•  1502
    A Faithful Response to Disagreement
    The Philosophical Review 130 (2): 191-226. 2021.
    In the peer disagreement debate, three intuitively attractive claims seem to conflict: there is disagreement among peers on many important matters; peer disagreement is a serious challenge to one’s own opinion; and yet one should be able to maintain one’s opinion on important matters. I show that contrary to initial appearances, we can accept all three of these claims. Disagreement significantly shifts the balance of the evidence; but with respect to certain kinds of claims, one should nonethe…Read more
  •  321
    Faith and Rational Deference to Authority
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. forthcoming.
    Many accounts of faith hold that faith is deference to an authority about what to believe or what to do. I show that this kind of faith fits into a more general account of faith, the risky-commitment account. I further argue that it can be rational to defer to an authority even when the authority’s pronouncement goes against one’s own reasoning. Indeed, such deference is rational in typical cases in which individuals treat others as authorities.
  •  61
    Suppose we want to do the most good we can with a particular sum of money, but we cannot be certain of the consequences of different ways of making use of it. This article explores how our attitudes towards risk and ambiguity bear on what we should do. It shows that risk-avoidance and ambiguity-aversion can each provide good reason to divide our money between various charitable organizations rather than to give it all to the most promising one. It also shows how different attitudes towards risk …Read more
  • Ch. 12. Can it be rational to have faith?
    In Jake Chandler & Victoria S. Harrison (eds.), Probability in the Philosophy of Religion, Oxford University Press. 2012.
  •  47
    Philosophical foundations for worst-case arguments
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 22 (3): 215-242. 2023.
    Certain ethical views hold that we should pay more attention, even exclusive attention, to the worst-case scenario. Prominent examples include Rawls's Difference Principle and the Precautionary Principle. These views can be anchored in formal principles of decision theory, in two different ways. On the one hand, they can rely on ambiguity-aversion: the idea that we cannot assign sharp probabilities to various scenarios, and that if we cannot assign sharp probabilities, we should decide pessimist…Read more
  • Can it be rational to have faith?
    In Jeremy Fantl, Matthew McGrath & Ernest Sosa (eds.), Contemporary epistemology: an anthology, Wiley. 2019.
  •  774
    Faith and traditions
    Noûs 57 (3): 740-759. 2023.
    One phenomenon arising in epistemic life is allegiance to, and break from, a tradition. This phenomenon has three central features. First, individuals who adhere to a tradition seem to respond dogmatically to evidence against their tradition. Second, individuals from different traditions appear to see the same evidence differently. And third, conversion from one tradition to another appears to be different in kind from ordinary belief shift. This paper uses recent work on the nature and rational…Read more
  •  432
    Relative priority
    Economics and Philosophy 39 (2): 199-229. 2023.
    The good of those who are worse off matters more to the overall good than the good of those who are better off does. But being worse off than one’s fellows is not itself bad; nor is inequality itself bad; nor do differences in well-being matter more when well-being is lower in an absolute sense. Instead, the good of the relatively worse-off weighs more heavily in the overall good than the good of the relatively better-off does, in virtue of the fact that the former are relatively worse off. This…Read more
  •  81
    Why continuing uncertainties are no reason to postpone challenge trials for coronavirus vaccines
    with Robert Steel and Nir Eyal
    Journal of Medical Ethics 46 (12): 808-812. 2020.
    To counter the pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, some have proposed accelerating SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development through controlled human infection trials. These trials would involve the deliberate exposure of relatively few young, healthy volunteers to SARS-CoV-2. We defend this proposal against the charge that there is still too much uncertainty surrounding the risks of COVID-19 to responsibly run such a trial.
  • Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion Volume 9 (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2019.
    Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion is an annual volume offering a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this longstanding area of philosophy that has seen an explosive growth of interest over the past half century.
  •  117
    How do scientific explanations for beliefs affect people's confidence that those beliefs are true? For example, do people think neuroscience-based explanations for belief in God support or challenge God's existence? In five experiments, we find that people tend to think explanations for beliefs corroborate those beliefs if the explanations invoke normally-functioning mechanisms, but not if they invoke abnormal functioning (where “normality” is a matter of proper functioning). This emerges across…Read more
  •  126
    Within philosophy of action, there are three broad views about what, in addition to beliefs, answer the question of “what to do?” and so determine an agent’s motivation: desires, judgments about values/reasons, or states of the will, such as intentions. We argue that recent work in decision theory vindicates the volitionalist. “What to do?” isn’t settled by “what do I value” or “what reasons are there?” Rational motivation further requires determining how to trade off the possibility of a good o…Read more
  •  103
    Weighing the Risks of Climate Change
    The Monist 102 (1): 66-83. 2019.
    This essay argues that when setting climate policy, we should place more weight on worse possible consequences of a policy, while still placing some weight on better possible consequences. The argument proceeds by elucidating the range of attitudes people can take towards risk, how we must make choices for people when we don’t know their risk-attitudes, and the situation we are in with respect to climate policy and the consequences for future people. The result is an alternative to the Precautio…Read more
  •  172
    - In decision theory, an agent is deciding how to value a gamble that results in different outcomes in different states. Each outcome gets a utility value for the agent.
  •  918
    Groupthink
    Philosophical Studies 172 (5): 1287-1309. 2015.
    How should a group with different opinions (but the same values) make decisions? In a Bayesian setting, the natural question is how to aggregate credences: how to use a single credence function to naturally represent a collection of different credence functions. An extension of the standard Dutch-book arguments that apply to individual decision-makers recommends that group credences should be updated by conditionalization. This imposes a constraint on what aggregation rules can be like. Taking c…Read more
  •  191
    Dutch Book Arguments. B is susceptibility to sure monetary loss (in a certain betting set-up), and F is the formal role played by non-Pr b’s in the DBT and the Converse DBT. Representation Theorem Arguments. B is having preferences that violate some of Savage’s axioms (and/or being unrepresentable as an expected utility maximizer), and F is the formal role played by non-Pr b’s in the RT.
  •  258
  •  205
    Faith and steadfastness in the face of counter-evidence
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 81 (1-2): 113-133. 2017.
    It is sometimes said that faith is recalcitrant in the face of new evidence, but it is puzzling how such recalcitrance could be rational or laudable. I explain this aspect of faith and why faith is not only rational, but in addition serves an important purpose in human life. Because faith requires maintaining a commitment to act on the claim one has faith in, even in the face of counter-evidence, faith allows us to carry out long-term, risky projects that we might otherwise abandon. Thus, faith …Read more
  •  2341
    Reason and Faith
    In William J. Abraham & Frederick D. Aquino (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology, Oxford University Press. 2017.
    Faith is a central attitude in Christian religious practice. The problem of faith and reason is the problem of reconciling religious faith with the standards for our belief-forming practices in general (‘ordinary epistemic standards’). In order to see whether and when faith can be reconciled with ordinary epistemic standards, we first need to know what faith is. This chapter examines and catalogues views of propositional faith: faith that p. It is concerned with the epistemology of such fait…Read more
  •  243
    Risk and Rationality
    Oxford University Press. 2013.
    Lara Buchak sets out a new account of rational decision-making in the face of risk. She argues that the orthodox view is too narrow, and suggests an alternative, more permissive theory: one that allows individuals to pay attention to the worst-case or best-case scenario, and vindicates the ordinary decision-maker.
  •  697
    Some early phase clinical studies of candidate HIV cure and remission interventions appear to have adverse medical risk–benefit ratios for participants. Why, then, do people participate? And is it ethically permissible to allow them to participate? Recent work in decision theory sheds light on both of these questions, by casting doubt on the idea that rational individuals prefer choices that maximise expected utility, and therefore by casting doubt on the idea that researchers have an ethical ob…Read more
  •  8293
    Can it be Rational to have Faith?
    In Jake Chandler & Victoria Harrison (eds.), Probability in the Philosophy of Religion, Oxford University Press. pp. 225. 2012.
    This paper provides an account of what it is to have faith in a proposition p, in both religious and mundane contexts. It is argued that faith in p doesn’t require adopting a degree of belief that isn’t supported by one’s evidence but rather it requires terminating one’s search for further evidence and acting on the supposition that p. It is then shown, by responding to a formal result due to I.J. Good, that doing so can be rational in a number of circumstances. If expected utility theory is the…Read more
  •  649
    Evolutionary applications of game theory present one of the most pedagogically accessible varieties of genuine, contemporary theoretical biology. We present here Oyun (OY-oon, http://charlespence.net/oyun), a program designed to run iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments, competitions between prisoner’s dilemma strategies developed by the students themselves. Using this software, students are able to readily design and tweak their own strategies, and to see how they fare both in round-robin tou…Read more
  •  668
    Instrumental rationality, epistemic rationality, and evidence-gathering
    Philosophical Perspectives 24 (1): 85-120. 2010.
    This paper addresses the question of whether gathering additional evidence is always rationally required, both from the point of view of instrumental rationality and of epistemic rationality. It is shown that in certain situations, it is not instrumentally rational to look for more evidence before making a decision. These are situations in which the risk of “misleading” evidence – a concept that has both instrumental and epistemic senses – is not offset by the gains from the possibility of non…Read more
  •  843
    Risk and Tradeoffs
    Erkenntnis 79 (S6): 1091-1117. 2014.
    The orthodox theory of instrumental rationality, expected utility (EU) theory, severely restricts the way in which risk-considerations can figure into a rational individual's preferences. It is argued here that this is because EU theory neglects an important component of instrumental rationality. This paper presents a more general theory of decision-making, risk-weighted expected utility (REU) theory, of which expected utility maximization is a special case. According to REU theory, the weigh…Read more
  •  159
    Reasonable faith * by John Haldane
    Analysis 72 (2): 413-415. 2012.
    Review of John Haldane's "Reasonable Faith"
  •  1912
    Taking Risks Behind the Veil of Ignorance
    Ethics 127 (3): 610-644. 2017.
    A natural view in distributive ethics is that everyone's interests matter, but the interests of the relatively worse off matter more than the interests of the relatively better off. I provide a new argument for this view. The argument takes as its starting point the proposal, due to Harsanyi and Rawls, that facts about distributive ethics are discerned from individual preferences in the "original position." I draw on recent work in decision theory, along with an intuitive principle about risk…Read more
  •  2868
    Decision Theory
    In Christopher Hitchcock & Alan Hajek (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Probability and Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2016.
    Decision theory has at its core a set of mathematical theorems that connect rational preferences to functions with certain structural properties. The components of these theorems, as well as their bearing on questions surrounding rationality, can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Philosophy’s current interest in decision theory represents a convergence of two very different lines of thought, one concerned with the question of how one ought to act, and the other concerned with the question of …Read more
  •  133
    Precis of Risk and Rationality
    Philosophical Studies 174 (9): 2363-2368. 2017.
    My book Risk and Rationality argues for a new alternative to the orthodox theory of rational decision-making. This alternative, risk-weighted expected utility maximization, holds that there are three important components involved in rational decision-making: utilities, probabilities, and risk-attitudes. This essay explains the basic outline of the theory and precisely how it differs from the orthodox theory. It also summarizes the main threads of argument in the book.
  •  1655
    Rational Faith and Justified Belief
    In Timothy O'Connor & Laura Frances Callahan (eds.), Religious Faith and Intellectual Virtue, Oxford University Press. pp. 49-73. 2014.
    In “Can it be rational to have faith?”, it was argued that to have faith in some proposition consists, roughly speaking, in stopping one’s search for evidence and committing to act on that proposition without further evidence. That paper also outlined when and why stopping the search for evidence and acting is rationally required. Because the framework of that paper was that of formal decision theory, it primarily considered the relationship between faith and degrees of belief, rather than betwe…Read more