Wlodek Rabinowicz

The Interpersonal Addition Theorem, due to John Broome, states that, given certain seemingly innocuous assumptions, the overall utility of an uncertain prospect can be represented as the sum of its individual utilities. Given ‘Bernoulli's hypothesis’ according to which individual utility coincides with individual welfare, this result appears to be incompatible with the Priority View. On that view, due to Derek Parfit, the benefits to the worse off should count for more, in the overall evaluation, than the comparable benefits to the better off. Pace Broome, the paper argues that prioritarians should meet this challenge not by denying Bernoulli's hypothesis, but by rejecting one of the basic assumptions behind the addition theorem: that a prospect is better overall if it is better for everyone. This conclusion follows if one interprets the priority weights that are imposed by prioritarians as relevant only to moral, but not to prudential, evaluations of prospects

According to the fitting-attitude analysis of value , to be valuable is to be a fitting object of a pro-attitude. In earlier publications, setting off from this format of analysis, I proposed a modelling of value relations which makes room for incommensurability in value. In this paper, I first recapitulate the value modelling and then move on to suggest adopting a structurally similar analysis of probability. Indeed, many probability theorists from Poisson onwards did adopt an analysis of this kind. This move allows to formally model probability and probability relations in essentially the same way as value and value relations. One of the advantages of the model is that we get a new account of Keynesian incommensurable probabilities, which goes beyond Keynes in distinguishing between different types of incommensurability. It also becomes possible to draw a clear distinction between incommensurability and vagueness in probability comparisons

This paper puts forward the following claims: (i) The size of inequality in welfare should be distinguished from its badness. (ii) The size of a pairwise inequality between two individuals can be measured by the absolute or the relative welfare distance between their welfare levels, but it does not depend on the welfare levels of other individuals. (iii) The size of inequality in a social state may be understood either as the degree of pairwise inequality or as its amount. (iv) The badness of a pairwise inequality may differ from its size in several ways; for example, the badness measure might go by the distance between priority-transformed welfare levels and/or it might assign heavier weight to larger distances. (v) The badness of a pairwise inequality may be either personal or impersonal, with the personal interpretation being internally consistent and, pace Temkin, independently tenable even if we reject the so-called Slogan (i.e., the Person-Affecting Claim). (vi) The aggregation procedure by which we arrive from the badness of pairwise inequalities to the badness of the inequality in a social state takes different forms depending on whether the badness of a pairwise inequality is interpreted in a personal or in an impersonal way. (vii) Since Temkin’s complaint-based measures of the badness of inequality follow the format appropriate for the personal interpretation, they seem out of place if one, like him, treats the badness of inequality as an impersonal value.

Jan Österberg (Self and Others, 1988) argues that the most defensible form of egoism should not only tell each of us what to do but also tell us what we ought to do. He also claims that collective norms should take precedence over individual ones. An individual ought to do one's part in an action pattern that is prescribed for the group - provided that other members of the group do their part. question This paper questions Österberg's claim that Collective Egoism, unlike other forms of egoism, avoids violations of the principles which he takes to be analytical adequacy criteria for ethical theories: the principles of "deontic consequence" and "joint satisfiability". Furthermore, it questions his argument that Collective Egoism yields the "right" prescriptions in its main test-case: Prisoners' Dilemma. The improved version of Collective Egoism is able to deal with the two-person Prisoners' Dilemma, but it still misbehaves when we move to the many-persons cases. A certain type of "free rider"-problems proves to be especially troublesome.

In this short summary, which is aimed to give a rough picture of the main lines of research in practical philosophy in Sweden during the last decade, I have decided to organize the presentation by universities rather than by particular research subjects. It is to be hoped that this will give the reader a better grasp of what is going on at various departments. The summary is to a large extent a collective work: It is based on the reports prepared by professors Erik Carlson, Uppsala University, Sven-Ove Hansson, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Christian Munthe, University of Gothenburg, Bo Petersson, Linköping University, Hans Ruin, Södertörn University College, Torbjörn Tännsjö, Stockholm University, and on my own report for Lund University.

Standard approaches to possible-world semantics allow us to define necessity and logical truth, but analyticity is considerably more difficult to account for. The source of this difficulty lies in the received model-theoretical conception of a language interpretation. In intuitive terms, analyticity amounts to truth in virtue of meaning alone, i.e. solely in virtue of the interpretation of linguistic expressions. In other words, an analytic sentence should remain true under all variations of ‘extralinguistic reality’ as long as the interpretation is kept constant. However, the received conception of an interpretation as a mapping from language to a model frame hinders keeping the interpretation constant while varying other components of the model. To make room for analyticity, the concept of an interpretation should therefore be revised. The latter should be made richer in content than it has usually been assumed. As a by-product, this revision also gives us a one-dimensional analogue of the influential two-dimensional account of a priori. We are thus able to map out the network of formal connections between the notions of analyticity, apriority, logical truth and necessity.

Presumption of Equality requires that individuals be treated equally in the absence of relevant information that would discriminate between them. Our objective is to make this principle more precise, if viewed as a principle of fairness, and to determine why and under what conditions it should be obeyed. Presumption norms are procedural constraints, but their justification can be sought in the possible or expected outcomes of the procedures they regulate. This is the avenue pursued here. The suggestion is that in the absence of information that would discriminate between the individuals, equal treatment minimizes the expected unfairness of the outcome. A related suggestion is that equal treatment under these circumstances also minimizes the maximal possible unfairness of the outcome. Whether these suggestions are correct or not depends on the properties of the underlying unfairness measure. The required properties are specified.

In Rabinowicz 2008, I considered how value relations can best be analyzed in terms of fitting pro-­‐attitudes. In the formal model presented in that paper fitting pro-­‐attitudes are represented by the class of permissible preference orderings on a domain of items that are being compared. As it turns out, this approach opens up for a multiplicity of different types of value relationships, along with the standard relations of "better", "worse", "equally as good as" and "incomparable in value". Unfortunately, though, the approach is vulnerable to a number of objections. I believe these objections can be avoided if one re-interprets the underlying notion of preference: Instead of treating preference as a 'dyadic' attitude directed towards a pair of items, we can think of it as a difference of degree between 'monadic' attitudes of favouring. Each such monadic attitude has just one item as its object. Given this re-interpretation, permissible preferences can be modelled by the class of permissible assignments of degrees of favouring to items in the domain. From this construction, we can then recover the old modelling in terms of the class of permissible preference orderings, but the previous objections to that model no longer apply. Thus, what we get is the old wine in new and hopefully tighter barrels.

The paper argues that the final value of an object-i.e., its value for its own sake-need not be intrinsic. Extrinsic final value, which accrues to things in virtue of their relational rather than internal features, cannot be traced back to the intrinsic value of states that involve these things together with their relations. On the contrary, such states, insofar as they are valuable at all, derive their value from the things involved. The endeavour to reduce thing-values to state-values is largely motivated by a mistaken belief that appropriate responses to value must consist in preferring and/or promoting. A pluralist approach to value analysis obviates the need for reduction: the final value of a thing or person can be given an independent interpretation in terms of the appropriate thing- or person-oriented responses: admiration, love, respect, protection, care, cherishing, etc

in Undetermined Presumption of Equality enjoins that individuals be treated equally in the absence of discriminating information. My objective in this paper is to make this principle more precise, viewing it as a norm of fairness, in order to determine why and under what conditions it should be obeyed. Presumption norms are procedural constraints, but their justification might come from the expected outcomes of the procedures they regulate. This outcome-oriented approach to fairness is pursued in the paper. The suggestion is that in the absence of information that would discriminate between the individuals, equal treatment minimizes the expected unfairness in the outcome. Another suggestion is that, under these circumstances, equal treatment also minimizes maximal possible unfairness, i.e., it is minimally unfair if ‘worst comes to worst’. Whether these suggestions are correct depends on the properties of the underlying unfairness measure.

This paper argues that expected utility theory for actions in chancy environments should be formulated in terms of centered chances. The subjective expected utility of an option A may be seen as a weighted sum of the utilities of A in different possible worlds, with weights being the credences that the agent assigns to these worlds. The utility of A in a given world is then definable as a weighted sum of the values of A’s different possible outcomes, with weights being the conditional chances of these outcomes if A were performed. On the centered-chance view, the chances to be used as weights in the definition of utility are centered. Unlike ordinary chances, centered chances depend not only on what happens prior to the agent’s choice but also on the events that occur after the choice. Thus, to give an example, suppose that the action under consideration results in a bad outcome due to some event whose ordinary chance of occurring was very low at the time of choice. Then the utility of that action in the actual world could be high on the non-centered view, but on the centered view that utility is negative, since the centered chance of the event in question given the action was one, given that it did actually take place. A precise definition of centered chances is not easy to frame, but the concept can be made intuitively clear. The resulting decision theory is, in my opinion, philosophically more satisfactory than the extant proposals, even though it doesn’t differ much in its practical recommendations, with the exception of some rather peculiar cases.

The so called Ramsey test is a semantic recipe for determining whether a conditional proposition is acceptable in a given state of belief. Informally, it can be formulated as follows: (RT) Accept a proposition of the form "if A, then C" in a state of belief K, if and only if the minimal change of K needed to accept A also requires accepting C. In Gärdenfors (1986) it was shown that the Ramsey test is, in the context of some other weak conditions, on pain of triviality incompatible with the following principle, which was there called the preservation criterion: (P) If a proposition B is accepted in a given state of belief K and the proposition A is consistent with the beliefs in K, then B is still accepted in the minimal change of K needed to accept A. (RT) provides a necessary and sufficient criterion for when a 'positive' conditional should be included in a belief state, but it does not say anything about when the negation of a conditional sentence should be accepted. A very natural candidate for this purpose is the following negative Ramsey test: (NRT) Accept the negation of a proposition of the form "if A, then C" in a consistent state of belief K, if and only if the minimal change of K needed to accept A does not require accepting C. This note shows that (NRT) leads to triviality results even in the absence of additional conditions like (P).

This paper discusses the argument for preference utilitarianism proposed by Richard Hare in Moral Thinking(Hare, 1981). G. F. Schueler (1984) and Ingmar Persson (1989) identified a serious gap in Hare’s reasoning, which might be called the No-Conflict Problem. The paper first tries to fill the gap. Then, however, starting with an idea of Zeno Vendler, the question is raised whether the gap is there to begin with. Unfortunately, this Vendlerian move does not save Hare from criticism. Paradoxically, it instead endangers the whole argumentative enterprise

According to the standard objection to backward induction in games, its application depends on highly questionable assumptions about the players' expectations as regards future counterfactual game developments. It seems that, in order to make predictions needed for backward reasoning, the players must expect each player to act rationally at each node that in principle could be reached in the game, and also to expect that this confidence in the future rationality of the players would be kept by each player come what may: even at the game-nodes that could only be reached by irrational play. Both expectations seem to be rather unreasonable: a player's initial disposition to rational behaviour may be weakened by a long stretch of irrational play on his part and, even more importantly, his initial confidence in the other players' future rationality may be undermined by an irrational play on their part. For different formulations of this objection see Binmore, Reny and, Bicchieri, Pettit and Sugden. and Aumann and.)

According to an influential tradition in value analysis, to be valuable is to be a fitting object of a pro-attitude – a fitting object of favoring. If it is fitting to favor an object for its own sake, then, in this view, the object has final value. If it is fitting to favor an object for the sake of its effects, then its value is instrumental. Disvalue is connected in the analogous way to disfavoring, i.e., to con-attitudes. For a history of this fitting-attitudes analysis, or FA-analysis for short, see the following text. The label itself was coined rather recently, though, in Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen.

Piccione and Rubinstein (1997) present and analyse the sequential decision problem of an “absentminded driver”. The driver's absentmindedness (imperfect recall) leads him to time-inconsistent strategy evaluations. His original evaluation gets replaced by a new one under impact of the information that the circumstances have changed, notwithstanding the fact that this change in circumstances has been expected by him all along. The time inconsistency in strategy evaluation suggests that such an agent might have reason to renege on his adopted strategy. As we shall see, however, this danger is only apparent. There is no serious problem of dynamic inconsistency in this case. My diagnosis of the case under consideration is in many respects similar to the one provided by Aumann, Hart and Perry (1997), but the analysis leading to this diagnosis is not quite the same.

An agent who violates independence can avoid dynamic inconsistency in sequential choice if he is sophisticated enough to make use of backward induction in planning. However, Seidenfeld has demonstrated that such a sophisticated agent with dependent preferences is bound to violate the principle of dynamic substitution, according to which admissibility of a plan is preserved under substitution of indifferent options at various choice nodes in the decision tree. Since Seidenfeld considers dynamic substitution to be a coherence condition on dynamic choice, he concludes that sophistication cannot save a violator of independence from incoherence. In response to McClennen’s objection that relying on dynamic substitution when independence is at stake must be question-begging, Seidenfeld undertakes to prove that dynamic substitution follows from the principle of backward induction alone, provided we assume that the agent’s admissible choices from different sets of feasible plans are all based on a fixed underlying preference ordering of plans. This paper shows that Seidenfeld's proof fails: depending on the interpretation, it is either invalid or based on an unacceptable assumption.

The theories of belief change developed within the AGM-tradition are not logics in the proper sense, but rather informal axiomatic theories of belief change. Instead of characterizing the models of belief and belief change in a formalized object language, the AGM-approach uses a natural language — ordinary mathematical English — to characterize the mathematical structures that are under study. Recently, however, various authors such as Johan van Benthem and Maarten de Rijke have suggested representing doxastic change within a formal logical language: a dynamic modal logic. Inspired by these suggestions Krister Segerberg has developed a very general logical framework for reasoning about doxastic change: dynamic doxastic logic (DDL). This framework may be seen as an extension of standard Hintikka-style doxastic logic with dynamic operators representing various kinds of transformations of the agent's doxastic state. Basic DDL describes an agent that has opinions about the external world and an ability to change these opinions in the light of new information. Such an agent is non-introspective in the sense that he lacks opinions about his own belief states. Here we are going to discuss various possibilities for developing a dynamic doxastic logic for introspective agents: full DDL or DDL unlimited. The project of constructing such a logic is faced with difficulties due to the fact that the agent’s own doxastic state now becomes a part of the reality that he is trying to explore: when an introspective agent learns more about the world, then the reality he holds beliefs about undergoes a change. But then his introspective (higher-order) beliefs have to be adjusted accordingly. In the paper we shall consider various ways of solving this problem.