-
34Discussion – Ryberg's doubts about higher and lower pleasures – put to rest?Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 6 (2): 231-235. 2003.
-
44To Have One's Cake and Eat It, Too: Sequential Choice and Expected-Utility ViolationsJournal of Philosophy 92 (11): 586-620. 1995.
-
156Actual truth, possible knowledgeTopoi 13 (2): 101-115. 1994.The well-known argument of Frederick Fitch, purporting to show that verificationism (= Truth implies knowability) entails the absurd conclusion that all the truths are known, has been disarmed by Dorothy Edgington''s suggestion that the proper formulation of verificationism presupposes that we make use of anactuality operator along with the standardly invoked epistemic and modal operators. According to her interpretation of verificationism, the actual truth of a proposition implies that it could…Read more
-
22Ryberg’s Doubts About Higher and Lower Pleasures –Put to Rest?Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 6 (2). 2003.
-
196Analyticity and Possible-World SemanticsErkenntnis 72 (3): 295-314. 2010.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 ‘ex…Read more
-
159Value Based on PreferencesEconomics and Philosophy 12 (1): 1. 1996.What distinguishes preference utilitarianism from other utilitarian positions is the axiological component: the view concerning what is intrinsically valuable. According to PU, intrinsic value is based on preferences. Intrinsically valuable states are connected to our preferences being satisfied
-
37Kripke on psychophysical identityIn , . 2002.This paper deals with Kripke’s influential criticism of the view that mental states are physical in nature, i.e. that such states are identical with certain physical states or processes.
-
176What if I were in his shoes? On Hare's argument for preference utilitarianismTheoria 62 (1-2): 95-123. 1996.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. Paradoxicall…Read more
-
38Conditionals and the Ramsey testIn D. Gabbay & P. Smets (eds.), Handbook of Defeasible Reasoning and Uncertainty Management Systems, Vol 3, . 1998.
-
58According to the fitting-attitude analysis of value (FA-analysis), 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 anal…Read more
-
103Value, Fitting‐Attitude Account ofIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.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 s…Read more
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |