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76Safeguards of a Disunified MindInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (3): 356-383. 2014.The papers focuses on pragmatic arguments for various rationality constraints on a decision maker’s state of mind: on her beliefs or preferences. An argument of this kind typically targets constraint violations. It purports to show that a violator of a given constraint can be confronted with a decision problem in which she will act to her guaranteed disadvantage. Dramatically put, she can be exploited by a clever bookie who doesn’t know more than the agent herself. Examples of pragmatic argument…Read more
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110. Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (pp. 634-638) (review)Ethics 114 (3). 2004.
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35A Distinction in Value: Intrinsic and for Its Own SakeProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (1). 2000.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 (or persons) 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-va…Read more
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152Kotarbinski's Early Criticism of UtilitarianismUtilitas 12 (1): 79. 2000.Apart from a short introduction, this contribution consists of a translation of Tadeusz Kotarbinski’s “Utilitarianism and The Ethics of Pity”. In that very concise and relatively unknown early note, written before he embarked on his long and influential career as a nominalist logician and philosopher of science, Kotarbinski had formulated four astonishingly ‘modern’ objections to utilitarianism. Unlike Christian ‘ethics of pity’, utilitarian ethics disregards the normative importance of the dist…Read more
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15If in doubt, treat’em equally: a case study in the application of formal methods to ethicsIn Tadeusz Czarnecki, Katarzyna Kijania-Placek, Olga Pollr & Jan Wolenski (eds.), The Analytical Way: Proceedings of the 6th European Congress of Analytic Philosophy, . pp. 219-243. 2010.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 sug…Read more
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151Value Relations RevisitedEconomics and Philosophy 28 (2): 133-164. 2012.In Rabinowicz (2008), I considered how value relations can best be analysed in terms of fitting pro-attitudes. In the formal model of 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…Read more
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113Re-considering the Foole’s Rejoinder: backward induction in indefinitely iterated prisoner’s dilemmasSynthese 136 (2): 135-157. 2003.According to the so-called “Folk Theorem” for repeated games, stable cooperative relations can be sustained in a Prisoner’s Dilemma if the game is repeated an indefinite number of times. This result depends on the possibility of applying strategies that are based on reciprocity, i.e., strategies that reward cooperation with subsequent cooperation and punish defectionwith subsequent defection. If future interactions are sufficiently important, i.e., if the discount rate is relatively small, each…Read more
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108Tropic of ValueIn Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen & Michael J. Zimmerman (eds.), Recent Work on Intrinsic Value, Springer. pp. 213--226. 2001.The authors of this paper earlier argued that concrete objects, such as things or persons, may have final value , which is not reducible to the value of states of affairs that concern the object in question.Our arguments have been challenged. This paper is an attempt to respond to some of these challenges, viz. those that concern the reducibility issue. The discussion presupposes a Brentano-inspired account of value in terms of fitting responses to value bearers. Attention is given to a yet anot…Read more
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31Democracy: two modelsIn , . 2011.The point of departure in my story is the contrast between two models of democratic voting process: popular democracy and what might be called committee democracy. On one interpretation, voting in popular democracy is a procedure whose function is to aggregate the individuals’ preferences to something like a collective preference, while in committee democracy what is being aggregated are committee members’ judgments. The relevant judgments on the agenda often address an evaluative question. It i…Read more
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11In 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, S…Read more
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174Broome and the intuition of neutralityPhilosophical Issues 19 (1): 389-411. 2009.In “Weighing Lives” (2004) John Broome criticizes a view common to many population axiologists. On that view, population increases with extra people leading decent lives are axiologically neutral: they make the world neither better nor worse, ceteris paribus. Broome argues that this intuition, however, attractive, cannot be sustained, for several independent reasons. I respond to his criticisms and suggest that the neutrality intuition, if correctly interpreted, can after all be defended.On the …Read more
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25Pragmatic arguments for rationality constraintsIn Maria Carla Galavotti, Roberto Scazzieri & Patrick Suppes (eds.), Reasoning, Rationality and Probability, . pp. 139-163. 2008.My focus is on pragmatic arguments for various rationality constraints on a decision maker’s state of mind: on his beliefs or preferences. An argument of this kind purports to show that a violator of a given constraint can be exposed to a decision problem in which she will act to her guaranteed disadvantage. Dramatically put, she can be exploited by a clever bookie who doesn’t know more than the agent himself. Examples of pragmatic arguments of this kind are synchronic Dutch Books, for the stand…Read more
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23The goal of this paper is to consider how the notion of analyticity can be dealt with in model-theoretical terms. The standard approach to possible-world semantics allows us to define logical truth and necessity, but analyticity is considerably more difficult to account for.
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40This 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…Read more
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889DDL unlimited: Dynamic doxastic logic for introspective agentsErkenntnis 50 (2-3): 353-385. 1999.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 repr…Read more
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72Grappling With the Centipede: Defence of Backward Induction for BI-Terminating GamesEconomics and Philosophy 14 (1): 95-126. 1998.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 e…Read more
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Two Causal Decision Theories: Lewis vs SobelIn Tom Pauli (ed.), Philosophical Essays Dedicated to Lennart Åqvist, Philosophical Society and Dept. of Philosophy, University of Uppsala. pp. 299-321. 1982.
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75Preference stability and substitution of indifferents: a rejoinder to SeidenfeldTheory and Decision 48 (4): 311-318. 2000.Seidenfeld (Seidenfeld, T. [1988a], Decision theory without 'Independence' or without 'Ordering', Economics and Philosophy 4: 267-290) gave an argument for Independence based on a supposition that admissibility of a sequential option is preserved under substitution of indifferents at choice nodes (S). To avoid a natural complaint that (S) begs the question against a critic of Independence, he provided an independent proof of (S) in his (Seidenfeld, T. [1988b], Rejoinder [to Hammond and McClennen…Read more
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107A Distinction in Value: Intrinsic and for its own sakeIn Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen & Michael J. Zimmerman (eds.), Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Springer. pp. 115--129. 2000.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 large…Read more
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70On Seidenfeldâs Criticism of Sophisticated Violations of the Independence AxiomTheory and Decision 43 (3): 279-292. 1997.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 s…Read more
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44Letters From Long Ago: On Causal Decision Theory and Centered ChancesIn Johansson Lars-Göran (ed.), Logic, Ethics, and All That Jazz - Essays in Honour of Jordan Howard Sobel, . 2009.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…Read more
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20Appendix: The jury theorem and the discursive dilemmaPhilosophical Issues 11 (1): 295-299. 2001.
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9Presumption 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 sug…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |