In _A Theory of Regret_ Brian Price contends that regret is better understood as an important political emotion than as a form of weakness. Price shows how regret allows us to see that our convictions are more often the products of our perceptual habits than the authentic signs of moral courage that we more regularly take them to be. Regret teaches us to give up our expectations of what we think should or might occur in the future, (...) and also the idea that what we think we should do will always be the right thing to do. Understood instead as a mode of thoughtfulness, regret helps us to clarify our will in relation to the decisions we make within institutional forms of existence. Considering regret in relation to emancipatory theories of thinking, Price shows how the unconditionally transformative nature of this emotion helps us become more sensitive to contingency and allows us, in turn, to recognize the steps we can take toward changing the institutions that shape our lives. (shrink)

Trading on non-public material information is fertile ground for a discussion of ethical behavior. The long-running legal tug-of-war over what constitutes illegal insider trading delivers challenges to regulatory authorities charged with detecting and enforcing the law, and is likely one of the reasons that prosecution of insider trading events remains rather uncommon. One can observe both increased volume in the equity and option markets and run-ups in the stock price prior to the announcement of the acquisitions; however, the detection (...) of illegal or unethical insider trading can be difficult. Given the legal uncertainty around insider trading and the circumstantial evidence from the trading activity, it is almost impossible to identify unethical insider trades unless there is a whistleblower or trades are large in size and impeccable in timing. Using call option trading around two merger announcements with similar firms that resulted in different ultimate treatment from the SEC, we illustrate the struggle regulators and prosecutors have with identifying and enforcing unethical insider trades. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: The conclusions on libertarianism Robert Nozick reaches are appropriate for a bygone era. In a modern market economy, libertarianism requires that employable people have the option of taking up a publicly provided income instead of employment. This is the only way to compensate the involuntarily unemployed that a market economy requires and to ensure that all employment is voluntary. Taxation on voluntary exchanges is unobjectionable because it alters prices, not property, and no one has a right to a particular (...) price. The best way to provide state incomes for the capable unemployed is through a negative income tax.RÉSUMÉ: Les conclusions de libertarisme que tire Nozick valent pour une époque révolue. Dans une économie de marché moderne, le libertarisme exige que les gens aptes au travail puissent opter pour un revenu de source publique plutôt que pour un travail. Voilà le seul moyen de compenser les sans-emploi involontaires que requiert l’economie de marché et de s’assurer que chacun travaille volontairement. Imposer les échanges volontaires est acceptable parce que cela affecte les prix, non la propriété, et que nul n’a droit à un prix prticulier. Le meilleur moyen pour l’État de fournir un revenu aux sans-emploi aptes au travail passe par un impôt sur le revenu négatif. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: The conclusions on libertarianism Robert Nozick reaches are appropriate for a bygone era. In a modern market economy, libertarianism requires that employable people have the option of taking up a publicly provided income instead of employment. This is the only way to compensate the involuntarily unemployed that a market economy requires and to ensure that all employment is voluntary. Taxation on voluntary exchanges is unobjectionable because it alters prices, not property, and no one has a right to a particular (...) price. The best way to provide state incomes for the capable unemployed is through a negative income tax.RÉSUMÉ: Les conclusions de libertarisme que tire Nozick valent pour une époque révolue. Dans une économie de marché moderne, le libertarisme exige que les gens aptes au travail puissent opter pour un revenu de source publique plutôt que pour un travail. Voilà le seul moyen de compenser les sans-emploi involontaires que requiert l’economie de marché et de s’assurer que chacun travaille volontairement. Imposer les échanges volontaires est acceptable parce que cela affecte les prix, non la propriété, et que nul n’a droit à un prix prticulier. Le meilleur moyen pour l’État de fournir un revenu aux sans-emploi aptes au travail passe par un impôt sur le revenu négatif. (shrink)

Lucas, Brian Review(s) of: The price of freedom: Edmund Rice educational leader, by Denis McLaughlin, East Kew: David Lovell Publishing, 2007, pp.397, $45.00.

Pecuniary externalities—costs imposed on third parties mediated through the price system—have typically received little philosophical attention. Recently, this has begun to change. In two separate papers, Richard Endörfer (Econ Philos 38, pp. 221–241, 2022) and Hayden Wilkinson (Philos Public Affairs 50: 202–238, 2022) place pecuniary externalities at center stage. Though their arguments differ significantly, both conclude pecuniary externalities are in some sense morally problematic. If the state is not called on to regulate pecuniary externalities, then, at the very least, (...) individuals should be conscious of how their productive and consumptive decisions affect others by changing prices. We disagree. Both arguments fail, in that neither gives us reason to think pecuniary externalities are cause for moral concern. Unless a new argument emerges, pecuniary externalities should be left alone. (shrink)

This article on the potential for patient online records access (ORA) to increase the likelihood of nocebo effects is timely, 1 given the recent introduction of full prospective records access for primary care patients in England. 2 Blease provides a convincing overview of the evidence for the nocebo effect and examines the complex interplay with health inequities. The article proposes two mechanisms for ORA augmenting nocebo effects through: (A) patients reading about possible negative outcomes of treatments and (B) a negative (...) clinician tone or less supportive content in the notes diminishing patient trust and setting up negative expectations. Blease notes a small percentage of those who had used ORA at least once during the previous year in one study reported feeling more worried about their medications, 3 and that those with mental health diagnoses were significantly more prone to this than those without such diagnoses.shrink)

Cicero’s first speeches as consul, de lege agraria I and II, delivered to the senate and the people respectively, are virtually identical in outline and broad argument. That allows the rhetorical technique of individual sections to be compared closely. This article uses such comparisons to probe the tactics and ideology of the speeches. In both Cicero’s choice of word and phrase might suggest that he is simply addressing his audiences as suits their stations. But a consideration of the circumstances of (...) the speeches reveals instead that Cicero is directing his audiences to alternate ways of imagining their social and political positions; in effect, Cicero propounds distinct, principled, and communalist definitions of dignitas and libertas, core values of each audience – though sometimes at the price of distorting the intent of the bill. (shrink)

This paper offers a rigorous philosophical defence for the approaches and methods of classical financial accounting research, drawn from New Pragmatism and, in particular, the ideas of Huw Price and Michael Lynch’s functional theory of truth. Such an underpinning is important because classical approaches and methods are often characterised as unscientific and lacking theoretical support. It can justify the resumption of scholarly efforts to employ classical approaches and methods to contribute to the development and refinement of accounting practice, including, (...) and especially, accounting’s conceptual framework, as part of the mainstream of the academy’s work. In addition, giving explicit attention to aspects of the functional theory of truth in the design of accounting research may improve its rigour and coherence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hooked! Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the Urge to Consume, and: Subverting Greed: Religious Perspectives on the Global EconomyBrian KarafinHooked! Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the Urge to Consume. Edited by Stephanie Kaza. Boston: Shambhala, 2005. 271 pp.Subverting Greed: Religious Perspectives on the Global Economy. Edited by Paul F. Knitter and Chandra Muzaffar. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002. 193 pp.The Buddha's second noble truth diagnoses the (...) cause of suffering as desire, understood as a mental state of greed or clinging attachment that in turn leads to grasping. The mind that wants to find lasting satisfaction by grasping at objects of desire, the Buddha said, is doomed to dissatisfaction because the very nature of conditioned existence frustrates permanent pleasure. The monkey-mind keeps clinging desperately to the banana in the cage even as that clinging itself traps the hand that grasps. To let go, to escape suffering through an insight into the structural nature of the cage, the fruit, and the grasping hand, seems beyond the monkey's abilities until, chastened by the seemingly endless lack of satisfaction and wishing to emerge into a state of freedom, the monkey enters the path and trains his mind to recognize the true causes of his frustration.The teachings of the Buddha have been understood, for the past 2,500 years, as a therapy of desire. The analysis of suffering and its causes in the confused and clinging minds of ordinary sentient beings, and the prescription of a path of training to uproot those causes and thereby free the mind from suffering, have been presented as a perennial psychospiritual system of training responding to [End Page 179] the afflicted condition of every sentient being's mind regardless of culture, language, or economic system. But what happens, asks Santikaro, the American meditation teacher and disciple of Achaan Buddhadasa, in his essay in Hooked!, when this psychological inquiry is taking place in a social context marked by the deliberate and systematic exacerbation of desire, as in the contemporary period of consumerist capitalism? This question might be taken as a kind of koan to be read between the lines in all of the essays in this compelling, darkly humorous, and inspiring book: is liberation possible under capitalism? Even the Buddha's teachings can be commodified, Thubten Chodron points out in her essay, with examples ranging from the advertising hype on posters for the highest yoga tantra initiations by visiting Tibetan lamas to the high prices charged at many retreat centers and the commercial mindsets of Buddhist students wanting the biggest bang for their buck when they come to teachings or retreats. Even socially engaged Buddhist activists surf the web looking for bargains between news flashes on the latest imperial wars, as Diana Winston ruefully and comically recounts in her piece, "You Are What You Download." It seems that we are in danger of becoming a population of "hungry ghosts," the mythical beings of Buddhist cosmology whose tiny mouths cannot possibly consume enough food and drink to slake the voracious hungers and thirsts of their enormous bellies.The essays in Hooked! range widely across themes and vary greatly in styles. The text moves from the personal memoir of Winston to the meditation teachings of Pema Chodron, the philosophical inquiries into time of David Loy, descriptions of social change movements in Thailand by Pracha Hutanuwatr and Jane Rasbash, green power in contemporary Japan, essays on generosity in Zen monastic training and gift-based economies, young Buddhists' shopping habits, and much more. But all of the authors seem to agree with the recognition that, under capitalism, the problem of desire, greed, and attachment is exponentially more acute than in traditional societies, dwelling as we do in an environment that is antithetical to the very idea of a therapy for desire's overcoming. The essayists also seem to agree that hope is not vain, that it is in fact still possible to follow the path of the Buddha under capitalism, but that to be effective the practice of the path needs to take seriously and fully acknowledge the effects, intra-psychically as well as socially, of the capitalist economic system. We are... (shrink)

The contextual approach is a prominent framework for thinking about group selection. Here, I highlight ambiguity about what the contextual approach is. Then, I discuss problematic entailments the contextual approach has for what processes count as group selection—entailments more troublesome than typically noted. However, Sober and Wilson’s version of the Price approach, which is the main alternative to the contextual approach, is problematic too: it leads to an underappreciated paradox called the vanishing selection problem and thereby generates the wrong (...) qualitative account of whether group selection is occurring in a certain family of cases. In response, I develop an account of group selection that can deal with the counterexamples to both the contextual approach and the Price approach. I then discuss the role that contextual analysis can continue to play in the discussion of individual fitness and metapopulation evolution. (shrink)

In their recent paper, “Epistemology for Beginners: Two to Five-Year-Old Children’s Representation of Falsity,” Olivier Mascaro and Olivier Morin study the ontogeny of a naïve understanding of truth in humans. Their paper is fascinating for several reasons, but most striking is their claim (given a rather optimistic reading of epistemology) that toddlers as young as two can, at times, recognize false from true assertions. Their Optimistic Epistemology Hypothesis holds that children seem to have an innate capacity to represent a state (...) of affairs truthfully. In the following paper, I investigate the problems this research poses for deflationist theories of truth. Richard Rorty and Huw Price hold that the best way to understand truth or “the truth” is to understand the necessary conditions required for assertoric practice. Both philosophers present unique and very different deflationary theories when it comes to construing truth. I argue that neither philosopher’s approach is successful because they focus on truth and fail to recognize truthfulness as a norm of assertoric practice. I show that truthfulness is the elusive third norm of claim-based discourse and is consistent with Mascaro and Morin’s findings. (shrink)

There has been a recent surge of interest among economists in developing models of doxastic states that can account for some aspects of human cognitive limitations that are ignored by standard formal models, such as awareness. Epistemologists purport to have a principled reason for ignoring the question of awareness: under the equilibrium conception of doxastic states they favour, a doxastic state comprises the doxastic commitments an agent would recognise were he fully aware, so the question of awareness plays no role. (...) The objective of this paper is to scrutinize this argument. A thesis underlying the argument, which we call the independence of doxastic commitments with respect to awareness, is identified, and examples are given where it appears to be violated. By considering these examples, one can get an idea of the price of accepting this thesis. On the one hand, one can escape the conclusion that the thesis is violated, but only at the expense of another principle espoused by all major formal models of belief, which we call constant doxastic rest; and abandoning this principle necessitates extensive revision of current models of belief. On the other hand, there are epistemologically valid reasons for thinking that the thesis fails to hold in the examples, which have to be rebutted if the thesis, and the equilibrium justification for ignoring the issue of awareness, are to be retained. (shrink)

Many medicines currently available on the market are simply too expensive for millions around the world to afford. Many medicines available in the developing world are only available to a small percentage of the population due to economic inequities. The profit-seeking behavior of pharmaceutical companies exacerbates this problem. In most cases, the price reductions required to make drugs affordable to a broader class of people in the developing world are not offset by the resultant increase in sales volume. Simply (...) stated, in most of the developing world, it is more profitable to sell drugs to the very wealthy at high prices than it is to sell cheaper drugs to a greater number of people. As a result, medicines remain unaffordable for the vast majority of people in many parts of the world. While this might be an acceptable outcome for certain commodities, such as luxury goods, it is completely unacceptable for life-saving medicines. Therefore, in order to effectively address the global lack of access to medicines, the role pharmaceutical companies play in the international intellectual property regime must be critically examined. (shrink)

A perennial problem in the philosophy of love has centred around what it is to love persons qua persons. Plato has usually been interpreted as believing that when we love we are attaching ourselves to qualities that inhere in the objects of our love and that these qualities transcend the objects. Vlastos has argued, along with Nussbaum, Price and many others that such an account tells against a true love of persons as unique and irreplaceable individuals. I argue that (...) Plato’s account of love as presented in the Lysis and Symposium is not so easily rejected. My concern is both to show that Plato can meet the objections and that his theory can still offer helpful insights into the understanding of love in our own lives. In particular I will identify two manners of loving persons; one which is context and individual specific, and another which might be termed metaphysical, thereby preserving aspects of the Platonic ascent of love. I will further argue that the two aspects are often non–controversially linked, and that such linking helps explain something of the mysterious nature of love. (shrink)

A perennial problem in the philosophy of love has centred around what it is to love persons qua persons. Plato has usually been interpreted as believing that when we love we are attaching ourselves to qualities that inhere in the objects of our love and that these qualities transcend the objects. Vlastos has argued, along with Nussbaum, Price and many others that such an account tells against a true love of persons as unique and irreplaceable individuals. I argue that (...) Plato’s account of love as presented in the Lysis and Symposium is not so easily rejected. My concern is both to show that Plato can meet the objections and that his theory can still offer helpful insights into the understanding of love in our own lives. In particular I will identify two manners of loving persons; one which is context and individual specific, and another which might be termed metaphysical, thereby preserving aspects of the Platonic ascent of love. I will further argue that the two aspects are often non–controversially linked, and that such linking helps explain something of the mysterious nature of love. (shrink)

A perennial problem in the philosophy of love has centered around what it is to love persons qua persons. Plato has usually been interpreted as believing that when we love we are attaching ourselves to qualities that inhere in the objects of our love and that these qualities transcend the objects. Vlastos has argued, along with Nussbaum, Price and many others that such an account tells against a true love of persons as unique and irreplaceable individuals. I argue that (...) Plato’s account of love as present in the Lysis and Symposium is not so easily rejected. My concern is to show both that Plato can meet the objections and that his theory can still offer helpful insights into the understanding of love in our lives. In particular, I will identify two manners of loving persons; one which is context and individual specific, and another which might be termed metaphysical, thereby preserving aspects of the Platonic ascent of love. I will further argue that the two aspects are often non-controversially linked, and that such linking helps explain something of the mysterious nature of love. (shrink)

Storage and Commodity Markets is primarily a work of economic theory, concerned with how the capability to store a surplus affects the prices and production of commodities. Its focus on the behaviour, over time, of aggregate stockpiles provides insights into such questions as how much a country should store out of its current supply of food considering the uncertainty in future harvests. Related topics covered include whether storage or international trade is a more effective buffer and whether stockpiles are more (...) useful in raw or processed form. Several chapters are devoted to analysing such government programmes as price bands, buffer stocks, and strategic reserves. This material is in the domain of applied welfare analysis with public finance. Because the theory presented is sufficiently general, it should be of interest to macroeconomists studying aggregate inventories or savings and to those in operations research studying inventory and pricing policies of large firms. (shrink)

Regulation is often applied to business behavior to ensure that the social costs of doing business are included in the cost and pricing structures of the firm. Because the consumer benefits from the transaction that generated the social costs, asking the consumer to bear the burden imposed by the transaction is fair. However, there may be a lack of Justice m the internal and external distribution of the social costs of doing business if consumers are the only party bearing that (...) burden, or if the costs are being shifted to employees or taxpayers when a closer stakeholder is also benefiting from the transaction – the stockowner. A social justice perspective requires that those benefiting from a transaction share in the burdens of it. We propose that a Tobin-like tax on stock transactions might be a just means of achieving greater justice in the distribution of the social cost burden. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Networks represents the frontier of research into how and why networks they form, how they influence behavior, how they help govern outcomes in an interactive world, and how they shape collective decision making, opinion formation, and diffusion dynamics. From a methodological perspective, the contributors to this volume devote attention to theory, field experiments, laboratory experiments, and econometrics. Theoretical work in network formation, games played on networks, repeated games, and the interaction between linking and (...) behavior is synthesized. A number of chapters are devoted to studying social process mediated by networks. Topics here include opinion formation, diffusion of information and disease, and learning. There are also chapters devoted to financial contagion and systemic risk, motivated in part by the recent financial crises. Another section discusses communities, with applications including social trust, favor exchange, and social collateral; the importance of communities for migration patterns; and the role that networks and communities play in the labor market. A prominent role of networks, from an economic perspective, is that they mediate trade. Several chapters cover bilateral trade in networks, strategic intermediation, and the role of networks in international trade. Contributions discuss as well the role of networks for organizations. On the one hand, one chapter discusses the role of networks for the performance of organizations, while two other chapters discuss managing networks of consumers and pricing in the presence of network-based spillovers. Finally, the authors discuss the internet as a network with attention to the issue of net neutrality. (shrink)

Authors have a lot of leeway with regard to what they can make true in their story. In general, if the author says that p is true in the fiction we’re reading, we believe that p is true in that fiction. And if we’re playing along with the fictional game, we imagine that, along with everything else in the story, p is true. But there are exceptions to these general principles. Many authors, most notably Kendall Walton and Tamar Szabó Gendler, (...) have discussed apparent counterexamples when p is “morally deviant”. Many other statements that are conceptually impossible also seem to be counterexamples. In this paper I do four things. I survey the range of counterexamples, or at least putative counterexamples, to the principles. Then I look to explanations of the counterexamples. I argue, following Gendler, that the explanation cannot simply be that morally deviant claims are impossible. I argue that the distinctive attitudes we have towards moral propositions cannot explain the counterexamples, since some of the examples don’t involve moral concepts. And I put forward a proposed explanation that turns on the role of ‘higher-level concepts’, concepts that if they are satisfied are satisfied in virtue of more fundamental facts about the world, in fiction, and in imagination. (shrink)

We provide a new interpretation of Zeno’s Paradox of Measure that begins by giving a substantive account, drawn from Aristotle’s text, of the fact that points lack magnitude. The main elements of this account are (1) the Axiom of Archimedes which states that there are no infinitesimal magnitudes, and (2) the principle that all assignments of magnitude, or lack thereof, must be grounded in the magnitude of line segments, the primary objects to which the notion of linear magnitude applies. Armed (...) with this account, we are ineluctably driven to introduce a highly constructive notion of (outer) measure based exclusively on the total magnitude of potentially infinite collections of line segments. The Paradox of Measure then consists in the proof that every finite or potentially infinite collection of points lacks magnitude with respect to this notion of measure. We observe that the Paradox of Measure, thus understood, troubled analysts into the 1880’s, despite their knowledge that the linear continuum is uncountable. The Paradox was ultimately resolved by Borel in his thesis of 1893, as a corollary to his celebrated result that every countable open cover of a closed line segment has a finite sub-cover, a result he later called the “First Fundamental Theorem of Measure Theory.” This achievement of Borel has not been sufficiently appreciated. We conclude with a metamathematical analysis of the resolution of the paradox made possible by recent results in reverse mathematics. (shrink)

Normative Externalism argues that it is not important that people live up to their own principles. What matters, in both ethics and epistemology, is that they live up to the correct principles: that they do the right thing, and that they believe rationally. This stance, that what matters are the correct principles, not one's own principles, has implications across ethics and epistemology. In ethics, it undermines the ideas that moral uncertainty should be treated just like factual uncertainty, that moral ignorance (...) frequently excuses moral wrongdoing, and that hypocrisy is a vice. In epistemology, it suggests we need new treatments of higher-order evidence, and of peer disagreement, and of circular reasoning, and the book suggests new approaches to each of these problems. Although the debates in ethics and in epistemology are often conducted separately, putting them in one place helps bring out their common themes. One common theme is that the view that one should live up to one's own principles looks less attractive when people have terrible principles, or when following their own principles would lead to riskier or more aggressive action than the correct principles. Another common theme is that asking people to live up to their principles leads to regresses. It can be hard to know what action or belief complies with one's principles. And now we can ask, in such a case should a person do what they think their principles require, or what their principles actually require? Both answers lead to problems, and the best way to avoid these problems is to simply say people should follow the correct principles. (shrink)

Certain puzzling cases have been discussed in the literature recently which appear to support the thought that knowledge can be obtained by way of deduction from a falsehood; moreover, these cases put pressure, prima facie, on the thesis of counter closure for knowledge. We argue that the cases do not involve knowledge from falsehood; despite appearances, the false beliefs in the cases in question are causally, and therefore epistemologically, incidental, and knowledge is achieved despite falsehood. We also show that the (...) principle of counter closure, and the concomitant denial of knowledge from falsehood, is well motivated by considerations in epistemological theory--in particular, by the view that knowledge is first in the epistemological order of things. (shrink)

Abstract Kant claims that the basis of a judgment of taste is a merely subjective representation and that the only merely subjective representations are feelings of pleasure or displeasure. Commentators disagree over how to interpret this claim. Some take it to mean that judgments about the beauty of an object depend only on the state of the judging subject. Others argue instead that, for Kant, the pleasure we take in a beautiful object is best understood as a response to its (...) qualities, and that, accordingly, feelings of pleasure or displeasure are no different from other representations, such as colors or smells. While I agree that the judgment of taste is best understood as asserting a claim about an object's qualities, I argue that the distinction Kant makes between feelings of pleasure or displeasure and other representations should not be ignored. I show that one's liking or disliking for an object is merely subjective in the sense that its significance depends on what one has made of oneself through one's aesthetic education. The judgment of taste, then, is merely subjective because one must first become the kind of person whose feelings have the right significance at the right time before one can determine whether an object's qualities make it beautiful. (shrink)

The relation between the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions is "the great problem" of Western philosophy, according to Emmanuel Levinas. In this book Brian Schroeder, Silvia Benso, and an international group of philosophers address the relationship between Levinas and the world of ancient thought. In addition to philosophy, themes touching on religion, mythology, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and politics are also explored. The volume as a whole provides a unified and extended discussion of how an engagement between Levinas and thinkers (...) from the ancient tradition works to enrich understandings of both. This book opens new pathways in ancient and modern philosophical studies as it illuminates new interpretations of Levinas' ethics and his social and political philosophy. (shrink)

We use a public-good experiment to analyze behavior in a decentralized asymmetric punishment institution. The institution is asymmetric in the sense that players differ in the effectiveness of their punishment. At the aggregate level, we observe remarkable similarities between outcomes in asymmetric and symmetric punishment institutions. Controlling for the average punishment effectiveness of the institutions, we find that asymmetric punishment institutions are as effective in fostering cooperation and as efficient as symmetric institutions. At the individual level, we find that players (...) with higher punishment effectiveness contribute similar amounts to the public account, but have higher earnings and punish more than their weak counterparts. (shrink)