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3Popper's Conception of the Rationality Principle in the Social SciencesIn Ian Jarvie, David Miller & Karl Milford (eds.), Karl Popper: A Centenary Assessment: Selected Papers from Karl Popper 2002: Volume III: Science, Ashgate. 2006.
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Research Habits in Financial Modelling: The Case of Non-normality of Market Returns in the 1970s and the 1980sIn Ping Chen & Emiliano Ippoliti (eds.), Methods and Finance: A Unifying View on Finance, Mathematics and Philosophy, Springer Verlag. 2017.
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25Epistemic vice predicts acceptance of Covid-19 misinformationEpisteme 21 (1): 207-228. 2024.Why are mistaken beliefs about COVID-19 so prevalent? Political identity, education and other demographic variables explain only part of the differences between people in their susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation. This paper focuses on another explanation: epistemic vice. Epistemic vices are character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. If the basic assumption of vice epistemology is right, then people with epistemic vices such as indifference to …Read more
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174Ranking philosophy journals: a meta-ranking and a new survey rankingSynthese 202 (6): 1-31. 2023.This paper presents a meta-ranking of philosophy journals based on existing rankings, and a new ranking of philosophy journals developed through a survey involving a thousand authors (351 respondents, data collection May 2022) of articles from the most recent issues of 40 general philosophy journals. In addition to assessing journal quality, data were gathered on various variables such as gender, age, years in academia, number of refereed publications, area of specialization, and journal affilia…Read more
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1021Why are mistaken beliefs about Covid-19 so prevalent? Political identity, education and other demographic variables explain only a part of individual differences in the susceptibility to Covid-19 misinformation. This paper focuses on another explanation: epistemic vice. Epistemic vices are character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. If the basic assumption of vice epistemology is right, then people with epistemic vices such as indifference to the trut…Read more
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35Pitting Virtue Ethics Against Situationism: An Empirical Argument for VirtueEthical Theory and Moral Practice 26 (3): 463-479. 2023.Situationists maintain that psychological evidence (e.g., the well-known Good Samaritan experiment) challenges a key assumption of virtue ethics, namely that virtuous people display cross-situational consistency of behavior. This situationist critique is frequently thought to pose a serious threat to virtue ethics. Virtue ethicists have so far mainly put forward conceptual rather than empirical arguments against situationism. In this paper, we examine the extent to which a plausible empirical ar…Read more
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Freedom in finance: the importance of epistemic virtues and interlucent communicationIn Christopher Cowton & James Dempsey (eds.), Business Ethics After the Global Financial Crisis: Lessons From the Crash, Routledge. 2019.
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39Ethics at the Centre of Global and Local Challenges: Thoughts on the Future of Business EthicsJournal of Business Ethics 180 (3): 835-861. 2022.To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme Ethics at the centre of global and local challenges. For much of the history of the Journal of Business Ethics, ethics was seen within the academy as a peripheral aspect of business. However, in recent years, t…Read more
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53The Business of Liberty: Freedom and Information in Ethics, Politics, and LawOxford University Press. 2022.What makes political freedom valuable to us? Two well-known arguments are that freedom contributes to our desire satisfaction and to our personal responsibility. Here, Boudewijn de Bruin argues that freedom is valuable when it is accompanied by knowledge. He offers an original and systematic account of the relationship between freedom and knowledge and defends two original normative ideals of known freedom and acknowledged freedom. By combining psychological perspectives on choice and philosophi…Read more
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Finance and Financial Economics: A Philosophy of Science PerspectiveIn Conrad Heilmann & Julian Reiss (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Economics, Routledge. 2022.
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Real Life Collective Epistemic Virtue and ViceIn Mark Alfano, Jeroen De Ridder & Colin Klein (eds.), Social Virtue Epistemology, Routledge. pp. 396-423. 2022.
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Reflexive Law and Climate Change: The EU Sustainable Finance Action PlanIn Joakim Sandberg & Lisa Warenski (eds.), The Philosophy of Money and Finance, Oxford University Press. 2024.This Chapter studies legislative initiatives around sustainable finance deriving from the Action Plan: Financing Sustainable Growth (also called ‘Sustainable Finance Action Plan’, ‘Action Plan’ henceforth), published by the European Commission (‘Commission’) in 2018 (Communication 2018/97). I evaluate various instruments proposed in the Action Plan, using a reflexive law approach coupled with insights from business ethics and epistemology (De Bruin, 2013, 2015). I point to the challenges such an…Read more
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2Climate Change and Business EthicsJournal of Business Ethics. forthcoming.This article sketches ways in which business ethics should contribute to addressing the climate emergency. I consider some ways in which normative contributions to the debate on climate change and global warming have been defended, and how international thinking about environmental issues has moved from consequentialist to justice- and rights-based thinking. A recent case that came before the Hague District Court between a Dutch branch of Friends of the Earth, Milieudefensie, and Royal Dutch She…Read more
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44Against Nationalism: Climate Change, Human Rights, and International LawDanish Yearbook of Philosophy 55 (2): 173-198. 2022.Climate change threatens humanity more than anything else. If we talk of nationalism, we ought therefore consider its pros and cons in light of the climate emergency. Anatol Lieven believes that civic nationalism along the lines of Chaim Gans, David Miller, and Yuli Tamir helps combat global warming. He thinks that when nationalists recognize that climate change is just as threatening to the survival of their nation-state as wars, they will make the sacrifices necessary to avert the threat. In t…Read more
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24Knowledge attribution, socioeconomic status, and education: new results using the Great British Class SurveySynthese 199 (3-4): 7615-7657. 2021.This paper presents new evidence on the impact of socioeconomic status and education on knowledge attribution. I examine a variety of cases, including vignettes where agents have been Gettiered, have false beliefs, and possess knowledge. Early work investigated whether SES might be associated with knowledge attribution :429–460, 2001; Seyedsayamdost in Episteme 12:95–116, 2014). But these studies used college education as a dummy variable for SES. I use the recently developed Great British Class…Read more
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65The Development and Validation of the Epistemic Vice ScaleReview of Philosophy and Psychology 1-28. forthcoming.This paper presents two studies on the development and validation of a ten-item scale of epistemic vice and the relationship between epistemic vice and misinformation and fake news. Epistemic vices have been defined as character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. Examples of epistemic vice are gullibility and indifference to knowledge. It has been hypothesized that epistemically vicious people are especially susceptible to misinformation and conspiracy…Read more
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59Saving the armchair by experiment: what works in economics doesn’t work in philosophyPhilosophical Studies 178 (8): 2483-2508. 2020.Financial incentives, learning, group consultation, and increased experimental control are among the experimental techniques economists have successfully used to deflect the behavioral challenge posed by research conducted by such scholars as Tversky and Kahneman. These techniques save the economic armchair to the extent that they align laypeople judgments with economic theory by increasing cognitive effort and reflection in experimental subjects. It is natural to hypothesize that a similar stra…Read more
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45Epistemic Injustice in FinanceTopoi 40 (4): 755-763. 2019.This article applies philosophical work on epistemic injustice and cognate concepts to study gender and racial disparity in financial markets. Members of disadvantaged groups often receive inferior financial services. In most jurisdictions, it is illegal to provide discriminatorily disparate treatment to groups defined by gender and skin colour. Racial disparity in financial services is generally considered to be discriminatory. The standard view among most regulators is that gender disparity is…Read more
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36Stakes Sensitivity and Credit Rating: A New Challenge for RegulatorsJournal of Business Ethics 169 (1): 169-179. 2019.The ethical practices of credit rating agencies, particularly following the 2008 financial crisis, have been subject to extensive analysis by economists, ethicists, and policymakers. We raise a novel issue facing CRAs that has to do with a problem concerning the transmission of epistemic status of ratings from CRAs to the beneficiaries of the ratings, and use it to provide a new challenge for regulators. Building on recent work in philosophy, we argue that since CRAs have different stakes than t…Read more
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36Impermissible Self-Rationalizing Pessimism: In Defence of a Pragmatic Ethics of BeliefErkenntnis 86 (2): 257-274. 2019.We present an argument against a standard evidentialist position on the ethics of belief. We argue that sometimes a person merits criticism for holding a belief even when that belief is well supported by her evidence in any relevant sense. We show how our argument advances the case for anti-evidentialism in the light of other arguments presented in the recent literature, and respond to a set of possible evidentialist rejoinders.
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178Philosophy of money and financeIn Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012.
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13Pledging Integrity: Oaths as Forms of Business Ethics ManagementJournal of Business Ethics 136 (1): 23-42. 2016.The global financial crisis has led to a surprising interest in professional oaths in business. Examples are the MBA Oath, the Economist’s Oath and the Dutch Banker’s Oath, which senior executives in the financial services industry in the Netherlands have been obliged to swear since 2010. This paper is among the first to consider oaths from the perspective of business ethics. A framework is presented for analysing oaths in terms of their form, their content and the specific contribution they mak…Read more
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40Moral Responsibility for Large‐Scale Events: The Difference between Climate Change and Economic CrisesMidwest Studies in Philosophy 42 (1): 191-212. 2018.
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57Liberal and Republican FreedomJournal of Political Philosophy 17 (4): 418-439. 2009.This paper argues that liberal freedom (non-interference) is epistemologically prior to republican freedom (non-domination). I start investigate three relations between liberal and republican freedom: (i) Logical Equivalence, or the question whether republican freedom entails liberal freedom (and vice versa); (ii) Degree Supervenience, or whether changes in the degree (amount, quantity) of republican freedom are mirrored by changes in the degree of liberal freedom (and vice versa); and (iii) Epi…Read more
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13Afscheid van een SpinozaprojectAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 91 159-161. 2002.
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383Research Habits in Financial Modelling: The Case of Non-normativity of Market Returns in the 1970s and the 1980sIn Ping Chen & Emiliano Ippoliti (eds.), Methods and Finance: A Unifying View on Finance, Mathematics and Philosophy, Springer. pp. 73-93. 2016.In this chapter, one considers finance at its very foundations, namely, at the place where assumptions are being made about the ways to measure the two key ingredients of finance: risk and return. It is well known that returns for a large class of assets display a number of stylized facts that cannot be squared with the traditional views of 1960s financial economics (normality and continuity assumptions, i.e. Brownian representation of market dynamics). Despite the empirical counterevidence, no…Read more
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554'Information as a Condition of Justice in Financial Markets: The Regulation of Credit-Rating AgenciesIn Lisa Herzog (ed.), Just Financial Markets?: Finance in a Just Society, Oxford University Press. pp. 250-270. 2017.This chapter argues for deregulation of the credit-rating market. Credit-rating agencies are supposed to contribute to the informational needs of investors trading bonds. They provide ratings of debt issued by corporations and governments, as well as of structured debt instruments (e.g. mortgage-backed securities). As many academics, regulators, and commentators have pointed out, the ratings of structured instruments turned out to be highly inaccurate, and, as a result, they have argued for tigh…Read more
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15Common knowledge of payoff uncertainty in gamesSynthese 163 (1): 79-97. 2007.Using epistemic logic, we provide a non-probabilistic way to formalise payoff uncertainty, that is, statements such as ‘player i has approximate knowledge about the utility functions of player j.’ We show that on the basis of this formalisation common knowledge of payoff uncertainty and rationality (in the sense of excluding weakly dominated strategies, due to Dekel and Fudenberg (1990)) characterises a new solution concept we have called ‘mixed iterated strict weak dominance.’
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16Media Violence and Freedom of Speech: How to Use Empirical DataEthical Theory and Moral Practice 11 (5): 493-505. 2008.Susan Hurley has argued against a well known argument for freedom of speech, the argument from autonomy, on the basis of two hypotheses about violence in the media and aggressive behaviour. The first hypothesis says that exposure to media violence causes aggressive behaviour; the second, that humans have an innate tendency to copy behaviour in ways that bypass conscious deliberation. I argue, first, that Hurley is not successful in setting aside the argument from autonomy. Second, I show that th…Read more
Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands
Areas of Specialization
Financial Ethics |
Sustainability |
Climate Change |
Areas of Interest
Business Ethics |
Liberalism |
Virtue Epistemology |
Philosophy of Law |