Consequentialism has been challenged on the grounds that it is too demanding. I will respond to the problem of demandingness differently from previous accounts. In the first part of the paper, I argue that consequentialism requires us to distinguish the justification of an act ϕ from the justification of an act ψ, where ψ is an act of praise or blame.

In the second part of the paper, I confront the problem of demandingness.   I do not attempt to rule out the objection; instead, I argue that if certain plausible empirical claims about moral motivation are true, we morally ought not to blame people for failing to meet certain very demanding obligations. With this theory, we create a space in consequentialism for intuitions questioning the plausibility of demanding obligations.

I conclude the paper by showing that separate justifications for ϕ and ψ may also give us a theoretical niche for intuitions about supererogation.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 24 March 2016
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Rick Morris
Moderator: Dr Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Rick Morris did his undergraduate work in philosophy at American Military University while serving in the U.S. military. After leaving active service, he did an MA at San Jose State. Rick is currently in his third year in the philosophy PhD program at University of California, Davis, where he is specializing in the philosophy of biology. He also maintains interests in moral philosophy and the philosophy of religion.

A major concern for scientists is receiving credit (in the sense of recognition or prestige) for their work. Philosophers have begun to explore the epistemological consequences of this observation. Kitcher and Strevens have focused on the potential for the credit economy to promote a beneficial division of cognitive labor. In this talk I explore two potential downsides of the credit economy. First, it might encourage scientists to keep partial results they have achieved secret in order to improve their chances of claiming credit for a major breakthrough down the road. Second, it might encourage scientists to prematurely “rush into print”. Using formal models of credit-seeking scientists I argue that in most circumstances there is an incentive to share partial results, alleviating the first worry. However, I also argue that there is a structural incentive to rush into print, and a legitimate worry that this harms the epistemic standards of published work.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Friday, 26 February 2016
Time: 3pm – 5pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Remco Heesen
Moderator: Prof Neiladri Sinhababu

About the Speaker:

Remco Heesen is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, having previously obtained degrees from the London School of Economics and Tilburg University. His research interests are in philosophy of science, epistemology, and rational choice theory. His recent work focuses on the social epistemology of science. More information is available at his website, http://remcoheesen.eu.

Revisionary ontologies appear to disagree with common sense about which material objects there are. There are powerful arguments for these views, but even after having provided them, their proponents face the Problem of Reasonableness: they need to explain why most reasonable people hold beliefs apparently incompatible with the true ontology. According to mainstream approaches to this problem, the mismatch between ordinary belief and the true ontology is either merely apparent or superficial. In their place, I propose my unapologetic view, which consists of a causal and an evaluative component. In the causal component, I argue that our tendencies to form beliefs about material objects were influenced by selective pressures that were independent from the ontological truth. In the evaluative component, I draw a parallel with the New Evil Demon Problem and argue that whatever is the best treatment of this problem, the revisionary ontologist can apply it to ordinary people’s beliefs about material objects. I conclude that the unapologetic view emerges as an attractive, stable, and hitherto overlooked solution to the Problem of Reasonableness.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 18 February 2016
Time: 3pm – 5pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: David Kovacs
Moderator: Prof Neiladri Sinhababu

About the Speaker:

David Kovacs is a PhD candidate at Cornell University. His research interests are in metaphysics (including meta-metaphysics), the philosophy of mind, and epistemology.

According to deontological approaches to justification, we can analyze justification in deontic terms. In this paper, I try to advance the discussion of deontological approaches by applying recent insights in the semantics of deontic modals. Specifically, I use the distinction between weak necessity modals (“ought”, “should”) and strong necessity modals (“must”, “have to”) to develop and defend a new version of the deontological approach. According to the view I defend, “justified” expresses a deontic status that I call “faultlessness”, which is defined as the dual of weak necessity modals. After unpacking this status, I explain how the Faultlessness View avoids the problems facing rival deontological theories.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 11 February 2016
Time: 3pm – 5pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Bob Beddor
Moderator: Prof Neiladri Sinhababu

About the Speaker:

Bob Beddor is a PhD candidate at Rutgers University. Most of his work is in epistemology, with close connections to philosophy of language and metaethics.

The standard representation theorem for expected utility theory says roughly that if a subject’s preferences conform to certain  conditions, then she can be represented as maximising her expected utility given a particular set of credences and utilities—and, moreover, that having those credences and utilities is the only way that she could be an expected utility maximiser, given the facts about her preferences. These theorems are widely taken to provide the mathematical, normative, and (in some cases) conceptual basis for contemporary decision theory in a wide range of disciplines. However, the kinds of agents that the theorems seem apt to tell us anything about are highly idealised, being (amongst other things) always probabilistically coherent with infinitely precise degrees of belief and full knowledge of all epistemically necessary truths. Ordinary agents do not look very rational when compared to the angels usually talked about in decision theory. In this paper, I will outline a theorem aimed at the representation of those who are not probabilistically coherent, logically omniscient, or even very good decision-makers—i.e., agents who arefrequently irrational. The agents in question may have highly incoherent credences, limited representational capacities, and are only assumed to (i) be deductively competent with respect to obvious implications, and (ii) maximise expected utility with respect to a restricted class of relatively simple gambles.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 4 February 2016
Time: 3pm – 5pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Edward Elliot
Moderator: Prof Neiladri Sinhababu

About the Speaker:

Edward Elliot presently works mainly on issues to do with the conceptual foundations of decision theory and formal epistemology, with a special interest in the nature and content of degrees of belief. His long-term research project is to understand representational phenomena of all kinds (mental, linguistic, scientific), and to situate them within the natural world. He was awarded his PhD in November 2015, from the Australian National University. His thesis was on the topic of decision-theoretic representation theorems and their connection to the characterisation and naturalisation of degrees of belief and utilities.

Sometimes, it seems the proper response to evidence is to adopt an imprecise credence. Recently, a number of arguments purport to show that imprecise credences conflict with alethic monism. I claim that, on the contrary, imprecise credences, once properly understood, are compatible with alethic monism. Furthermore, this understanding reveals some important relationships between epistemic value and epistemic behaviour.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 28 January 2016
Time: 3pm – 5pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Ben Levinstein
Moderator: Prof Neiladri Sinhababu

About the Speaker:

Ben Levinstein is currently a James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. Before that, he was a post-doc at Bristol University working on epistemic utility theory. His current interests include epistemology, decision theory, and ethics. He received a PhD from Rutgers in 2013.