Practical Reason and Permissible Preference - Joe Horton (UCL)
Seminar
Speaker: Joe Horton How should you choose when you do not know how to evaluate your options? Suppose, for example, that a consequentialist theory evaluates your options one way, a deontological theory evaluates them another way, and you do not know which of these theories is correct…
21 Mar - TBC
Seminar
Almost all of our reasoning is *defeasible*: that is, our inferences go through only other things equal, and there are always more of them -- the list of things that might go wrong is open-ended, and doesn't run out. Most work on defeasibility (or non-monotonic reasoning, if you're in…
Bounded Utilities and Ex Ante Pareto - Petra Kosonen (UT Austin)
Seminar
Speaker: Petra Kosonen This talk shows that decision theories on which utilities are bounded, such as standard axiomatizations of Expected Utility Theory, violate Ex Ante Pareto if combined with an additive axiology, such as Total Utilitarianism. A series of impossibility theorems…
Bounded Utilities and Ex Ante Pareto
Seminar
This talk shows that decision theories on which utilities are bounded, such as standard axiomatizations of Expected Utility Theory, violate Ex Ante Pareto if combined with an additive axiology, such as Total Utilitarianism. A series of impossibility theorems point toward Total…
Lifetime Prerogatives and Moral Offsetting - Theron Pummer (University of Saint Andrews)
Seminar
Speaker: Theron Pummer Our everyday lives are filled with constant opportunities to help anonymous strangers, by giving to charity, volunteering, and so on. They are also filled with constant opportunities to reduce the harm we do to anonymous strangers, via our carbon emissions,…
Failing to Tell the Truth: A Transparent Approach to Truth-Tellers, Liars, and Curry
Seminar
The first sentence in this abstract is true. What does the previous sentence—a contingent truth-teller—say? Well, truth is transparent: to say a sentence is true is just to reassert what that sentence said. Hence, to fully determine what a sentence says—what proposition it expresses—we…
Belonging to the Future - Susan Brison (Dartmouth / Princeton)
Seminar
Speaker: Susan Brison This talk was sparked by my recently reading Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus for the first time since high school. I’d never forgotten the first two sentences: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not…