• 7. Partisanship
    In Brian P. McLaughlin & Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (eds.), Perspectives on Self-Deception, University of California Press. pp. 170-182. 1988.
  •  3
    How to Change Your Desires
    In Disasters and Dilemmas, Wiley. 1990.
    To see some of the ways of changing desires begin with a comparison with the rather different case of belief. In the case of belief there are 'rational' ways of changing the opinions, by considering arguments and evidence, and 'non‐rational' ones, such as being hypnotized or joining a religious sect. This chapter discusses cases in which someone wants to change their desires. There is then a conflict between their second order desires and their simple, first order, desires. The chapter also desc…Read more
  • Risk: More Questions than Answers
    In Disasters and Dilemmas, Wiley. 1990.
    Decision making comes under pressure when the stakes are high and the information is imperfect. That is risk. Most of the risks can be most easily presented in terms of tensions between the recommendations of a simple theory and the complex reactions. The theory is the standard philosophers' and economists' account of rationality in the face of risk, in terms of expected utility, and the cases derive mostly from the intuitive sense many people have had that there is something wrong with the theo…Read more
  •  1
    Misery and Death
    In Disasters and Dilemmas, Wiley. 1990.
    People need strategies, to tell them either how to balance the preservation of life against the avoidance of pain or how to allocate the resources without having to balance them. This chapter describes a non‐balancing strategy. This strategy could be a helpful part of a society's decision‐making resources. The chapter also gives many non‐medical cases which present problems which are similar in one way or another. In all these cases the tension is between the preservation of life and various kin…Read more
  •  1
    Risk: A Few Answers
    In Disasters and Dilemmas, Wiley. 1990.
    This chapter presents a model of risk‐taking behaviour. That is, it describes some simpler patterns of preference than real people ever have, and then discusses some strategies that would make sense for people with these simple preferences when faced with choices between risky options. These strategies can also make sense for people, with the more complicated preferences. The chapter also discusses some more detailed assumptions about snobs' preferences. There are several ways in which the Snobs…Read more
  •  2
    The Price of Choice
    In Disasters and Dilemmas, Wiley. 1990.
    This chapter discusses four ways in which the question of the price of a choice can arise: one trivial, one about risk, one awful, and one moral. It is very hard to compare the awfulness of a choice to the desirability or undesirability of the things one is choosing between. The undesirability of having to choose between loyalty to the child and opposition to terrorism seems to be incomparable both to the loyalty and to the opposition. The final decision is made with the valuation one would use …Read more
  •  2
    Good Strategies, Good Decisions
    In Disasters and Dilemmas, Wiley. 1990.
    A good decision is one that leads to people's getting what they want. Luck plays a smaller role if they ask what makes a good decision‐making method or policy. This chapter discusses how often people will get more of what they want if their decisions are formed in this way, than they would have had they reasoned differently. It also describes the advantages or disadvantages of the dilemma‐managing strategies, and presents a systematic view of the strategies (partition‐shifting strategies, spread…Read more
  • Notes
    In Disasters and Dilemmas, Wiley. 1990.
    Family life and one's career are incomparable values for him/her. The whole topic of incomparability of desires is veiled in confusion and controversy. Some people deny that there are any incomparable desires. This chapter explains meaning of incomparability, discusses incomparability as a fact of life that many of the desires are incomparable, and also examines why incomparability makes an enormous difference to decision‐making what patterns of incomparability the desires exhibit. The first dim…Read more
  •  1
    Dilemma‐Management: Easy Cases
    In Disasters and Dilemmas, Wiley. 1990.
    This chapter describes a way of thinking, really a family of ways of thinking, which allows incomparables to be left incomparable. In the chapter, the patterns of decision making are very ordinary and unsurprising. But the point is to show that people do have ways of thinking that do not require them to balance the unbalanceable, and to begin to develop a vocabulary that helps reveal how they do this. The chapter discusses the following five dilemma‐managing principles: the rain‐check principle;…Read more
  •  1
    Patterns of Desire
    In Disasters and Dilemmas, Wiley. 1990.
    The difficulty of a dilemma is often due to the pattern of one's desires: the way in which your wants for different things are related to one another. When one sees how many patterns desires can take one begins to appreciate the real difficulty of decision making. But one also begins to see that dilemmas are not all unfortunate and insoluble traps. There are good and not so good strategies for dealing with them. In dealing with the resulting dilemmas the strategy may find ways of reducing them t…Read more
  • Front Matter
    In Disasters and Dilemmas, Wiley. 1990.
    The prelims comprise: Half‐Title Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Introduction.
  •  1
    References
    In Disasters and Dilemmas, Wiley. 1990.
    Family life and one's career are incomparable values for him/her. The whole topic of incomparability of desires is veiled in confusion and controversy. Some people deny that there are any incomparable desires. This chapter explains meaning of incomparability, discusses incomparability as a fact of life that many of the desires are incomparable, and also examines why incomparability makes an enormous difference to decision‐making what patterns of incomparability the desires exhibit. The first dim…Read more
  •  1
    Moments in Good Lives
    In Disasters and Dilemmas, Wiley. 1990.
    This chapter describes just one of the many attributes that a worthwhile life can have, one which connects both with the experience of the satisfyingness of life and with the dilemma‐managing strategies. Several of the dilemma‐managing strategies link choices to the overall pattern of the decision‐maker's life. All of these strategies resolve dilemmas by relating the incomparable desires that produce them to more nearly comparable preferences for kinds of lives. These strategies could be crudely…Read more
  •  1
    Index
    In Disasters and Dilemmas, Wiley. 1990.
    Family life and one's career are incomparable values for him/her. The whole topic of incomparability of desires is veiled in confusion and controversy. Some people deny that there are any incomparable desires. This chapter explains meaning of incomparability, discusses incomparability as a fact of life that many of the desires are incomparable, and also examines why incomparability makes an enormous difference to decision‐making what patterns of incomparability the desires exhibit. The first dim…Read more
  •  2
    Coordination Problems
    In Disasters and Dilemmas, Wiley. 1990.
    This is a chapter about changing the desires of others. People often have to coordinate their actions in order to get what they want. The need for coordination produces a practical problem and a philosophical problem. The difference between the problems is that in dealing with the practical one he/she does not have to get hung up about rationality. Different coordination problems generalize in different ways to more than two people or more than two actions. The prisoner's dilemma has received mo…Read more
  •  3
    The Disunity of the Moral
    In Disasters and Dilemmas, Wiley. 1990.
    This chapter contrasts moral motivation, as a problematic thing, with the apparently straightforward motives of self‐interest. It also contrasts moral dilemmas, in which one has to find an acceptable action in the midst of conflicting responsibilities and obligations, with practical or prudential dilemmas, in which the problem is getting as much as he/she can of what he/she want. The problem is that these contrasts are all different. They cut in different directions. For any two of the contrasts…Read more
  •  68
    The Limits of Sociological Marxism?
    Historical Materialism 21 (1): 129-158. 2013.
    Within the agenda of historical-materialist theory and practice Sociological Marxism has delivered a compelling perspective on how to explore and link the analysis of civil society, the state, and the economy within an explicit focus on class exploitation, emancipation, and rich ethnography. This article situates a major analysis of state formation, the rise of the Justice and Development Party, and the growth of a broader Islamist movement in Turkey within the main current of Sociological Marxi…Read more
  •  40
    Representing and Intervening (review)
    Philosophical Review 95 (4): 606-611. 1986.
  •  30
    Axis of Evil or Access to Diesel?
    with Andreas Bieler
    Historical Materialism 23 (2): 94-130. 2015.
    This article examines how the Iraq War was a space in the ongoing geographical extension of global capitalism linked tousforeign policy. Was it simply the decision by a unitary, hegemonic actor in the inter-state system overriding concerns from other states? Was it an imperialist move to secure the ‘global oil spigot’? Alternatively, did the use of military force reflect the interests and emergence of a transnational state apparatus? We argue that theusimperium needs to be conceptualised as a sp…Read more
  •  24
    Introduction: International Relations as Political Theory
    with Andreas Bieler
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 8 (4): 383-393. 2005.
  •  44
    A Double Reading of Gramsci: Beyond the Logic of Contingency
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 8 (4): 439-453. 2005.
    Abstract In criticising the Italian idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce ? described by Eric Hobsbawm as the first ?post?Marxist? ? Antonio Gramsci elaborated a distinct theory of history. For Gramsci, philosophers such as Croce developed a subjective account of history based on the progression of philosophical thought rather than problems posed by historical development. This essay develops a ?double reading? of Gramsci. First, it presents an overview of a dominant post?Marxist reading of Grams…Read more
  •  3
    Realism and the Progress of Science
    Philosophical Quarterly 32 (128): 288-289. 1982.
  • Surprise
    In Sabine Roeser & Cain Samuel Todd (eds.), Emotion and Value, Oxford University Press Uk. 2014.
  •  186
    Explaining Culture
    Philosophical Books 38 (4): 235-239. 1997.
    review of Sperber *Explaining Culture*
  •  11
    The Language of Thought (review)
    Journal of Philosophy 75 (3): 161-169. 1978.
  •  6
    Deviant Logic (review)
    Journal of Philosophy 74 (5): 308-311. 1977.
  •  10
    Language and Thought
    Journal of Symbolic Logic 50 (1): 252-252. 1985.
  •  328
    Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain
    Mind 114 (455): 737-739. 2005.
    I consider Glimcher's claim to have given an account of mental functioning that is at once neurological and decision-theoretical. I am skeptical, but remark on some good ideas of Glimcher's.