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  1. Against the no-difference argument.Adam Elga - forthcoming - Analysis.
    There are 1,000 of us and one victim. We each increase the level at which a "discomfort machine" operates on the victim---leading to great discomfort. Suppose that consecutive levels of the machine are so similar that the victim cannot distinguish them. Have we acted permissibly? According to the "no-difference argument" the answer is "yes" because each of our actions was guaranteed to make the victim no worse off. This argument is of interest because if it is sound, similar arguments threaten (...)
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  • Imperfect Reasons and Rational Options.Douglas W. Portmore - 2012 - Noûs 46 (1):24 - 60.
    Agents often face a choice of what to do. And it seems that, in most of these choice situations, the relevant reasons do not require performing some particular act, but instead permit performing any of numerous act alternatives. This is known as the basic belief. Below, I argue that the best explanation for the basic belief is not that the relevant reasons are incommensurable (Raz) or that their justifying strength exceeds the requiring strength of opposing reasons (Gert), but that they (...)
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  • Phenomenal conservatism and self-defeat: a reply to DePoe.Michael Huemer - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 156 (1):1-13.
    John DePoe has criticized the self-defeat argument for Phenomenal Conservatism. He argues that acquaintance, rather than appearance, may form the basis for non-inferentially justified beliefs, and that Phenomenal Conservatism conflicts with a central motivation for internalism. I explain how Phenomenal Conservatism and the self-defeat argument may survive these challenges.
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  • Introduction.Ruth Chang - 1997 - In Incommensurability, incomparability, and practical reason. Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard. pp. 1-34.
    This paper is the introduction to the volume. It gives an argumentative view of the philosophical landscape concerning incommensurability and incomparability. It argues that incomparability, not incommensurability, is the important phenomenon on which philosophers should be focusing and that the arguments for the existence of incomparability are so far not compelling.
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  • The Sorites Paradox in Practical Philosophy.Hrafn Asgeirsson - 2019 - In Sergi Oms & Elia Zardini (eds.), The Sorites Paradox. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. pp. 229–245.
    The first part of the chapter surveys some of the main ways in which the Sorites Paradox has figured in arguments in practical philosophy in recent decades, with special attention to arguments where the paradox is used as a basis for criticism. Not coincidentally, the relevant arguments all involve the transitivity of value in some way. The second part of the chapter is more probative, focusing on two main themes. First, I further address the relationship between the Sorites Paradox and (...)
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  • Money-Pump Arguments.Johan E. Gustafsson - 2022 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Suppose that you prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A. Your preferences violate Expected Utility Theory by being cyclic. Money-pump arguments offer a way to show that such violations are irrational. Suppose that you start with A. Then you should be willing to trade A for C and then C for B. But then, once you have B, you are offered a trade back to A for a small cost. Since you prefer A to B, you (...)
  • Parfit's Ethics.Richard Yetter Chappell - 2021 - Cambridge University Press.
    Derek Parfit was one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This Element offers a critical introduction to his wide-ranging ethical thought, focusing especially on his two most significant works, Reasons and Persons and On What Matters, and their contribution to the consequentialist moral tradition. Topics covered include: rationality and objectivity, distributive justice, self-defeating moral theories, Parfit's Triple Theory, personal identity, and population ethics.
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  • Aggregation and Reductio.Patrick Wu - 2021 - Ethics 132 (2):508-525.
    Joe Horton argues that partial aggregation yields unacceptable verdicts in cases with risk and multiple decisions. I begin by showing that Horton’s challenge does not depend on risk, since exactly similar arguments apply to riskless cases. The underlying conflict Horton exposes is between partial aggregation and certain principles of diachronic choice. I then provide two arguments against these diachronic principles: they conflict with intuitions about parity, prerogatives, and cyclical preferences, and they rely on an odd assumption about diachronic choice. Finally, (...)
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  • A risky challenge for intransitive preferences.Timothy Luke Williamson - forthcoming - Noûs.
    Philosophers have spent a great deal of time debating whether intransitive preferences can be rational. I present a risky decision that poses a challenge for the defender of intransitivity. The defender of intransitivity faces a trilemma and must either: (i) reject the rationality of intransitive preferences, (ii) deny State-wise Dominance, or (iii) accept the bizarre verdict that you can be required to pay to relabel the tickets of a fair lottery. If we take the first horn, then we have a (...)
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  • Transitivity, the Sorites Paradox, and Similarity-Based Decision-making.Alex Voorhoeve & Ken Binmore - 2006 - Erkenntnis 64 (1):101-114.
    A persistent argument against the transitivity assumption of rational choice theory postulates a repeatable action that generates a significant benefit at the expense of a negligible cost. No matter how many times the action has been taken, it therefore seems reasonable for a decision-maker to take the action one more time. However, matters are so fixed that the costs of taking the action some large number of times outweigh the benefits. In taking the action some large number of times on (...)
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  • Preferences, Proxies, and Rationality.Chrisoula Andreou - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-11.
    This paper uses the idea of a proxy, which figures in discussions of bounded rationality, to construct an argument for a revisionary conclusion about ideal instrumental rationality. I consider how subjective responses can figure as proxies in heuristics and develop the following argument: (1) Proxies, even if relatively easy to recognize, can sometimes be messy, prompting incomplete or cyclic preferences. (2) From the point of view of ideal instrumental rationality, it is permissible for an agent to be concerned with a (...)
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  • Small Impacts and Imperceptible Effects: Causing Harm with Others.Kai Spiekermann - 2014 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 38 (1):75-90.
  • Vague Music.Roy Sorensen - 2011 - Philosophy 86 (2):231-248.
    Is listening to music like looking through a kaleidoscope? Formalists contend that music is meaningless. Most music theorists concede that this austere thesis is surprisingly close to the truth. Nevertheless, they refute formalism with a little band of diffusely referential phenomena, such as musical quotation, onomatopoeia, exemplification, and leitmotifs. These curiosities ought to be pressed into a new campaign against assumptions that vagueness can only arise in the semantically lush setting of language. Just as the discovery of extremophilic bacteria led (...)
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  • An intrapersonal, intertemporal solution to an interpersonal dilemma.Valerie Soon - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (10):3353-3370.
    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 (...)
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  • Cyclical preferences and world bayesianism.Jordan Howard Sobel - 1997 - Philosophy of Science 64 (1):42-73.
    An example shows that 'pairwise preferences' (certain hypothetical choices) can cycle even when rational. General considerations entail that preferences tout court (certain relations of actual valuations) cannot cycle. A world-bayesian theory is explained that accommodates these two kinds of preference, and a theory for rational actions that would have them maximize and be objects of ratifiable choices. It is observed that choices can be unratifiable either because of troublesome credences or because of troublesome preferences. An appendix comments on a third (...)
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  • Uncertain preferences in rational decision.Moritz Schulz - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (6):605-627.
    ABSTRACT Is uncertainty about preferences rationally possible? And if so, does it matter for rational decision? It is argued that uncertainty about preferences is possible and should play the same role in rational decision-making as uncertainty about worldly facts. The paper develops this hypothesis and defends it against various objections.
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  • Practical rationality is a problem in the philosophy of mind.Timothy Schroeder - 2010 - Philosophical Issues 20 (1):394-409.
    The philosophy of mind encompasses a familiar set of topics: consciousness, intentionality, mental causation, emotion, whatever topics in psychology happen to capture our interest (concepts, mindreading . . .), and so on. There is a topic deserving of addition to this list, a topic that should be receiving regular attention from philosophers of mind but is not: practical rationality. The philosophy of mind bears directly upon what can be called the ‘meta-theory’ of practical rationality, and meta-theories of rationality likewise impose (...)
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  • Structural Injustice and Individual Responsibility.Andrea Sangiovanni - 2018 - Journal of Social Philosophy 49 (3):461-483.
  • The Argument from Small Improvement is a Red Herring.Thomas Raleigh - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    The much-discussed ‘Argument from Small Improvement’ has been advanced both as a reason to reject (tripartite) Completeness, one of the standard axioms of decision theory, and to accept the possibility of rationally incomparable choices. But this form of argument cannot be an effective basis for either of these conclusions, unless one already has some prior, independent reason to prefer Transitivity to Completeness as a constraint on rational preferences (or rational values). In particular, I show how a reverse argument from small (...)
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  • Spectrum arguments and hypersensitivity.Theron Pummer - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (7):1729-1744.
    Larry Temkin famously argues that what he calls spectrum arguments yield strong reason to reject Transitivity, according to which the ‘all-things-considered better than’ relation is transitive. Spectrum arguments do reveal that the conjunctions of independently plausible claims are inconsistent with Transitivity. But I argue that there is very strong independent reason to reject such conjunctions of claims, and thus that the fact that they are inconsistent with Transitivity does not yield strong reason to reject Transitivity.
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  • Two dogmas of deontology: Aggregation, rights, and the separateness of persons: Alastair Norcross.Alastair Norcross - 2009 - Social Philosophy and Policy 26 (1):76-95.
    One of the currently popular dogmata of anti-consequentialism is that consequentialism doesn't respect, recognize, or in some important way account for what is referred to as the The charge is often made, but rarely explained in any detail, much less argued for. In this paper I explain what I take to be the most plausible interpretation of the separateness of persons charge. I argue that the charge itself can be deconstructed into at least two further objections to consequentialist theories. These (...)
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  • Great harms from small benefits grow: how death can be outweighed by headaches.A. Norcross - 1998 - Analysis 58 (2):152-158.
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  • Comparing Harms: Headaches and Human Lives.Alastair Norcross - 1997 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 26 (2):135-167.
  • Collective harm and the inefficacy problem.Julia Nefsky - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (4):e12587.
    This paper discusses the inefficacy problem that arises in contexts of “collective harm.‘ These are contexts in which by acting in a certain sort of way, people collectively cause harm, or fail to prevent it, but no individual act of the relevant sort seems to itself make a difference. The inefficacy problem is that if acting in the relevant way won’t make a difference, it’s unclear why it would be wrong. Each individual can argue, “things will be just as bad (...)
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  • How you can help, without making a difference.Julia Nefsky - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (11):2743-2767.
    There are many cases in which people collectively cause some morally significant outcome (such as a harmful or beneficial outcome) but no individual act seems to make a difference. The problem in such cases is that it seems each person can argue, ‘it makes no difference whether or not I do X, so I have no reason to do it.’ The challenge is to say where this argument goes wrong. My approach begins from the observation that underlying the problem and (...)
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  • Love in the Time of Consequentialism.Barry Maguire - 2017 - Noûs 51 (4):686-712.
    There are several powerful motivations for neutral value‐based deontic theories such as Act Consequentialism. Traditionally, such theories have had great difficulty accounting for partiality towards one's personal relationships and projects. This paper presents a neutral value‐based theory that preserves the motivations for Act Consequentialism while vindicating some crucial intuitions about reasons to be partial. There are two central ideas. The first is that when it comes to working out what you ought to do, your friends’ interests, the needs of your (...)
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  • Regretful Decisions and Climate Change.Rebecca Livernois - 2018 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 48 (2):168-191.
    Climate change has made pressing the question of why we do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. By analogy to the puzzle of the self-torturer, I argue that even if interpersonal and intergenerational conflicts of interest were resolved, we may still end up in a regretful environmental state when we aim to maximize our net benefit derived from polluting activities. This is because a rational agent with transitive preferences making climate change decisions faces incentives to over-pollute. This is caused by (...)
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  • Non-Measurability, Imprecise Credences, and Imprecise Chances.Yoaav Isaacs, Alan Hájek & John Hawthorne - 2021 - Mind 131 (523):892-916.
    – We offer a new motivation for imprecise probabilities. We argue that there are propositions to which precise probability cannot be assigned, but to which imprecise probability can be assigned. In such cases the alternative to imprecise probability is not precise probability, but no probability at all. And an imprecise probability is substantially better than no probability at all. Our argument is based on the mathematical phenomenon of non-measurable sets. Non-measurable propositions cannot receive precise probabilities, but there is a natural (...)
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  • In defence of repugnance.Michael Huemer - 2008 - Mind 117 (468):899-933.
    I defend the 'Repugnant' Conclusion that for any possible population of happy people, a population containing a sufficient number of people with lives barely worth living would be better. Four lines of argument converge on this conclusion, and the conclusion has a simple, natural theoretical explanation. The opposition to the Repugnant Conclusion rests on a bare appeal to intuition. This intuition is open to charges of being influenced by multiple distorting factors. Several theories of population ethics have been devised to (...)
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  • Degrees of commensurability and the repugnant conclusion.Alan Hájek & Wlodek Rabinowicz - 2021 - Noûs 56 (4):897-919.
    Two objects of valuation are said to be incommensurable if neither is better than the other, nor are they equally good. This negative, coarse-grained characterization fails to capture the nuanced structure of incommensurability. We argue that our evaluative resources are far richer than orthodoxy recognizes. We model value comparisons with the corresponding class of permissible preference orderings. Then, making use of our model, we introduce a potentially infinite set of degrees of approximation to better, worse, and equally good, which we (...)
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  • Utility cascades.Max Khan Hayward - 2020 - Analysis 80 (3):433-442.
    Utility cascades occur when a utilitarian’s reduction of support for an intervention reduces the effectiveness of that intervention, leading the utilitarian to further reduce support, thereby further undermining effectiveness, and so on, in a negative spiral. This paper illustrates the mechanisms by which utility cascades occur, and then draws out the theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, utility cascades provide an argument that the utilitarian agent should sometimes either ignore evidence about effectiveness or fail to apportion support to effectiveness. Practically, utility (...)
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  • Rational Choice and the Transitivity of Betterness.Toby Handfield - 2014 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (3):584-604.
    If A is better than B and B is better than C, then A is better than C, right? Larry Temkin and Stuart Rachels say: No! Betterness is nontransitive, they claim. In this paper, I discuss the central type of argument advanced by Temkin and Rachels for this radical idea, and argue that, given this view very likely has sceptical implications for practical reason, we would do well to identify alternative responses. I propose one such response, which employs the idea (...)
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  • Money-pumps, self-torturers and the demons of real life.Sven Ove Hansson - 1993 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (4):476 – 485.
  • Nonrenewable Resources and the Inevitability of Outcomes.Benjamin Hale - 2011 - The Monist 94 (3):369-390.
  • Embracing Self-Defeat in Normative Theory.Samuel Fullhart - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    Some normative theories are self-defeating. They tell us to respond to our situations in ways that bring about outcomes that are bad, given the aims of the theories, and which could have been avoided. Across a wide range of debates in ethics, decision theory, political philosophy, and formal epistemology, many philosophers treat the fact that a normative theory is self-defeating as sufficient grounds for rejecting it. I argue that this widespread and consequential assumption is false. In particular, I argue that (...)
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  • Rational Requirements and the Primacy of Pressure.Daniel Fogal - 2020 - Mind 129 (516):1033-1070.
    There are at least two threads in our thought and talk about rationality, both practical and theoretical. In one sense, to be rational is to respond correctly to the reasons one has. Call this substantive rationality. In another sense, to be rational is to be coherent, or to have the right structural relations hold between one’s mental states, independently of whether those attitudes are justified. Call this structural rationality. According to the standard view, structural rationality is associated with a distinctive (...)
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  • The psychological basis of collective action.James Fanciullo - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (2):427-444.
    Sometimes, a group of people can produce a morally bad outcome despite each person’s individual act making no difference to whether the outcome is produced. Since each person’s act makes no difference, it seems the effects of the act cannot provide a reason not to perform it. This is problematic, because if each person acts in accordance with their reasons, each will presumably perform the act—and thus, the bad outcome will be brought about. I suggest that the key to solving (...)
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  • Tenenbaum and Raffman on Vague Projects, the Self-Torturer, and the Sorites.Luke Elson - 2016 - Ethics 126 (2):474-488.
    Sergio Tenenbaum and Diana Raffman contend that ‘vague projects’ motivate radical revisions to orthodox, utility-maximising rational choice theory. Their argument cannot succeed if such projects merely ground instances of the paradox of the sorites, or heap. Tenenbaum and Raffman are not blind to this, and argue that Warren Quinn’s Puzzle of the Self-Torturer does not rest on the sorites. I argue that their argument both fails to generalise to most vague projects, and is ineffective in the case of the Self-Torturer (...)
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  • Incommensurability as vagueness: a burden-shifting argument.Luke Elson - 2017 - Theoria 83 (4):341-363.
    Two options are ‘incommensurate’ when neither is better than the other, but they are not equally good. Typically, we will say that one option is better in some ways, and the other in others, but neither is better ‘all things considered’. It is tempting to think that incommensurability is vagueness—that it is (perhaps) indeterminate which is better—but this ‘vagueness view’ of incommensurability has not proven popular. I set out the vagueness view and its implications in more detail, and argue that (...)
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  • Sorites without vagueness II: Comparative sorites.Ehtibar N. Dzhafarov & Damir D. Dzhafarov - 2010 - Theoria 76 (1):25-53.
    We develop a mathematical theory for comparative sorites, considered in terms of a system mapping pairs of stimuli into a binary response characteristic whose values supervene on stimulus pairs and are interpretable as the complementary relations 'are the same' and 'are not the same' (overall or in some respect). Comparative sorites is about hypothetical sequences of stimuli in which every two successive elements are mapped into the relation 'are the same', while the pair comprised of the first and the last (...)
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  • The refutation of cyclic evaluations.Sven Danielsson - 1996 - Theoria 62 (1-2):161-168.
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  • The possibility of parity.Ruth Chang - 2002 - Ethics 112 (4):659-688.
    This paper argues for the existence of a fourth positive generic value relation that can hold between two items beyond ‘better than’, ‘worse than’, and ‘equally good’: namely ‘on a par’.
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  • Cyclical preferences and rational choice.Erik Carlson - 1996 - Theoria 62 (1-2):144-160.
  • A Refutation of Spectrum Arguments for Nontransitive Betterness.Erik Carlson - 2023 - Philosophia 51 (4):2147-2150.
    This short paper states a new objection against “spectrum arguments” for nontransitive betterness. It is shown that defenders of such arguments must reject one of two very plausible principles.
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  • Temptation and the Agent’s Standpoint.Michael E. Bratman - 2014 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (3):293-310.
    Suppose you resolve now to resist an expected temptation later while knowing that once the temptation arrives your preference or evaluative assessment will shift in favor of that temptation. Are there defensible norms of rational planning agency that support sticking with your prior intention in the face of such a shift at the time of temptation and in the absence of relevant new information? This article defends the idea that it might be rational to stick with your prior intention in (...)
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  • Rational Intransitive Preferences.Peter Baumann - 2022 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 21 (1):3-28.
    According to a widely held view, rationality demands that the preferences of a person be transitive. The transitivity assumption is an axiom in standard theories of rational choice. It is also prima facie very plausible. I argue here that transitivity is not a necessary condition of rationality; it is a constraint only in some cases. The argument presented here is based on the non-linearity of differential utility functions. This paper has four parts. First, I present an argument against the transitivity (...)
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  • No free lunch: The significance of tiny contributions.Zach Barnett - 2018 - Analysis 78 (1):3-13.
    There is a well-known moral quandary concerning how to account for the rightness or wrongness of acts that clearly contribute to some morally significant outcome – but which each seem too small, individually, to make any meaningful difference. One consequentialist-friendly response to this problem is to deny that there could ever be a case of this type. This paper pursues this general strategy, but in an unusual way. Existing arguments for the consequentialist-friendly position are sorites-style arguments. Such arguments imagine varying (...)
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  • Supererogation and sequence.Adam Bales & Claire Benn - 2020 - Synthese 198 (8):7763-7780.
    Morally supererogatory acts are those that go above and beyond the call of duty. More specifically: they are acts that, on any individual occasion, are good to do and also both permissible to do and permissible to refrain from doing. We challenge the way in which discussions of supererogation typically consider our choices and actions in isolation. Instead we consider sequences of supererogatory acts and omissions and show that some such sequences are themselves problematic. This gives rise to the following (...)
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  • Resolutions provide reasons or: “how the Cookie Monster quit cookies”.Adam Bales & Toby Handfield - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):4829-4840.
    Why should we typically act in accordance with our resolutions when faced with the temptation to do otherwise? A much-maligned view suggests that we should do so because resolutions themselves provide us with reasons for action. We defend a version of this view, on which resolutions provide second-order reasons. This account avoids the objections typically taken to be fatal for the view that resolutions are reasons, including the prominent bootstrapping objections.
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  • Self torture and group beneficence.Frank Arntzenius & David McCarthy - 1997 - Erkenntnis 47 (1):129-144.
    Moral puzzles about actions which bring about very small or what are said to be imperceptible harms or benefits for each of a large number of people are well known. Less well known is an argument by Warren Quinn that standard theories of rationality can lead an agent to end up torturing himself or herself in a completely foreseeable way, and that this shows that standard theories of rationality need to be revised. We show where Quinn's argument goes wrong, and (...)
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