abstract ‘Time is money’, Benjamin Franklin's ‘Poor Richard’ tells us. But instead of converting time expenditures into monetary equivalents, it makes more sense in many cases to convert money into temporal equivalents. The difficulty in putting a monetary value on time in unpaid household labour, when adjusting the National Accounts, points to the problems of the first approach. The advantages of the latter approach are illustrated by the Swedish system of specifying criminal fines in terms of the number of days (...) the offender would have to work to pay them off. (shrink)

Norms are a pervasive yet mysterious feature of social life. In Explaining Norms, four philosophers and social scientists team up to grapple with some of the many mysteries, offering a comprehensive account of norms: what they are; how and why they emerge, persist and change; and how they work.

Probabilism is committed to two theses: 1) Opinion comes in degrees—call them degrees of belief, or credences. 2) The degrees of belief of a rational agent obey the probability calculus. Correspondingly, a natural way to argue for probabilism is: i) to give an account of what degrees of belief are, and then ii) to show that those things should be probabilities, on pain of irrationality. Most of the action in the literature concerns stage ii). Assuming that stage i) has been (...) adequately discharged, various authors move on to stage ii) with varied and ingenious arguments. But an unsatisfactory response at stage i) clearly undermines any gains that might be accrued at stage ii) as far as probabilism is concerned: if those things are not degrees of belief, then it is irrelevant to probabilism whether they should be probabilities or not. In this paper we scrutinize the state of play regarding stage i). We critically examine several of the leading accounts of degrees of belief: reducing them to corresponding betting behavior (de Finetti); measuring them by that behavior (Jeffrey); and analyzing them in terms of preferences and their role in decision-making more generally (Ramsey, Lewis, Maher). We argue that the accounts fail, and so they are unfit to subserve arguments for probabilism. We conclude more positively: ‘degree of belief’ should be taken as a primitive concept that forms the basis of our best theory of rational belief and decision: probabilism. (shrink)

The paper’s target is the historically influential betting interpretation of subjective probabilities due to Ramsey and de Finetti. While there are several classical and well-known objections to this interpretation, the paper focuses on just one fundamental problem: There is a sense in which degrees of belief cannot be interpreted as betting rates. The reasons differ in different cases, but there’s one crucial feature that all these cases have in common: The agent’s degree of belief in a proposition A does not (...) coincide with her degree of belief in a conditional that A would be the case if she were to bet on A, where the belief in this conditional itself is conditioned on the supposition that the agent will have an opportunity to make such a bet. Even though the two degrees of belief sometimes can coincide (they will coincide in those cases when the bet has no expected causal bearings on the proposition A and the opportunity to bet have no evidential bearings on that proposition), it is the latter belief rather than the former that guides the agent’s rational betting behaviour. The reason is that this latter belief takes into consideration potential interferences that bet opportunities and betting itself might create with regard to the proposition to be betted on. It is because of this interference problem that the agent’s degree of belief in A cannot be interpreted as her betting rate for A. (shrink)

What is the relation between norms (in the sense of ?socially accepted rules?) and conventions? A number of philosophers have suggested that there is some kind of conceptual or constitutive relation between them. Some hold that conventions are or entail special kinds of norms (the ?conventions-as-norms thesis?). Others hold that at least some norms are or entail special kinds of conventions (the ?norms-as-conventions thesis?). We argue that both theses are false. Norms and conventions are crucially different conceptually and functionally in (...) ways that make it the case that it is a serious mistake to try to assimilate them. They are crucially different conceptually in that whereas conventions are not normative and are behaviour dependent and desire dependent, norms are normative, behaviour independent, and desire independent. They are crucially different functionally in that whereas conventions principally serve the function of facilitating coordination, norms principally serve the function of making us accountable to one another. (shrink)

Hindriks describes institutions as norm-governed social practices, and argue that his theory help bring together and complete earlier theories of institutions. In this comment on his paper, I argue that his argument would be even better if he clarified certain parts of his argument with regards to the nature of institutions and the relationship between institutions and social norms. I also argue that he should reconsider his claim that institutions (and social norms) exist in order to solve cooperation and coordination (...) problems. (shrink)

Voices on the political right have long claimed that the welfare state ought to be kept small, and that charities can take over many of the tasks involved in helping those at the bottom of society. The arguments in favor of this claim are controversial, but even if they are accepted at face value the policy proposal remains problematic. For the proposal presupposes that charities would, in fact, be able to raise enough money to provide adequate help to those in (...) need, and therefore assumes that charities are able to very significantly increase the number and/or size of donations they receive. We argue that there are good reasons for doubting that charities will be able to do this. Our argument turns on the fact that the most powerful strategy for eliciting donations—namely, allowing donors to use their donation to signal their pro-sociality—has an inbuilt upper limit. If too much emphasis is placed on the signaling opportunities donating to charity provides, donating no longer functions as an effective signal and the motivation to donate declines. (shrink)

According to the signaling theory of social norms, people comply with social norms in order to signal that they have a low discount rate for future costs and benefits and thereby that they are reliable cooperation partners. But the theory does not take into sufficient account the fact that the signaling value of social norm compliance depends on how many other people that comply, and that the signaling value at high compliance levels is rather low. Therefore, although signaling can explain (...) some compliance with social norms, it is unlikely to be the main explanation. (shrink)

The most recent major contribution to the literature on justice as mutual advantage is Peter Vanderschraaf’s book Strategic Justice. In this book, he develops a theory of justice as convention, where justice is those principles that rational, self-interested agents would choose to solve problems of partially conflicting interest. His theory is thus a kind of theory of justice as mutual advantage. A common criticism of theories of justice as mutual advantage is the Vulnerability Objection: if the principles of justice require (...) that resources are only shared with those that are net-contributors to a cooperative surplus, then those that are not net-contributors to that cooperative surplus (so-called vulnerable people) have no claim of justice to any share of the resources. But, the objection states, surely justice cannot exclude people simply because they are vulnerable. Vanderschraaf argues that his theory of justice as convention successfully answers the Vulnerability Objection. However, in this paper, I argue that although Vanderschraaf’s theory successfully demonstrates that it can be to the mutual advantage of rational, self-interested people to agree to share equally even when some people contribute more than others, the problem remains of why such people would share with those that can never contribute more to the cooperative surplus than what they would withdraw from it. Vanderschraaf’s solution is to weaken the requirement that people actually contribute. But that, I argue, undermines the claim that his theory is a theory of justice as mutual advantage. (shrink)

abstract ‘Time is money’, Benjamin Franklin's ‘Poor Richard’ tells us. But instead of converting time expenditures into monetary equivalents, it makes more sense in many cases to convert money into temporal equivalents. The difficulty in putting a monetary value on time in unpaid household labour, when adjusting the National Accounts, points to the problems of the first approach. The advantages of the latter approach are illustrated by the Swedish system of specifying criminal fines in terms of the number of days (...) the offender would have to work to pay them off. (shrink)

Many paradoxes have been revealed in the theory of democracy over the years. This article points to yet another paradox at the heart of democracy, whether in its aggregative or deliberative form.The paradox is this: If you are dealing with a large and heterogeneous community, in which people's choices are menu-sensitive in diverse ways, and if people's cognitive capacities preclude them from considering all items on a large menu simultaneouslythen individuals’ choices may be unstable and manipulable depending on how choices (...) over cognitively-manageable subsets of the menu are partitioned and sequenced, 1 and the collective choice may be likewise unstable and manipulable in consequence.Aggregative democracy casts this argument in terms of ‘alternatives’ on the menu for choice. Deliberative democracy casts this argument in terms of ‘considerations’. The same formal problem arises in both cases. (shrink)

State-sponsored breastfeeding promotion campaigns have become increasingly common in developed countries. In this article, by using the tools of liberal political theory, as well as public health and health promotion ethics, we argue that such campaigns are not justified. They ignore important costs for women, including undermining autonomy, fail to distribute burdens fairly, cannot be justified neutrally and fail a basic efficacy test. Moreover, our argument demonstrates that breastfeeding campaigns are a rare case that bridges the fields of public health (...) ethics and the ethics of health promotion campaigns. This demonstrates the need to consider the ethics of state promotion of both voluntary and coercive behavioural change that benefits third parties. (shrink)

It has long been common to identify an agent’s degrees of belief with her betting rates. Here is this betting interpretation in a nutshell: A bet on a proposition A with price C and a non-zero stake S is said to be fair for an agent iff the latter is willing to take each side of the bet, to buy the bet as to sell it. Assuming that such a bet on A exists and that the C/S ratio is constant (...) for different fair bets on A, this ratio is the agent’s betting rate for A. (shrink)

A healthy work-life balance has become increasingly important to people trying to cope with the pressures of contemporary society. This trend highlights the fallacy of assessing well-being in terms of finance alone; how much time we have matters just as much as how much money. The authors of this book have developed a novel way to measure 'discretionary time': time which is free to spend as one pleases. Exploring data from the US, Australia, Germany, France, Sweden and Finland, they show (...) that temporal autonomy varies substantially across different countries and under different living conditions. By calibrating how much control people have over their time, and how much they could have under alternative welfare, gender or household arrangements, this book offers a new perspective for comparative cross-national enquiries into the temporal aspects of human welfare. (shrink)

Many of the major challenges facing global society are unstructured collective harms (e.g., global warming): collective in the sense that they arise as the result of the actions of, or interactions among, multiple agents, and unstructured in the sense that there is no coordination or intention to cause harm among these agents. But how should we distribute moral responsibility for these harms? In this paper, an answer is proposed to this question. This answer builds on but develops existing proposals by (...) drawing together literatures that speak to different aspects of the question. First, it is argued that the notion of causal contribution needs to be broadened to include the idea of causation as production. Second, it is discussed how the voluntariness and foreseeability conditions are best interpreted in this context. Third, literature on moral taint is drawn to introduce additional objective (external) criteria. (shrink)

Explaining Norms is a work in philosophy of social science aspiring to provide an account of norms, their general character, their kinds ðformal, legal, moral, and socialÞ, what they can explain, and what explains their dynamic ðemergence, persistence, and unravelingÞ. The authors engage with various positions in ethics, political philosophy, and ðto some extentÞ the philosophy of law. The discussion is rewarding and inventive—it provides distinctive and intriguing views on several topics ðe.g., on the distinction between moral and social normsÞ. (...) There are a lot of ideas here. Perhaps this is predictable, given that the work is a product of four capable minds. What is surprising is the range of ideas and arguments on which the authors manage to agree and out of which they construct one reasonably cohesive account. Given the wide range of literatures discussed, readers are likely to find much of interest. Not surprisingly, some related literatures do seem to be underplayed—treated in a few footnotes and somewhat by the way, with little development of systematic connections. There are thriving literatures in comparative psychology/ ethology, moral psychology, and cultural anthropology that are devoted to how we humans manage to cooperate and coordinate as we do. While there are footnotes to some of this literature ðsee the index for, e.g., Boyd, Bowles, Camerer, Gintis, and HenrichÞ, many readers would have benefited from a discussion that more fully related the position developed in Explaining Norms to that work in experimental economics and anthropology. Discussing the relationships with work in moral psychology and ethology would also have been appreciated ðHaidt, de Waal, and Tomasello are not mentionedÞ. Still, there is very much to like about what is treated here. The authors seek conceptually individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for being a norm. On the account provided, norms are something on the order of normative principles accepted in some group ð3–4Þ. Thus, norms involve some normative principle, possessing “a certain generality of scope and application.” These principles need not be objectively correct or fitting, and they may be objectively “simply awful” ð3Þ. The central questions have to do with what is involved in some group accepting these normative principles. The authors locate their position in two dimensions. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently suggested that some abstract, plausibly non-causal and/or mathematical, explanations explain in a way that is radically dif- ferent from the way causal explanation explain. Namely, while causal explanations explain by providing information about causal dependence, allegedly some abstract explanations explain in a way tied to the independence of the explanandum from the microdetails, or causal laws, for example. We oppose this recent trend to regard abstractions as explanatory in some sui generis way, and argue (...) that a prominent ac- count of causal explanation can be naturally extended to capture explanations that radically abstract away from microphysical and causal-nomological details. To this end, we distinguish di erent senses in which an explanation can be more or less abstract, and analyse the connection between explanations’ abstractness and their explanatory power. According to our analysis abstract explanations have much in common with counterfactual causal explanations. (shrink)

Recently, there has been much research into conceptual engineering in connection with feminist inquiry and activism, most notably involving gender issues, but also sexism and misogyny. Our paper contributes to this research by explicating, in a principled manner, a series of other concepts important for feminist research and activism, to wit, feminist political identity terms. More specifically, we show how the popular Conceptual Spaces Framework (CSF) can be used to identify and regiment concepts that are central to feminist research, focusing (...) especially on feminism in France. According to the CSF, concepts can be represented geometrically, as regions in similarity spaces. A particular strength of the CSF framework is its empirically-focused methodology, which allows researchers to infer the boundaries of concepts from empirical data, thus eliminating the need to strongly rely on intuitions about meanings. This is shown to be especially valuable for the explication of concepts relating to feminist political identity, given that the intuitions of feminist scholars and activists about what would appear to be core concepts in the area tend to be poorly aligned or even conflicting. We report the results from an empirical categorization study conducted among French feminists and show how they support the view that the CSF can contribute to both the conceptual engineering project and our understanding of the structure of social reality. (shrink)

Objectification is a notion central to contemporary feminist theory. It has famously been associated with the work of anti-pornography feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, and more recently with the work of Martha Nussbaum. However, objectification is a notion that has not yet been adequately defined. It has been used rather vaguely to refer to a broad range of cases involving, in some way or another, the treatment of a person as an object. My purpose in this paper is to (...) offer a plausible understanding of objectification. I do that by focusing on the work of four prominent thinkers: Immanuel Kant, and contemporary feminists Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin and Martha Nussbaum. Through drawing on these thinkers' conceptions of objectification, I am finally led to a more complete and coherent understanding of this notion. (shrink)

A well-known challenge for contextualists is to account for disagreement. Focusing on moral contextualism, this paper examines recent attempts to address this challenge by using the standard expressivist explanation, i.e., explaining disagreement in terms of disagreement in attitude rather than disagreement in belief. Assuming that the moral disagreements can be explained in terms of disagreement in attitude, this may seem as a simple solution for contextualists. However, it turns out to be easier said than done. This paper examines a number (...) of different ways in which disagreement in attitude can be incorporated into a contextualist framework and argues that each suggestion is problematic. In particular, the purported explanations of disagreement fail to adequately explain intuitive occurrences of disagreement, the robustness of disagreement intuitions and/or locate the disagreement in the intuitively right place. (shrink)

I show that the Lottery Paradox is just a version of the Sorites, and argue that this should modify our way of looking at the Paradox itself. In particular, I focus on what I call “the Cut-off Point Problem” and contend that this problem, well known by Sorites scholars, ought to play a key role in the debate on Kyburg’s puzzle. Very briefly, I show that, in the Lottery Paradox, the premises “ticket n°1 will lose”, “ticket n°2 will lose”… “ticket (...) n°1000 will lose” are equivalent to soritical premises of the form “~(the winning ticket is in {…, (tn)}) ⊃ ~(the winning ticket is in {…, tn, (tn + 1)})” (where “⊃” is the material conditional, “~” is the negation symbol, “tn” and “tn + 1” are “ticket n°n” and “ticket n°n + 1” respectively, and “{}” identify the elements of the lottery tickets’ set. The brackets in “(tn)” and “(tn + 1)” are meant to point out that in the antecedent of the conditional we do not always have a “tn” (and, as a result, a “tn + 1” in the consequent): consider the conditional “~(the winning ticket is in {}) ⊃ ~(the winning ticket is in {t1})”). As a result, failing to believe, for some ticket, that it will lose comes down to introducing a cut-off point in a chain of soritical premises. In this paper I explore the consequences of the different ways of blocking the Lottery Paradox with respect to the Cut-off Point Problem. A heap variant of the Lottery Paradox is especially relevant for evaluating the different solutions. One important result is that the most popular way out of the puzzle, i.e., denying the Lockean Thesis, becomes less attractive. Moreover, I show that, along with the debate on whether rational belief is closed under classical logic, the debate on the validity of modus ponens should play an important role in discussions on the Lottery Paradox. -/- . (shrink)

Kant has famously argued that monogamous marriage is the only relationship where sexual use can take place "without degrading humanity and breaking the moral laws." Kantian marriage, however, has been the target of fierce criticisms by contemporary things: it has been regarded as flawed and paradoncal, as being deeply at odds with feminism, and, at best, as plainly uninteresting. In this paper, I argue that Kantian marriage can indeed survive these criticisms. Finally, the paper advances the discussion beyond marriage. Drawing (...) on Kant 's conception of friendship, I suggest that he might have overlooked the possibility of sex being morally permissible in yet another context. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Our aim in this article is to offer a new justification for preferring theories that are more quantitatively parsimonious than their rivals. We discuss cases where it seems clear that those involved opted for more quantitatively parsimonious theories. We extend previous work on quantitative parsimony by offering an independent probabilistic justification for preferring the more quantitatively parsimonious theories in particular episodes of theory choice. Our strategy allows us to avoid worries that other considerations, such as pragmatic factors of computational (...) tractability and so on, could be the driving ones in the historical cases under consideration. _1_ Introduction _2_ Three Desiderata _2.1_ Limiting _2.2_ Robustness _2.3_ Breadth _2.3.1_ A limited success for Baker _2.3.2_ Rejecting Baker’s analysis _2.4_ The proposal _3_ Probabilistically Additive Hypotheses and a Bayesian Account: The Limpid Rationale Relativized and Reconsidered _3.1_ Neutrinos and beta decay _3.2_ Avogadro’s hypothesis _3.3_ Postulation of Neptune _4_ Conclusion. (shrink)

A frequent justification in the literature for using stated preference methods (SP) is that they are the only methods that can capture the so-called total economic value (TEV) of environmental changes to society. Based on follow-up interviews with SP survey respondents, this paper addresses the implications of that argument by shedding light on the construction of TEV, through respondents’ perspective. It illuminates the deficiencies of willingness to pay (WTP) as a measure of value presented as three aggregated themes considering respondents’ (...) unintentionality, their retraction once they understood that their WTP could be decisive in cost-benefit analysis and the inherent incompleteness of WTP. We discuss why the TEV discourse persists, how it conceals rather than reveals broader notions of value and in what ways our results support the development of alternative approaches that truly endorse plurality in environmental valuation and decision-making. (shrink)

Sección I. Aportes desde las epistemologías feministas -- Sección II. Posturas éticas en las antropologías feministas -- Sección III. Protagonistas diversas, voces multisituadas -- Sección IV. La antropología y el feminismo: narraciones en primera persona sobre experiencias de investigación y docencia -- Sección V. Expresiones contemporáneas de la violencia.

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 32-33.

This paper generalizes the (epistemic) preface paradox beyond the principle of belief aggregation and constructs a similar paradox for deontic reasoning. The analysis of the deontic case yields a solution strategy---restricting belief/obligation aggregation rather than giving it up altogether---that can be transferred to the epistemic case. Our proposal amounts to a reasonable compromise between two goals: (i) sticking to bridge principles between evidence and belief, such as the Lockean Thesis, and (ii) obtaining a sufficiently strong logic of doxastic and deontic (...) reasoning. (shrink)