Erik J. Olsson (Lund): "Google and the Wisdom of Crowds: Condorcet-style Theorems for the World Wide Web"
Seminar
Search engines like Google play a huge role in society as sources of information. Determining what information we find online they influence and shape our view of the world. And yet, strangely enough, philosophers (including epistemologists) have had very little to say on the epistemological and…
Jennifer Carr (UCSD): Should you believe the truth?
Seminar
Abstract: It's often treated as a truism that we objectively epistemically ought to believe, or have maximal credence in, the truth. This claim is open to several interpretations. I explore a variety of prima facie plausible deontic semantics for the claim, and argue that each generates profoundly…
Kimberley Brownlee (Warwick): "Getting Rights out of Wrongs"
Seminar
Abstract: Sometimes, we gain new moral rights by acting wrongly. Sometimes, we gain new moral rights (in addition to restitution rights) from other people acting wrongly. This paper presents a typology of these rights. It then analyses why some wrongs can change the moral ballgame in this way to…
Ellen Clarke (Leeds): “The Metaphysics of Sex Categories"
Seminar
Abstract: The folk take sex categories to be exhausted by the binary of male and female, but this sits badly with the biological reality of intersex conditions. Alison Stone has argued that we should adopt an HPC (homeostatic property cluster) account of sex categories so that we can accommodate…
Feasibility and Poverty workshop
Workshop
This workshop is co-organised by Nic Southwood and Professor John Dryzek (UC) and is part of the activities of Nic's ARC Future Fellowship, “Feasibility in Politics: Taking Account of Groups and Institutions” and John’s ARC Laureate Fellowship, “Deliberative Worlds: Democracy, Justice, and a…
Anna Mahtani (LSE): "The designators that matter"
Seminar
Abstract: Suppose that you have a choice of two actions, A and B, and suppose that action A has better prospects for everyone than action B. Then many would conclude that A is “ex ante pareto superior” to B, and so that you should do A rather than B. I have argued that a person’s prospects can…