Maciej Juzaszek

In this paper we argue that we have reason to use epistemic nudges to correct for biases influencing perceptions of normative expectations. There is a broad consensus in the literature on social norms that individuals’ normative behaviours are fundamentally conditional on normative (and empirical) expectations. Expectations are a sub-set of beliefs, hence normative expectations have an epistemic aspect. Our paper focuses on normative expectation which refers to an individual’s second-order belief about what most other people in her community believe she ought to do. Normative expectations can be influenced by various forms of bias which can lead individuals to overestimate or underestimate the prevalence or strength of certain norms in their community, or to conform to norms that do not provide social benefit. We propose using epistemic nudges to produce accurate normative expectations in those nudgees. We examine the sort of epistemic nudges that could do so by enabling better presentation and transparency of information.

This article aims to reconcile the intuitions grounding two important positions from the ethics of belief: epistemic purism and reason pragmatism. They can conflict, especially at the level of what we ought to believe all-things-considered. They manifest themselves in two important meta-principles that constrain law and policy-making that seem to be in tension as well. The first is the principle of evidence-based regulation, which says that legal rules should only be based on current scientific knowledge. The second is the precautionary principle, according to which authorities should regulate (or even prohibit) an activity that may cause harm to humans or the environment, even if there is insufficient scientific evidence to support such a claim. However, I argue that the precautionary principle can be interpreted from the perspective of ethics of belief as political encroachment on evidence-based regulation. As such, it can reconcile both the epistemic and pragmatic intuitions underlying these two principles.

In the paper, I aim to reconstruct a charitable interpretation of Durkheimian utilitarianism, a normative theory of public morality proposed by well-recognised American moral psychologist – Jonathan Haidt, which might provide reasons to justify particular legal regulations and public policies. The reconstruction contains a coherent theory that includes elements of rule-utilitarianism, value pluralism, objective list theory and perfectionism, as well as references to Emile’s Durkheim views on human nature. I also compare Durkheimian utilitarianism with two similar theories – Brad Hooker’s rule consequentialism and Krzysztof Saja’s institutional function consequentialism.

The article aims to introduce the issue of legal luck and set the direction for further research on this topic. It contains an answer to the question about the relationship between moral luck and legal luck. Three positions are analyzed. The first one, represented by Arthur Ripstein, says that moral luck and legal luck are autonomous issues. The second one, represented by David Enoch, states that legal luck is the result of applying moral luck to law. The third one, on the contrary, refers to the concept of moral luck as a result of applying legal luck to morality. The author discusses diverse conceptions, indicating their strong and weak points, and finally opts for one of them, which leads to a certain view of further research on legal luck

This article aims at presenting to the Polish reader a number of different conceptions of justice in health care, represented by the advocates of liberal egalitarianism. The author has given an overview of the most relevant, influential and representative theories, held by the liberal egalitarians, in order to present the way in which, in a democratic state, both just health care and respect for freedom and moral equality of individuals can be provided. The following issues will be discussed: John Rawls’s theory of justice, Norman Daniels’s theory of justice including health possibilities, varieties of luck egalitarianism, Ronald Dworkin’s “prudent insurance” ideal, Elizabeth Anderson’s democratic egalitarianism, a family of theories of egalitarianism of all kinds of luck and the theory of Shlomi Segall