. Fugit Hora: Fashion and the ethics of style. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 340-354.

Tilda Swinton’s status as a fashion icon exemplifies the contradictory functions that Walter Benjamin attributes to fashion as both exemplifying commodity fetishism and expressing a utopian ‘image wish’. This vexed relationship with fashion inflects Swinton’s cinematic performances, enhanced by her emphasis on disguise and transformation that calls into question the nature of identity and its authenticity. Her persona speaks to the fluid and fragmented dimensions of contemporary European identities, which are rooted, but also cross borders, national and otherwise; similarly, her (...) public presence testifies to the way that contemporary culture has generated new forms of celebrity as a means of representing identities in which the negotiation of gender is a significant component. (shrink)

Can we reconcile the idea that we are free and responsible agents with the idea that what we do is determined according to natural laws? For centuries, philosophers have tried in different ways to show that we can. Hilary Bok takes a fresh approach here, as she seeks to show that the two ideas are compatible by drawing on the distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning.Bok argues that when we engage in practical reasoning--the kind that involves asking "what should (...) I do?" and sifting through alternatives to find the most justifiable course of action--we have reason to hold ourselves responsible for what we do. But when we engage in theoretical reasoning--searching for causal explanations of events--we have no reason to apply concepts like freedom and responsibility. Bok contends that libertarians' arguments against "compatibilist" justifications of moral responsibility fail because they describe human actions only from the standpoint of theoretical reasoning. To establish this claim, she examines which conceptions of freedom of the will and moral responsibility are relevant to practical reasoning and shows that these conceptions are not vulnerable to many objections that libertarians have directed against compatibilists. Bok concludes that the truth or falsity of the claim that we are free and responsible agents in the sense those conceptions spell out is ultimately independent of deterministic accounts of the causes of human actions.Clearly written and powerfully argued, Freedom and Responsibility is a major addition to current debate about some of philosophy's oldest and deepest questions. (shrink)

Can we reconcile the idea that we are free and responsible agents with the idea that what we do is determined according to natural laws? For centuries, philosophers have tried in different ways to show that we can. This text seeks to show that the two ideas are compatible by drawing on the distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning.

According to Bayesian epistemology, the epistemically rational agent updates her beliefs by conditionalization: that is, her posterior subjective probability after taking account of evidence X, pnew, is to be set equal to her prior conditional probability pold(·|X). Bayesians can be challenged to provide a justification for their claim that conditionalization is recommended by rationality—whence the normative force of the injunction to conditionalize? There are several existing justifications for conditionalization, but none directly addresses the idea that conditionalization will be epistemically rational (...) if and only if it can reasonably be expected to lead to epistemically good outcomes. We apply the approach of cognitive decision theory to provide a justification for conditionalization using precisely that idea. We assign epistemic utility functions to epistemically rational agents; an agent’s epistemic utility is to depend both upon the actual state of the world and on the agent’s credence distribution over possible states. We prove that, under independently motivated conditions, conditionalization is the unique updating rule that maximizes expected epistemic utility. (shrink)

Hilary Kornblith argues for a naturalistic approach to investigating knowledge. Knowledge, he explains, is a feature of the natural world, and so should be investigated using scientific methods. He offers an account of knowledge derived from the science of animal behavior, and defends this against its philosophical rivals. This controversial and refreshingly original book offers philosophers a new way to do epistemology.

Population axiology is the study of the conditions under which one state of affairs is better than another, when the states of affairs in ques- tion may differ over the numbers and the identities of the persons who ever live. Extant theories include totalism, averagism, variable value theories, critical level theories, and “person-affecting” theories. Each of these the- ories is open to objections that are at least prima facie serious. A series of impossibility theorems shows that this is no coincidence: (...) it can be proved, for various sets of prima facie intuitively compelling desiderata, that no axiology can simultaneously satisfy all the desiderata on the list. One’s choice of population axiology appears to be a choice of which intuition one is least unwilling to give up. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that first-person testimony is a good source of evidence, including testimony about the contents of mental states unobservable to others. Thus we generally think that an individual’s testimony is a good source of evidence about her wellbeing—after all, she experiences her quality of life and we don’t. However, some have argued that the first-person testimony of disabled individuals regarding their wellbeing is defeated: regardless of someone’s claim about how disability affects her overall wellbeing, other evidence about (...) disability undermines the force of her testimony with respect to our justified beliefs. In this paper, I argue that at least some cases of first-person testimony about disability is not defeated. Particularly, neither the existence of conflicting testimony nor evidence about disabilities’ associated harms or challenges successfully undermine either the content of the testimony or the reliability of the testifiers. While I do not claim that first-person testimony is the only evidence relevant to characterizing disability, I argue that it is not always blocked by other evidence about disability. At least some first-person testimony from disabled individuals is, therefore, undefeated evidence relevant to evaluating disability and overall wellbeing. (shrink)

I explore the prospects for modelling epistemic rationality (in the probabilist setting) via an epistemic decision theory, in a consequentialist spirit. Previous work has focused on cases in which the truth-values of the propositions in which the agent is selecting credences do not depend, either causally or merely evidentially, on the agent’s choice of credences. Relaxing that restriction leads to a proliferation of puzzle cases and theories to deal with them, including epistemic analogues of evidential and causal decision theory, and (...) of the Newcomb Problem and ‘Psychopath Button’ Problem. A variant of causal epistemic decision theory deals well with most cases. However, there is a recalcitrant class of problem cases for which no epistemic decision theory seems able to match our intuitive judgements of epistemic rationality. This lends both precision and credence to the view that there is a fundamental mismatch between epistemic consequentialism and the intuitive notion of epistemic rationality; the implications for understanding the latter are briefly discussed. (shrink)

Decisions, whether moral or prudential, should be guided at least in part by considerations of the consequences that would result from the various available actions. For any given action, however, the majority of its consequences are unpredictable at the time of decision. Many have worried that this leaves us, in some important sense, clueless. In this paper, I distinguish between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ possible sources of cluelessness. In terms of this taxonomy, the majority of the existing literature on cluelessness focusses (...) on the simple sources. I argue, contra James Lenman in particular, that these would-be sources of cluelessness are unproblematic, on the grounds that indifference-based reasoning is far less problematic than Lenman (along with many others) supposes. However, there does seem to be a genuine phenomenon of cluelessness associated with the ‘complex’ sources; here, indifference-based reasoning is inapplicable by anyone’s lights. This ‘complex problem of cluelessness’ is vivid and pressing, in particular, in the context of Effective Altruism. This motivates a more thorough examination of the precise nature of cluelessness, and the precise source of the associated phenomenology of discomfort in forced-choice situations. The latter parts of the paper make some initial explorations in those directions. (shrink)

Hilary Kornblith presents a new account of mental reflection, and its importance for knowledge, reasoning, freedom, and normativity. He argues that reflection cannot solve the philosophical problems it has traditionally been thought to, and offers a more realistic, demystified view of its nature which draws on dual process approaches to cognition.

True benevolence is, most fundamentally, a desire that the world be better. It is natural and common, however, to frame thinking about benevolence indirectly, in terms of a desire to make a difference to how good the world is. This would be an innocuous shift if desires to make a difference were extensionally equivalent to desires that the world be better. This paper shows that at least on some common ways of making a “desire to make a difference” precise, this (...) extensional equivalence fails. Where it fails, “difference-making preferences” run counter to the ideals of benevolence. In particular, in the context of decision making under uncertainty, coupling a “difference-making” framing in a natural way with risk aversion leads to preferences that violate stochastic dominance, and that lead to a strong form of collective defeat, from the point of view of betterness. Difference-making framings and true benevolence are not strictly mutually inconsistent, but agents seeking to implement true benevolence must take care to avoid the various pitfalls that we outline. GPI Working Paper No. 16-2022. (shrink)

This article is a critical survey of the debate over the value of the social discount rate, with a particular focus on climate change. The ma- jority of the material surveyed is from the economics rather than from the philosophy literature, but the emphasis of the survey itself is on founda- tions in ethical and other normative theory rather than highly technical details. I begin by locating the standard approach to discounting within the overall landscape of ethical theory, and explaining (...) the assumptions and simplifications that are needed in order to arrive at the model that is standard in the discounting literature. The article then covers the general theory of the Ramsey equation and its relationship to observed interest rates, arguments for and against a positive rate of pure time preference, the consumption elasticity of utility, and the effect of various sorts of uncertainty on the discount rate. Finally, it turns specifically to the ap- plication of this debate to the case of climate change, focussing on the recent controversy over the low discount rate used in the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change. (shrink)

Difficulties over probability have often been considered fatal to the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. Here I argue that the Everettian can have everything she needs from `probability' without recourse to indeterminism, ignorance, primitive identity over time or subjective uncertainty: all she needs is a particular *rationality principle*. The decision-theoretic approach recently developed by Deutsch and Wallace claims to provide just such a principle. But, according to Wallace, decision theory is itself applicable only if the correct attitude to a future (...) Everettian measurement outcome is subjective uncertainty. I argue that subjective uncertainty is not to be had, but I offer an alternative interpretation that enables the Everettian to live without uncertainty: we can justify Everettian decision theory on the basis that an Everettian should *care about* all her future branches. The probabilities appearing in the decision-theoretic representation theorem can then be interpreted as the degrees to which the rational agent cares about each future branch. This reinterpretation, however, reduces the intuitive plausibility of one of the Deutsch -Wallace axioms. (shrink)

The Everett (many-worlds) interpretation of quantum mechanics faces a prima facie problem concerning quantum probabilities. Research in this area has been fast-paced over the last few years, following a controversial suggestion by David Deutsch that decision theory can solve the problem. This article provides a non-technical introduction to the decision-theoretic program, and a sketch of the current state of the debate.

explores the interaction between psychology and epistemology and addresses empirical questions about how we should arrive at our beliefs, and whether the processes by which we arrive at our beliefs are the ones by which we ought to arrive at our beliefs.

Nick Bostrom and others have suggested treating decision-making under moral uncertainty as analogous to parliamentary decision-making. The core suggestion of this “parliamentary approach” is that the competing moral theories function like delegates to the parliament, and that these delegates then make decisions by some combination of bargaining and voting. There seems some reason to hope that such an approach might avoid standard objections to existing approaches (for example, the “maximise expected choiceworthiness” (MEC) and “my favourite theory” approaches). However, the parliamentary (...) approach is so far extremely underspecified, making it largely indeterminate how such a model will in fact behave in the respects that those concerned with moral uncertainty care about. This paper explores one way of making it precise. We treat predicaments of moral uncertainty as analogous to bargaining situations alone (setting aside voting), and apply a version of the Nash solution that is standard in bargaining theory. The resulting model does indeed perform in many of the hoped-for ways. However, so also does a version of MEC that employs a structural approach to intertheoretic comparisons. It seems to us an open question which, regarding this version of MEC and the bargaining-theoretic approach, is superior to the other. We identify the key points on which the two differ. (shrink)

Given the deep disagreement surrounding population axiology, one should remain uncertain about which theory is best. However, this uncertainty need not leave one neutral about which acts are better or worse. We show that, as the number of lives at stake grows, the Expected Moral Value approach to axiological uncertainty systematically pushes one toward choosing the option preferred by the Total View and critical-level views, even if one’s credence in those theories is low.

We often find that beliefs we hold are in conflict with the beliefs of epistemic peers, individuals who are just as intelligent, just as well-informed, and just as scrupulous in forming their beliefs as we are. Is it permissible to maintain our beliefs in the face of such disagreement? It is argued here that continued belief in these circumstances is not epistemically permissible, and that this has striking consequences for the practice of philosophy: we cannot reasonably hold on to our (...) philosophical views. (shrink)

In response to growing concerns of bias, discrimination, and unfairness perpetuated by algorithmic systems, the datasets used to train and evaluate machine learning models have come under increased scrutiny. Many of these examinations have focused on the contents of machine learning datasets, finding glaring underrepresentation of minoritized groups. In contrast, relatively little work has been done to examine the norms, values, and assumptions embedded in these datasets. In this work, we conceptualize machine learning datasets as a type of informational infrastructure, (...) and motivate a genealogy as method in examining the histories and modes of constitution at play in their creation. We present a critical history of ImageNet as an exemplar, utilizing critical discourse analysis of major texts around ImageNet’s creation and impact. We find that assumptions around ImageNet and other large computer vision datasets more generally rely on three themes: the aggregation and accumulation of more data, the computational construction of meaning, and making certain types of data labor invisible. By tracing the discourses that surround this influential benchmark, we contribute to the ongoing development of the standards and norms around data development in machine learning and artificial intelligence research. (shrink)

Much of the evidence for quantum mechanics is statistical in nature. The Everett interpretation, if it is to be a candidate for serious consideration, must be capable of doing justice to reasoning on which statistical evidence in which observed relative frequencies that closely match calculated probabilities counts as evidence in favour of a theory from which the probabilities are calculated. Since, on the Everett interpretation, all outcomes with nonzero amplitude are actualized on different branches, it is not obvious that sense (...) can be made of ascribing probabilities to outcomes of experiments, and this poses a prima facie problem for statistical inference. It is incumbent on the Everettian either to make sense of ascribing probabilities to outcomes of experiments in the Everett interpretation, or to find a substitute on which the usual statistical analysis of experimental results continues to count as evidence for quantum mechanics, and, since it is the very evidence for quantum mechanics that is at stake, this must be done in a way that does not presuppose the correctness of Everettian quantum mechanics. This requires an account of theory confirmation that applies to branching-universe theories but does not presuppose the correctness of any such theory. In this paper, we supply and defend such an account. The account has the consequence that statistical evidence can confirm a branching-universe theory such as Everettian quantum mechanics in the same way in which it can confirm a probabilistic theory. (shrink)

Prioritarianism is supposed to be a theory of the overall good that captures the common intuition of . But it is difficult to give precise content to the prioritarian claim. Over the past few decades, prioritarians have increasingly responded to this by formulating prioritarianism not in terms of an alleged primitive notion of quantity of well-being, but instead in terms of von NeumannPrimitivistTechnicalpriority to the worse offMorgenstern utility is a retrograde step.

This paper examines the source and content of epistemic norms. In virtue of what is it that epistemic norms have their normative force? A semantic approach to this question, due to Alvin Goldman, is examined and found unacceptable. Instead, accounts seeking to ground epistemic norms in our desires are argued to be most promising. All of these accounts make epistemic norms a variety of hypothetical imperative. It is argued that such an account may be offered, grounding our epistemic norms in (...) desire, which nevertheless makes these imperatives universal. The account is contrasted with some recent work of Stephen Stich. (shrink)

Harsanyi claimed that his Aggregation and Impartial Observer Theorems provide a justification for utilitarianism. This claim has been strongly resisted, notably by Sen and Weymark, who argue that while Harsanyi has perhaps shown that overall good is a linear sum of individuals’ von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities, he has done nothing to establish any con- nection between the notion of von Neumann-Morgenstern utility and that of well-being, and hence that utilitarianism does not follow. The present article defends Harsanyi against the Sen-Weymark cri- (...) tique. I argue that, far from being a term with precise and independent quantitative content whose relationship to von Neumann-Morgenstern utility is then a substantive question, terms such as ‘well-being’ suffer (or suffered) from indeterminacy regarding precisely which quantity they refer to. If so, then (on the issue that this article focuses on) Harsanyi has gone as far towards defending ‘utilitarianism in the original sense’ as could coherently be asked. (shrink)

This anthology brings together ten papers which have defined and advanced the debate between internalism and externalism in epistemology.

An important objection to preference-satisfaction theories of well-being is that these theories cannot make sense of interpersonal comparisons of well-being. A tradition dating back to Harsanyi () attempts to respond to this objection by appeal to so-called extended preferences: very roughly, preferences over situations whose description includes agents’ preferences. This paper examines the prospects for defending the preference-satisfaction theory via this extended preferences program. We argue that making conceptual sense of extended preferences is less problematic than others have supposed, but (...) that even so extended preferences do not provide a promising way for the preference satisfaction theorist to make interpersonal well-being comparisons. Our main objection takes the form of a trilemma: depending on how the theory based on extended preferences is developed, either the result will be inconsistent with ordinary preference-satisfaction theory, or it will fail to recover sufficiently rich interpersonal well-being comparisons, or it will take on a number of other arguably odd and undesirable commitments. (shrink)

Countering hegemonic understandings of rage as a deleterious emotion, this article examines rage across specific sites of trans cultural production—the prison letters of CeCe McDonald and the durational performance art of Cassils—in order to argue that it is integral to trans survival and flourishing. Theorizing rage as a justified response to unlivable circumstances, a response that plays a key role in enabling trans subjects to detach from toxic relational dynamics in order to transition toward other forms of gendered subjectivity and (...) intimate communality, I develop an account of what I call an “infrapolitical ethics of care” that indexes a web of communal practices that empathetically witness and amplify rage, as well as support subjects during and after moments of grappling with overwhelming negative affect. I draw on the work of trans, queer, and feminist theorists who have theorized the productivities of so‐called “negative” affects, particularly Sara Ahmed's work on willfulness and killing joy, María Lugones's writing on anger, Judith Butler's Spinozan reassessment of the vexed relations between self‐preservation and self‐destruction, and the rich account of trans rage provided by Susan Stryker. (shrink)

Despite growing interest in improving cognitive abilities across the lifespan through training, the benefits of cognitive training are inconsistent. One powerful contributor may be that individuals arrive at interventions with different baseline levels of the cognitive skill being trained. Some evidence suggests poor performers benefit the most from cognitive training, showing compensation for their weak abilities, while other evidence suggests that high performers benefit most, experiencing a magnification of their abilities. Whether training leads to compensation or magnification effects may depend (...) upon the specific cognitive domain being trained and the training approach implemented. To clarify the association between individual differences in baseline cognitive ability and training gains as well as potential moderators, we conducted a systematic meta-analysis of the correlation between these two variables. We found evidence of a significant meta-correlation demonstrating a compensatory effect, a negative association between initial ability on a trained cognitive process and training gains. Too few papers met our search criteria across the levels of proposed moderators of cognitive domain and training approach to conduct a reliable investigation of their influence over the meta-analytic effect size. We discuss the implications of a compensatory meta-correlation, potential reasons for the paucity of qualifying papers, and important future directions for better understanding how cognitive trainings work and for whom. (shrink)