Luc Bovens

Jon Elster contrasts preference acquisition through sour grapes with preference acquisition through character planning. He claims that what distinguishes these psychological phenomena is that only the latter is autonomous and intentional. I argue against this view and propose an alternative account which runs parallel to Donald Davidson's analysis of weakness of the will. On my account, preference acquisition through character planning secures the coherence between preferences and the reasons for holding these preferences, while preference acquisition through sour grapes does not. I then suggest that this account as well as moral theories that acknowledge conflicting moral concerns are threatened by alternative interpretations of Arrow's voting paradox in social choice theory. I discuss how appeals to various forms of moral supervenience , and, analogues to Amartya Sen's objections to a reading of Arrow's theorem in terms of social welfare judgments, affect these paradoxical interpretations. I argue that analogues to Sen's appeal to non-welfare information can dissolve these interpretations, though open the door for new threats from alternative interpretations of Sen's libertarian paradox

Blackburn argues that moral supervenience in conjunction with the lack of entailments from naturalistic to moral judgments poses a challenge to moral realism. Klagge and McFetridge try to avert the challenge by appealing to synthetically necessary connections between natural and moral properties. Blackburn rejoins that, even if there are such connections, the challenge still remains. We remain agnostic on the question whether there are such connections, but argue against Blackburn that, if there are indeed such connections, then the challenge to moral realism, properly phrased, does not hold up

I argue in this paper that there are two considerations which govern the dynamics of a two-person bargaining game, viz. relative proportionate utility loss from conceding to one's opponent's proposal and relative non-proportionate utility loss from not conceding to one's opponent's proposal, if she were not to concede as well. The first consideration can adequately be captured by the information contained in vNM utilities. The second requires measures of utility which allow for an interpersonal comparison of utility differences. These considerations respectively provide for a justification of the Nash solution and the Kalai egalitarian solution. However, none of these solutions taken by themselves can provide for a full story of bargaining, since, if within a context of bargaining one such consideration is overriding, the solution which does not match this consideration will yield unreasonable results. I systematically present arguments to the effect that each justification from self-interest for respectively the Nash and the Kalai egalitarian solution is vulnerable to this kind of objection. I suggest that the search for an integrative model may be a promising line of research.

Selinger and Whyte argue that Thaler and Sunstein are insufficiently sensitive to cultural variance in _Nudge_. I construct a taxonomy of the various roles that cultural variance may play in _nudges_. First, biases that are exploited in _nudging_ may interact with features that are culturally specific. Second, cultures may be more or less susceptible to certain biases. Third, cultures may resolve conflicting biases in different ways. And finally, _nudge_ may be enlisted for different aims in different cultures.

I give a voice to the sort of qualms we might have about photojournalism. But this is not to say that in each instance the scales will tip to the side of these qualms. To speak with Larry Burrows, sometimes penetrating the hearts of those at home vindicates our capitalizing on other men’s grief. Photojournalism’s role as a catalyst for social change does indeed give it a certain license. But in learning about what kind of values there are on the other side of the scale, we come to understand that there are certain restraints to this license. Understanding those restraints makes for a more respectful and a more powerful photojournalism.

The Government uses various policy tools to reduce alcohol consumption. There are restrictions on promotions, information campaigns, and pricing policies. These policies do not stand unchallenged. Restrictions on promotions irk business, information campaigns fail to reach the less educated, and pricing policies hurt responsible but poor consumers. So what about Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge? Nudges keep choices open but change the “choice architecture” so as to help those who would like to drink less, and they do so in ways that constructively engage business. Let us focus on one choice environment here, namely beer consumption in British pubs

We construct a new measure of voting power that yields reasonable measurements even if the individual votes are not cast independently. Our measure hinges on probabilities of counterfactuals, such as the probability that the outcome of a collective decision would have been yes, had a voter voted yes rather than no as she did in the real world. The probabilities of such counterfactuals are calculated on the basis of causal information, following the approach by Balke and Pearl. Opinion leaders whose votes have causal influence on other voters' votes can have significantly more voting power under our measure. But the new measure of voting power is also sensitive to the voting rule. We show that our measure can be regarded as an average treatment effect, we provide examples in which it yields intuitively plausible results and we prove that it reduces to Banzhaf voting power in the limiting case of independent and equiprobable votes

Nancy Cartwright is one of the most distinguished and influential contemporary philosophers of science. Despite the profound impact of her work, there is neither a systematic exposition of Cartwright’s philosophy of science nor a collection of articles that contains in-depth discussions of the major themes of her philosophy. This book is devoted to a critical assessment of Cartwright’s philosophy of science and contains contributions from Cartwright's champions and critics. Broken into three parts, the book begins by addressing Cartwright's views on the practice of model building in science and the question of how models represent the world before moving on to a detailed discussion of methodologically and metaphysically challenging problems. Finally, the book addresses Cartwright's original attempts to clarify profound questions concerning the metaphysics of science. With contributions from leading scholars, such as Ronald N. Giere and Paul Teller, this unique volume will be extremely useful to philosophers of science the world over.

Consider the following two seemingly unrelated questions. First, why does Rousseau (1993 [1762]) believe that the formation of factions or partial associations is not conducive to the general will in Du Contrat Social, II, 3? Second, why do federal assemblies typically strive for some form of degressive proportionality, i.e. a balance between equal and proportional representation, for the countries in the federation? We will show that there is a surprising connection between these questions. We turn to our first question. It is often thought that Rousseau’s opposition to factions can be interpreted in reference to the Condorcet Jury Theorem. The Condorcet Jury Theorem states that if voters are more likely to be right on some issue than not and cast their votes independently, then the chance that the majority is correct converges to one as the number of voters goes to infinity. This interpretation is tempting, but it is inconsistent with some crucial textual evidence. We turn to our second question. Consider a federation of countries with a decision-making assembly in which each country casts a block vote. On equal representation, the vote of each country has the same weight. On proportional representation, the weights of the votes are proportional to the countries’ population sizes. In between these extremes, we can let the weights increase as a function of population sizes, but smaller countries receive greater weights and larger countries receive lesser weights than proportionality would warrant. Such weightings are called degressively proportional weightings. How can degressive proportionality be justified? And does this justification provide us any guidance as to how these weights should be set? A correct understanding of Rousseau’s misgivings about the formation of factions will hold the key to these questions.

In “Judy Benjamin is a Sleeping Beauty” (2010) Bovens recognises a certain similarity between the Sleeping Beauty (SB) and the Judy Benjamin (JB). But he does not recognise the dissimilarity between underlying protocols (as spelled out in Shafer (1985). Protocols are expressed in conditional probability tables that spell out the probability of coming to learn various propositions conditional on the actual state of the world. The principle of total evidence requires that we not update on the content of the proposition learned but rather on the fact that we learn the proposition in question. Now attention to protocols drives a wedge between the SB and the JB. We have shown that the solution to a close variant of the SB which involves a clear protocol is P*(Heads) = 1/3 and since Beauty’s has precisely the same information at her disposal in the original SB at the time that she is asked to state her credence for Heads, the same solution should hold. The solution to the JB, on the other hand, is dependent on Judy’s probability distribution over protocols. One reasonable protocol yields P(Red) = 1/2, but Judy could also defend alternative values or a range of values in the interval [1/3, 1/2] depending on her probability distribution over protocols.

One of the stated aims of the “2008 Policy Plan on Asylum” by the European Commission is increased ‘responsibility sharing’ between Member States with respect to asylum seekers. Luc Bovens and Günperi Sisman assess the extent to which UNHCR outcome data reflect these aims between 2006 and 2011 – from the end of the first phase of the Common European Asylum System until the latest available data. They find that Greece, Portugal and Spain take on very low responsibility for asylum seekers per capita and per unit of GDP. Eastern European states do poorly per capita, but do much better per unit of GDP. There is also an overall trend towards greater responsibility sharing for acceptances and stocks per unit of GDP

We consider a special set of risky prospects in which the outcomes are either life or death. There are various alternatives to the utilitarian objective of minimizing the expected loss of lives in such prospects. We start off with the two-person case with independent risks and construct taxonomies of ex ante and ex post evaluations for such prospects. We examine the relationship between the ex ante and the ex post in this restrictive framework: There are more possibilities to respect ex ante and ex post objectives simultaneously than in the general framework, i.e. without the restriction to binary utilities. We extend our results to n persons and to dependent risks. We study optimal strategies for allocating risk reductions given different objectives. We place our results against the backdrop of various pro-poorly off value functions for the evaluation of risky prospects.

Risky prospects represent policies that impose different types of risks on multiple people. I present an example from food safety. A utilitarian following Harsanyi's Aggregation Theorem ranks such prospects according to their mean expected utility or the expectation of the social utility. Such a ranking is not sensitive to any of four types of distributional concerns. I develop a model that lets the policy analyst rank prospects relative to the distributional concerns that she considers fitting in the context at hand. I name this model ‘the Distribution View’ posing an alternative to Parfit's Priority View for risky prospects

The coherentist theory of justification provides a response to the sceptical challenge: even though the independent processes by which we gather information about the world may be of dubious quality, the internal coherence of the information provides the justification for our empirical beliefs. This central canon of the coherence theory of justification is tested within the framework of Bayesian networks, which is a theory of probabilistic reasoning in artificial intelligence. We interpret the independence of the information gathering processes (IGPs) in terms of conditional independences, construct a minimal sufficient condition for a coherence ranking of information sets and assess whether the confidence boost that results from receiving information through independent IGPs is indeed a positive function of the coherence of the information set. There are multiple interpretations of what constitute IGPs of dubious quality. Do we know our IGPs to be no better than randomization processes? Or, do we know them to be better than randomization processes but not quite fully reliable, and if so, what is the nature of this lack of full reliability? Or, do we not know whether they are fully reliable or not? Within the latter interpretation, does learning something about the quality of some IGPs teach us anything about the quality of the other IGPs? The Bayesian-network models demonstrate that the success of the coherentist canon is contingent on what interpretation one endorses of the claim that our IGPs are of dubious quality.

Suppose a committee has to take a stand on a complex issue, where the decision presupposes answering a number of sub-questions. There is an agreement within the committee which sub-questions should be posed. All questions are of the ”yes or no?”-type and the main question is to be given the yes-answer if and only if each sub-question is answered with “yes”. Two different voting procedures can be used. On one procedure, the committee members vote on each sub-question and the voting results then determine the committee’s conclusion on the main issue. This premise-based procedure (or pbp, for short) can be contrasted with the conclusion-based procedure (cbp), on which the members directly vote on the conclusion, with the vote of each member being guided by her views on the relevant sub-questions. The problem we want to examine concerns the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two procedures from the epistemic point of view. In some cases one can assume that the question before the committee has a right answer, which the committee is trying to reach. Is one of the two procedures better when it comes to tracking the truth? As it turns out, the answer to this query is not univocal: On the basis of Condorcet’s jury theorem we shall show that the premise-based procedure is clearly superior if we want to reach truth for the right reasons, i.e. without making any mistakes on the road to the conclusion. However, if the goal instead is to reach truth for whatever reasons, right or wrong, there will be special cases in which using the conclusion-based procedure turns out to be more reliable. But for the most part, the premise-based procedure will still retain its superiority. In this respect, our results disconfirm the tentative conjectures that have been put forward in Pettit and Rabinowicz (2001).

Kant's aim in the transcendental deduction is to show that the categories, i.e., a specific set of categories, are a necessary condition for all possible experience. Some philosophers have extended this idea in the following way: Kant solely identified a set of a priori concepts, which are a necessary condition for all possible epistemic claims within a framework of Newtonian physics; however, there exist other sets of epistemic claims, which can solely be justified by means of alternative sets of a priori concepts. In this paper I will address the following questions: (1) What claims are precisely involved in this alleged extension of Kant's results of the transcendental deduction? (2) Is it merely an historical accident that Kant could only identify one set of categories, or, are there, apart from Kant's explicit commitment to one particular set of categories, any other claims within the Transcendental Analytic, which are incompatible with this extension of Kant's view?

This paper addresses a problem for theories of epistemic democracy. In a decision on a complex issue which can be decomposed into several parts, a collective can use different voting procedures: Either its members vote on each sub-question and the answers that gain majority support are used as premises for the conclusion on the main issue, or the vote is conducted on the main issue itself. The two procedures can lead to different results. We investigate which of these procedures is better as a truth-tracker, assuming that there exists a true answer to be reached. On the basis of the Condorcet jury theorem, we show that the pbp is universally superior if the objective is to reach truth for the right reasons. If one instead is after truth for whatever reasons, right or wrong, there will be cases in which the cbp is more reliable, even though, for the most part, the pbp still is to be preferred

Belgium has recently extended its euthanasia legislation to minors, making it the first legislation in the world that does not specify any age limit. I consider two strands in the opposition to this legislation. First, I identify five arguments in the public debate to the effect that euthanasia for minors is somehow worse than euthanasia for adults—viz. arguments from weightiness, capability of discernment, pressure, sensitivity and sufficient palliative care—and show that these arguments are wanting. Second, there is another position in the public debate that wishes to keep the current age restriction on the books and have ethics boards exercise discretion in euthanasia decisions for minors. I interpret this position on the background of Velleman’s “Against the Right to Die” and show that, although costs remain substantial, it actually can provide some qualified support against extending euthanasia legislation to minors

The Distribution View provides a model that integrates four distributional concerns in the evaluation of risky prospects. Starting from these concerns, we can generate an ordering over a set of risky prospects, or, starting from an ordering, we can extract a characterization of the underlying distributional concerns. Separability of States and/or Persons for multiple-person risky prospects, for single-person risky prospects and for multiple-person certain prospects are discussed within the model. The Distribution View sheds light on public health policies and provides a framework for the discussion of Parfit's Priority View for risky prospects.