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28Mill’s Circle(s) of LibertySocial Theory and Practice 41 (4): 734-749. 2015.J.S. Mill’s advocacy of liberty was based only in part on his harm principle. He also endorsed two other principles that considerably extend the scope of liberty: first, a principle of individual liberty that is based on the value of positive freedom and of developing individuality, and second, a principle of free trade or economic freedom that is based on the value of economic efficiency. An analysis is offered of how these three principles are combined in Mill’s account of liberty and how they…Read more
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PreviewIn Sven Ove Hansson (ed.), The Role of Technology in Science: Philosophical Perspectives, Springer Verlag. 2015.
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23Measuring UncertaintyStudia Logica 93 (1): 21-40. 2009.Two types of measures of probabilistic uncertainty are introduced and investigated. Dispersion measures report how diffused the agent’s second-order probability distribution is over the range of first-order probabilities. Robustness measures reflect the extent to which the agent’s assessment of the prior (objective) probability of an event is perturbed by information about whether or not the event actually took place. The properties of both types of measures are investigated. The most obvious ty…Read more
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56Preference-based choice functions: a generalized approachSynthese 171 (2): 257-269. 2009.Although choice and preference are distinct categories, it may in some contexts be a useful idealization to treat choices as fully determined by preferences. In order to construct a general model of such preference-based choice, a method to derive choices from preferences is needed that yields reasonable outcomes for all preference relations, even those that are incomplete and contain cycles. A generalized choice function is introduced for this purpose. It is axiomatically characterized and is s…Read more
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36Making Road Traffic Safer: Reply to OriPhilosophical Papers 43 (3): 365-375. 2014.In order to reduce the death toll of road traffic it is necessary to focus on how vehicles and roads can be improved. Like other dangerous machines, motor vehicles should be equipped with safety devices that prevent mistakes by the operator from leading to serious consequences. Speed limiters that prevent driving at illegal speeds would save many lives, and so would alcohol interlocks. Meshi Ori's proposal that most cars should be replaced by motorcycles would not lead to the moral improvement t…Read more
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48Money-pumps, self-torturers and the demons of real lifeAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (4). 1993.This Article does not have an abstract
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85Providing foundations for coherentismErkenntnis 51 (2-3): 243-265. 1999.We prove that four theses commonly associated with coherentism are incompatible with the representation of a belief state as a logically closed set of sentences. The result is applied to the conventional coherence interpretation of the AGM theory of belief revision, which appears not to be tenable. Our argument also counts against the coherentistic acceptability of a certain form of propositional holism. We argue that the problems arise as an effect of ignoring the distinction between derived an…Read more
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25Outcome level analysis of belief contractionReview of Symbolic Logic 6 (2): 183-204. 2013.The outcome set of a belief change operator is the set of outcomes that can be obtained with it. Axiomatic characterizations are reported for the outcome sets of the standard AGM contraction operators and eight types of base-generated contraction. These results throw new light on the properties of some of these operators
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3Logic, epistemology and the unity of science, vol 1History and Philosophy of Logic 26 (3): 268-269. 2005.
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58Preference-based deontic logic (PDL)Journal of Philosophical Logic 19 (1). 1990.A new possible world semantics for deontic logic is proposed. Its intuitive basis is that prohibitive predicates (such as "wrong" and "prohibited") have the property of negativity, i.e. that what is worse than something wrong is itself wrong. The logic of prohibitive predicates is built on this property and on preference logic. Prescriptive predicates are defined in terms of prohibitive predicates, according to the wellknown formula "ought" = "wrong that not". In this preference-based deontic lo…Read more
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203Objective or subjective 'ought'?Utilitas 22 (1): 33-35. 2010.The prescriptive has both an objective and a subjective interpretation. In the objective sense, what one ought to do depends on what is actually true. In the subjective sense it depends on what one believes to be true. Ordinary usage seems to vacillate between these two interpretations. An example (the indecisive terrorist) is used to show that a subjective ought statement can have a determinate truth-value in situations where the corresponding objective ought statement has no truth-value, not e…Read more
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21Medical Ethics and New Public Management in SwedenCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 23 (3): 261-267. 2014.In order to shorten queues to healthcare, the Swedish government has introduced a yearly “queue billion” that is paid out to the county councils in proportion to how successful they are in reducing queues. However, only the queues for first visits are covered. Evidence has accumulated that queues for return visits have become longer. This affects the chronically and severely ill. Swedish physicians, and the Swedish Medical Association, have strongly criticized the queue billion and have claimed …Read more
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125Philosophy and other disciplinesMetaphilosophy 39 (4-5): 472-483. 2008.Abstract: This article offers a perspective on the role of philosophy in relation to other academic disciplines and to society in general. Among the issues treated are the delimitation of philosophy, whether it is a science, its role in the community of knowledge disciplines, its losses of subject matter to other disciplines, how it is influenced by social changes and by progress in other disciplines, and its role in interdisciplinary work. It is concluded that philosophy has an important missio…Read more
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47Hannes Leitgeb: The Stability of Belief: How Rational Belief Coheres with ProbabilityJournal of Philosophy 115 (5): 276-280. 2018.
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730Den moralfilosofiska traditionen har sina begränsningar. De frågor som stått i centrum för den moralfilosofiska diskussionen har ofta varit helt andra än de som människor i det praktiska livet har uppfattat som centrala moraliska problem. En viktig begränsning är att moralfilosofin, liksom beslutsteorin, nästan uteslutande har handlat om hur man hanterar välavgränsade problem där handlingsalternativen är givna. I det verkliga livet löser vi ofta moraliska problem genom att finna på nya handlings…Read more
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