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38Assessing ethical trade-offs in ecological field studiesJournal of Applied Ecology 47 (1): 227-234. 2010.Summary 1. Ecologists and conservation biologists consider many issues when designing a field study, such as the expected value of the data, the interests of the study species, the welfare of individual organisms and the cost of the project. These different issues or values often conflict; however, neither animal ethics nor environmental ethics provides practical guidance on how to assess trade-offs between them. 2. We developed a decision framework for considering trade-offs between values in e…Read more
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37The distinct moral importance of acting togetherPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (2): 505-510. 2022.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 2, Page 505-510, March 2022.
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36Challenges to decision theory: José Luis Bermúdez: Decision theory and rationality. Oxford University Press, 2009, 189 pp, US $50.00 HBMetascience 19 (3): 449-451. 2010.
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34How to be imprecise and yet immune to sure lossSynthese 199 (1-2): 427-444. 2020.Towards the end of Decision Theory with a Human Face, Richard Bradley discusses various ways a rational yet human agent, who, due to lack of evidence, is unable to make some fine-grained credibility judgments, may nonetheless make systematic decisions. One proposal is that such an agent can simply “reach judgments” on the fly, as needed for decision making. In effect, she can adopt a precise probability function to serve as proxy for her imprecise credences at the point of decision, and then sub…Read more
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27Review of Husain Sarkar, Group Rationality in Scientific Research (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (10). 2007.
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17Dynamic Decision TheoryIn Sven Ove Hansson & Vincent F. Hendricks (eds.), Introduction to Formal Philosophy, Springer. pp. 657-667. 2012.This chapter considers the controversial relationship between dynamic choice models, which depict a series of choices over time, and the more familiar static choice models, which depict a single ‘one-shot-only’ decision. An initial issue concerns how to reconcile the normative advice of these two models: Should an agent take account of the broader dynamic context when making a decision, and if so, in a sophisticated manner, or rather in a resolute manner? Further controversies concern what the d…Read more
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13Why Time Discounting Should Be Exponential: A Reply to CallenderAustralasian Philosophical Review 5 (3): 284-295. 2021.According to Craig Callender [2022], the ‘received view’ across the social sciences is that, when it comes to time and preference, only exponential time discounting is rational. Callender argues that this view is false, even pernicious. Here I endorse what I take to be Callender’s main argument, but only in so far as the received view is understood in a particular way. I go on to propose a different way of understanding the received view that makes it true. In short: When time discounting is sui…Read more
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12Model-Selection Theory: The Need for a More Nuanced Picture of Use-Novelty and Double-CountingBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (2): 351-375. 2018.This article argues that common intuitions regarding (a) the specialness of ‘use-novel’ data for confirmation and (b) that this specialness implies the ‘no-double-counting rule’, which says that data used in ‘constructing’ (calibrating) a model cannot also play a role in confirming the model’s predictions, are too crude. The intuitions in question are pertinent in all the sciences, but we appeal to a climate science case study to illustrate what is at stake. Our strategy is to analyse the intuit…Read more
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Acton, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Probability |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Social Science |