Today's Philsoc is a graduate students/postdoc only special session.
We'll have James Willoughby and Matt Kopec presenting.
1) James Willoughby
Why Global Scepticism Doesn’t Matter Much
Even if you accept a global sceptical conclusion, it does not seem to impact our day to day epistemic activities very much. Suppose the global sceptic is correct. Are we going to stop finding cures for diseases in the same way? Are we going to stop thinking that putting our hands in a fire is a bad idea? No. This warrants explanation. In this talk I will put a new spin on an old explanation: there is no relevant alternative for finding cures conventionally, for thinking that fire will burn our hands, for completing the vast majority of epistemic activities the way we complete them. While this explanation is no solution to scepticism, it offers a reason why global scepticism doesn’t affect our day to day epistemic activities very much.
2) Matt Kopec
No harm done? An experimental examination of moral norms for future generations
Over a long enough time frame, large-scale policy choices, such as those concerning climate change mitigation and adaptation, are able to change which future population comes into existence, which in turn changes which resulting population incurs various costs and benefits of such choices. Call these “identity-affecting” choices. In this series of behavioral economic studies, we examine the extent to which the public’s behavior and moral reasoning might change when faced with identity-affecting choice problems. First, we ran a novel variant of the well-known Dictator Game in which different chosen transfers would go to distinct and predetermined players in the second group (i.e. each member of the second player group could only get a predetermined amount and would receive it only if that transfer amount was chosen by the Dictator). We found that subjects were unfortunately much less willing to make altruistic sacrifices when making such identity-affecting choices. We then ran variants of the Dictator Game designed to examine whether utilitarian norms might counteract these problematic tendencies (i.e. where the total collective bonus is maximized at fair splits and marginally decreases as selfishness increases). Although we found that utilitarian norms do tend to make subjects more altruistic, this beneficial effect was similarly erased in an identity-affecting variant of the game. If the behavior suggested here is robust and also scales up to the level of policy choice, this seems to leave us in the precarious position of simply hoping the public never grasps the identity-affecting nature of certain policy choices.