Some philosophers are bold; they defend strong positions with few hedges or caveats. Others are cautious; they defend weak positions with many hedges and caveats. Which of these two approaches, bold or cautious, is better?
Price gouging seems like a rotten thing to do. There isn’t much written about it from a philosophic perspective, but most philosophers I’ve talked to think it’s a fairly nasty practice. President Bush thinks it’s morally analagous to looting. And it’s illegal in most states. […] Read More
Many of you will likely recall my post last fall on esoteric normative theories. That was a wonderfully provocative discussion, one I’d like to pursue further. In particular, I’d like to get a handle on the history of esotericism as an objection to normative theories, […] Read More
It seems the following is nowadays a popular view: Wide scope view: sentences of the form “If p, then it ought to be the case that q” have the logical form O(p -> q) where O is an “ought” operator and -> denotes a material […] Read More
Suppose that what ultimately matters is the objective goodness of what you do – where the objective goodness of an action is determined by the action’s actual outcome, not merely by the expected outcome. But suppose that you usually don’t know for certain what degree […] Read More
Classical decision theory is built around a central "representation theorem": so long as an agent’s preferences meet certain basic conditions of coherence, we can construct a function that represents the agent’s preferences — in the sense that the agent prefers one prospect X over a […] Read More
Practical conditionals are a problem. We all use conditionals like, “If you want a great steak, you ought to go to Manny’s Steak House.” But suppose I do want a great steak; does it follow that I ought to go to Manny’s? No—maybe my doctor […] Read More
Currently, epistemologists seem to be very interested in practical reasons and practical rationality. One good example of this is an interesting new paper entitled ‘Knowledge and Action’ by John Hawthorne and Jason Stanley (here) forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophy. Usually, when I read epistemologists […] Read More
Update (13 August, 2007). I’ve now written a very short paper on this issue: How to Live a Life Worth Living. As you’ll see, it was significantly influenced by useful comments I received here. The recent discussion of McTaggart initiated by Kris has been very […] Read More