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Volume 39 - Issue 1 - March 2023

Contents

Article

  • The metaethical dilemma of epistemic democracy

  • Christoph Schamberger
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    27 December 2021, pp. 1-19
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  • Epistemic democracy aims to show, often by appeal to the Condorcet Jury Theorem, that democracy has a high chance of reaching correct decisions. It has been argued that epistemic democracy is compatible with various metaethical accounts, such as moral realism, conventionalism and majoritarianism. This paper casts doubt on that thesis and reveals the following metaethical dilemma: if we adopt moral realism, it is doubtful that voters are, on average, more than 0.5 likely to track moral facts and identify the correct alternative. By contrast, if we adopt conventionalism or majoritarianism, we cannot expect that voters are both competent and sincere. Either way, the conditions for the application of Condorcet’s theorem are not met.

  • A dilemma for reasons additivity

  • Geoff Keeling
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    27 December 2021, pp. 20-42

  • This paper presents a dilemma for the additive model of reasons. Either the model accommodates disjunctive cases in which one ought to perform some act $$\phi $$ just in case at least one of two factors obtains, or it accommodates conjunctive cases in which one ought to $$\phi $$ just in case both of two factors obtains. The dilemma also arises in a revised additive model that accommodates imprecisely weighted reasons. There exist disjunctive and conjunctive cases. Hence the additive model is extensionally inadequate. The upshot of the dilemma is that one of the most influential accounts of how reasons accrue to determine what we ought to do is flawed.

  • Eliminating Group Agency

  • Lars J. K. Moen
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    27 December 2021, pp. 43-66
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  • Aggregating individuals’ consistent attitudes might produce inconsistent collective attitudes. Some groups therefore need the capacity to form attitudes that are irreducible to those of their members. Such groups, group-agent realists argue, are agents in control of their own attitude formation. In this paper, however, I show how group-agent realism overlooks the important fact that groups consist of strategically interacting agents. Only by eliminating group agency from our social explanations can we see how individuals vote strategically to gain control of their groups and produce collective attitudes we cannot make sense of if we treat groups as agents.

  • Calibration dilemmas in the ethics of distribution

  • Jacob M. Nebel, H. Orri Stefánsson
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    09 February 2022, pp. 67-98
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  • This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several ‘calibration dilemmas’, in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities. We first lay out a series of such dilemmas for prioritarian theories. We then consider a widely endorsed family of egalitarian views and show that they are subject to even more forceful calibration dilemmas than prioritarian theories. Finally, we show that our results challenge common utilitarian accounts of the badness of inequalities in resources.

  • The marketplace of rationalizations

  • Daniel Williams
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    03 March 2022, pp. 99-123
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  • Recent work in economics has rediscovered the importance of belief-based utility for understanding human behaviour. Belief ‘choice’ is subject to an important constraint, however: people can only bring themselves to believe things for which they can find rationalizations. When preferences for similar beliefs are widespread, this constraint generates rationalization markets, social structures in which agents compete to produce rationalizations in exchange for money and social rewards. I explore the nature of such markets, I draw on political media to illustrate their characteristics and behaviour, and I highlight their implications for understanding motivated cognition and misinformation.

  • Which choices merit deference? A comparison of three behavioural proxies of subjective welfare

  • João V. Ferreira
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    11 April 2022, pp. 124-151
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  • Recently several authors have proposed proxies of welfare that equate some (as opposed to all) choices with welfare. In this paper, I first distinguish between two prominent proxies: one based on context-independent choices and the other based on reason-based choices. I then propose an original proxy based on choices that individuals state they would want themselves to repeat at the time of the welfare/policy evaluation (confirmed choices). I articulate three complementary arguments that, I claim, support confirmed choices as a more reliable proxy of welfare than context-independent and reason-based choices. Finally, I discuss the implications of these arguments for nudges and boosts.

  • Better vaguely right than precisely wrong in effective altruism: the problem of marginalism

  • Nicolas Côté, Bastian Steuwer
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    30 May 2022, pp. 152-169
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  • Effective altruism (EA) requires that when we donate to charity, we maximize the beneficial impact of our donations. While we are in broad sympathy with EA, we raise a practical problem for EA, which is that there is a crucial empirical presupposition implicit in its charity assessment methods which is false in many contexts. This is the presupposition that the magnitude of the benefits (or harms) generated by some charity vary continuously in the scale of the intervention performed. We characterize a wide class of cases where this assumption fails, and then draw out the normative implications of this fact.

Book Review

e-only frontmatter

  • EAP volume 39 issue 1 Cover and Front matter

  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    23 March 2023, p. f1
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