay? In fact, this dilemma is not confined to the Ebola pandemic but relevant to all similar cases. In this paper, three authors, a medical resident, a clinical bioethicist, and a theoretical bioethicist respond to the dilemma. (shrink)

Is prostitution immoral? Various philosophers have put forward arguments for thinking so, one of the most notable being that, by engaging in sexual activity with someone for payment, the prostitute instrumentalizes himself or herself. In this paper, I identify two meanings of "instrumentalize" and, with them, two versions of the instrumentalization argument for the immorality of prostitution. I then critique each version of the argument.

In this paper, I will examine the notion of an epistemic dilemma, its characterizations in the literature, and the different intuitions prompted by it. I will illustrate that the notion of an epistemic dilemma is expected to capture various phenomena that are not easily unified with one concept: while some aspects of these phenomena are more about the agent in a certain situation, other aspects seem to be more about the situation as such. As a consequence, incompatible intuitions emerge concerning (...) the transparency of epistemic dilemmas as well as regarding the role that doxastic suspension plays in resolving cases of epistemic dilemma. I suggest to distinguish between the mental state of agents who find themselves in an epistemic dilemma and the normative situation that gives rise to a dilemma. I will refer to the agent’s mental state as epistemic conflict and will reserve the term epistemic dilemma for evidential situations in which epistemic principles either recommend incompatible doxastic responses or render all options impermissible. The concept of epistemic conflict not only captures the mental state of agents who find themselves in a genuine epistemic dilemma but also applies to agents who face difficult epistemic choices that they cannot resolve without substantial cognitive (and often pragmatic) effort, for example, via doxastic suspension. (shrink)

Douglas Edwards is arguably the most prominent contemporary advocate of moderate alethic pluralism. Significantly influenced by Crispin Wright and Michael Lynch, his work on the nature of truth has become widely discussed in the topical literature. Edwards labels his version of moderate alethic pluralism determination pluralism. At first blush, determination pluralism appears philosophically promising. The position deserves thoughtful consideration, particularly because of its capacity to accommodate the scope problem. I argue, however, that upon analysis the view is better understood as (...) a form of metaphysical dualism or what I will call meta-dualism. Furthermore, determination pluralists face a dilemma; there appears to be an instability at the core of their dualistic model. On the one horn of the dilemma, they need a clear metaphysical demarcation at the interface of their two necessary domains. On the other horn, they seem to need to a metaphysically vague boundary at the interface of their two necessary domains. Determination pluralism needs substantial revision. (shrink)

Perhaps death’s badness is an illusion. Epicureans think so and argue that agents cannot be harmed by death when they’re alive nor when they’re dead. I argue that each version of Epicureanism faces a fatal dilemma: it is either committed to a demonstrably false view about the relationship between self-regarding reasons and well-being or it is involved in a merely verbal dispute with deprivationism. I first provide principled reason to think that any viable view about the badness of death must (...) allow that agents have self-regarding reason to avoid death if doing so would increase their total well-being. I then show that Epicurean views which do not preserve this link are subject to reductio arguments and so should be rejected. After that, I show that the Epicurean views which accommodate this desideratum are involved in a merely verbal dispute with deprivationism. (shrink)

This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several “calibration dilemmas,” in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities. We first lay out a series of such dilemmas for prioritarian theories. We then consider a widely endorsed family of egalitarian views and show that they are subject to even more forceful calibration dilemmas than (...) prioritarian theories. Finally, we show that our results challenge common utilitarian accounts of the badness of inequalities in resources. (shrink)

The essay discusses the religious and ethical message of Shusaku Endo’s Silence. Briefly focusing first on the plot of the novel, the article proceeds to discuss the moral dilemma that is the core of the novel and asks whether the dilemma is symmetrical or incommensurable. Next, the essay analyzes the dilemma from the point of view of Max Scheler’s theory of the tragic. Finally, to highlight Rodrigues’s tragic situation, it discusses the notion of the hiddenness of God.

The dilemma I present for Laura Valentini’s paradox of ideal theory concerns a theory which includes idealizations but also an account of how you apply the theory to less ideal reality. If this does not count as an ideal theory, then theories of justice need not be ideal. If it does, then ideal theories can be action guiding.

It seems that different epistemic norms can come into conflict and so we might wonder what happens when they do impose incompatible requirements upon us. According to the dilemmic view, they might sometimes generate sets of requirements that cannot be satisfied, ensuring that there is no rationally acceptable way for a thinker to deal with the predicament she’s in. After reviewing the case for the dilemmic view, I introduce an alternative framework that accounts for the appearance of dilemma-like conflicts without (...) committing us to the possibility of genuine dilemmas. I argue that this alternative view has some important explanatory virtues that the dilemmic view lacks and can account for the problematic intuitions that seem to support the dilemmic view. (shrink)

The thesis of instrumental convergence holds that a wide range of ends have common means: for instance, self preservation, desire preservation, self improvement, and resource acquisition. Bostrom contends that instrumental convergence gives us reason to think that "the default outcome of the creation of machine superintelligence is existential catastrophe". I use the tools of decision theory to investigate whether this thesis is true. I find that, even if intrinsic desires are randomly selected, instrumental rationality induces biases towards (...) certain kinds of choices. Firstly, a bias towards choices which leave less up to chance. Secondly, a bias towards desire preservation, in line with Bostrom's conjecture. And thirdly, a bias towards choices which afford more choices later on. I do not find biases towards any other of the convergent instrumental means on Bostrom's list. I conclude that the biases induced by instrumental rationality at best weakly support Bostrom's conclusion that machine superintelligence is likely to lead to existential catastrophe. (shrink)

Epistemic instrumentalists think that epistemic normativity is just a special kind of instrumental normativity. According to them, you have epistemic reason to believe a proposition insofar as doing so is conducive to certain epistemic goals or aims—say, to believe what is true and avoid believing what is false. Perhaps the most prominent challenge for instrumentalists in recent years has been to explain, or explain away, why one’s epistemic reasons often do not seem to depend on one’s aims. This challenge (...) can arguably be met. But a different challenge looms: instrumental reasons in the practical domain have various properties that epistemic reasons do not seem to share. In this chapter, we offer a way for epistemic instrumentalists to overcome this challenge. Our main thesis takes the form of a conditional: if we accept an independently plausible transmission principle of instrumental normativity, we can maintain that epistemic reasons in fact do share the relevant properties of practical instrumental reasons. In addition, we can explain why epistemic reasons seem to lack these properties in the first place: some properties of epistemic reasons are elusive, or easy to overlook, because we tend to think and talk about epistemic reasons in an ‘elliptical’ manner. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to describe a problem for calibrationism: a view about higher order evidence according to which one's credences should be calibrated to one's expected degree of reliability. Calibrationism is attractive, in part, because it explains our intuitive judgments, and provides a strong motivation for certain theories about higher order evidence and peer disagreement. However, I will argue that calibrationism faces a dilemma: There are two versions of the view one might adopt. The first version, I (...) argue, has the implausible consequence that, in a wide range of cases, calibrationism is the only constraint on rational belief. The second version, in addition to having some puzzling consequences, is unmotivated. At the end of the paper I sketch a possible solution. (shrink)

Intuitively, many people seem to hold that engaging in acts of virtual murder in videogames is morally permissible, whereas engaging in acts of virtual child molestation is morally impermissible. The Gamer’s Dilemma (Luck in Ethics Inf Technol 11:31–36, 2009) challenges these intuitions by arguing that it is unclear whether there is a morally relevant difference between these two types of virtual actions. There are two main responses in the literature to this dilemma. First, attempts to resolve the dilemma by defending (...) an account of the relevant moral differences between virtual murder and virtual child molestation. Second, attempts to dissolve the dilemma by undermining the intuitions that ground it. In this paper, we argue that a narrow version of the Gamer’s Dilemma seems to survive attempts to resolve or dissolve it away entirely, since neither approach seems to be able to solve the dilemma for all cases. We thus provide a contextually sensitive version of the dilemma that more accurately tracks onto the intuitions of gamers. However, we also argue that the intuitions that ground the narrow version of the Dilemma may not have a moral foundation, and we put forward alternative non-moral normative foundations that seem to better account for the remaining intuitive difference between the two types of virtual actions. We also respond to proposed solutions to the Gamer’s Dilemma in novel ways and set out areas for future empirical work in this area. (shrink)

Lexical views in population axiology can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion without violating Transitivity or Separability. However, they imply a dilemma: either some good life is better than any number of slightly worse lives, or else the ‘at least as good as’ relation on populations is radically incomplete. In this paper, I argue that Archimedean views face an analogous dilemma. I thus conclude that the lexical dilemma gives us little reason to prefer Archimedean views. Even if we give up on lexicality, (...) problems of the same kind remain. (shrink)

Since Aristotle it has been common among philosophers to distinguish between two fundamental types of reasoning, theoretical and practical. We do not only want to work out what is the case but also what we ought to do. This article offers a logical analysis of instrumental reasoning, which is the paradigm of practical reasoning. In the first section I discuss the major types of instrumental reasoning and show why the accounts of most authors are defective. On the basis (...) of this discussion, I demonstrate in the second section that different types of normative conclusions are derivable from instrumental arguments and I show that it is an argument’s logical structure that determines what type of conclusion this is. (shrink)

In a recent paper, John Fischer develops a new argument against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) based on a deterministic scenario. Fischer uses this result (i) to rebut the Dilemma Defense - a well-known incompatibilist response to Frankfurt-type counterexamples to PAP; and (ii) to maintain that: If causal determinism rules out moral responsibility, it is not just in virtue of eliminating alternative possibilities. In this article, we argue that Fischer's new argument against PAP fails, thus leaving points (i) and (...) (ii) unsupported. (shrink)

Modern cosmology has two competing theories of the origin of the universe: the "Singularity theory" and the "Superstring theory". Four Dilemmas of the "Super-string theory" are presented: the incompleteness of the eleven space–time dimensions,the inextricable dependence on the “Space–Time Background”, the "Zero-Brane the-ory" admitting stuff smaller than the Planck scale, and the pure mathematical theory that cannot be falsified by experiments. Although the "Singularity theory" is faced with many critiques from the "Superstring theory", from the perspective of Informa-tion Ontology, (...) treating the "Singularity" as "Origin Information" can dissolve these troubles well. For the "Singularity theory", the new philosophical thinking frame-work effectively explains the parameter problems of the universe, and gives satisfied response to the challenges from the "Superstring theory". As a result, the "Singularity theory" has a more competitive advantage on the origin of the universe. (shrink)

The framework of Solomonoff prediction assigns prior probability to hypotheses inversely proportional to their Kolmogorov complexity. There are two well-known problems. First, the Solomonoff prior is relative to a choice of Universal Turing machine. Second, the Solomonoff prior is not computable. However, there are responses to both problems. Different Solomonoff priors converge with more and more data. Further, there are computable approximations to the Solomonoff prior. I argue that there is a tension between these two responses. This is because computable (...) approximations to Solomonoff prediction do not always converge. (shrink)

Philosophers of science turned to historical case studies in part in response to Thomas Kuhn's insistence that such studies can transform the philosophy of science. In this issue Joseph Pitt argues that the power of case studies to instruct us about scientific methodology and epistemology depends on prior philosophical commitments, without which case studies are not philosophically useful. Here I reply to Pitt, demonstrating that case studies, properly deployed, illustrate styles of scientific work and modes of argumentation that are not (...) well handled by currently standard philosophical analyses. I illustrate these claims with exemplary findings from case studies dealing with exploratory experimentation and with interdisciplinary cooperation across sciences to yield multiple independent means of access to theoretical entities. The latter cases provide examples of ways that scientists support claims about theoretical entities that are not available in work performed within a single discipline. They also illustrate means of correcting systematic biases that stem from the commitments of each discipline taken separately. These findings illustrate the transformative power of case study methods, allow us to escape from the horns of Pitt's "dilemma of case studies," and vindicate some of the post-Kuhn uses to which case studies have been put. (shrink)