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  1. The Methodology of Political Theory.Christian List & Laura Valentini - 2016 - In Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John P. Hawthorne (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories, for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks at a recent debate (...)
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  • Theory Choice and Social Choice: Okasha versus Sen.Jacob Stegenga - 2015 - Mind 124 (493):263-277.
    A platitude that took hold with Kuhn is that there can be several equally good ways of balancing theoretical virtues for theory choice. Okasha recently modelled theory choice using technical apparatus from the domain of social choice: famously, Arrow showed that no method of social choice can jointly satisfy four desiderata, and each of the desiderata in social choice has an analogue in theory choice. Okasha suggested that one can avoid the Arrow analogue for theory choice by employing a strategy (...)
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  • Ethics without numbers.Jacob M. Nebel - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (2):289-319.
    This paper develops and explores a new framework for theorizing about the measurement and aggregation of well-being. It is a qualitative variation on the framework of social welfare functionals developed by Amartya Sen. In Sen’s framework, a social or overall betterness ordering is assigned to each profile of real-valued utility functions. In the qualitative framework developed here, numerical utilities are replaced by the properties they are supposed to represent. This makes it possible to characterize the measurability and interpersonal comparability of (...)
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  • Perspectival Disagreement.Erich H. Rast - 2018 - Theoria 84 (2):120-139.
    A phenomenon called perspectival disagreement is laid out and modelled on the basis of modifications to known consensus measures for qualitative representations of preferences and transitive values by binary relations. Cases of perspectival disagreement are of general philosophical interest, because they allow for the possibility that two or more agents judge the value positions of other agents differently even when their assessments are based on the same evidence. Various examples of perspectival disagreement are given, generalizations are discussed, and it is (...)
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  • Écueils des théories de la rationalité.J. Nicolas Kaufmann - 1999 - Dialogue 38 (4):801-826.
    Un grand nombre de problèmes dont traite aujourd'hui la théorie de la décision reposent sur des problématiques qui appartiennent à des approches philosophiques, méthodologiques et théoriques fort différentes et dont l'auteur deChoix rationnel et vie publiquedéplore à juste titre l'absence d'unité intrinsèque. En effet, les racines de la théorie contemporaine du choix rationnel ont des ramifications dans trois traditions philosophiques qui ont été maintenues sans entretenir de contacts: théories philosophiques de l'action d'Aristote à Hume, à Kant et à la philosophie (...)
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  • The Diversity of Rational Choice Theory: A Review Note.Catherine Https://Orcidorg Herfeld - 2020 - Topoi 39 (2):329-347.
    In this paper, I review the literature on rational choice theory to scrutinize a number of criticisms that philosophers have voiced against its usefulness in economics. The paper has three goals: first, I argue that the debates about RCT have been characterized by disunity and confusion about the object under scrutiny, which calls into question the effectiveness of those criticisms. Second, I argue that RCT is not a single and unified choice theory—let alone an empirical theory of human behavior—as some (...)
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  • Norms of Public Argumentation and the Ideals of Correctness and Participation.Frank Zenker, Jan Albert van Laar, B. Cepollaro, A. Gâţă, M. Hinton, C. G. King, B. Larson, M. Lewiński, C. Lumer, S. Oswald, M. Pichlak, B. D. Scott, M. Urbański & J. H. M. Wagemans - 2024 - Argumentation 38 (1):7-40.
    Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principle, both ideals are mutually coherent. If the information needed for a correct deliberative (...)
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  • Epistemic Norms for Public Political Arguments.Christoph Lumer - 2024 - Argumentation 38 (1):63-83.
    The aim of the article is to develop precise epistemic rules for good public political arguments, by which political measures in the broad sense are justified. By means of a theory of deliberative democracy, it is substantiated that the justification of a political measure consists in showing argumentatively that this measure most promotes the common good or is morally optimal. It is then discussed which argumentation-theoretical approaches are suitable for providing epistemically sound rules for arguments for such theses and for (...)
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  • Is economics still immersed in the old concepts of the Enlightenment era?Andrzej P. Wierzbicki - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):236-237.
  • Condorget: Politics and Reason.Ian White - 1978 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures 12:110-139.
    From the time of its clearest origins with Pascal, the theory of probabilities seemed to offer means by which the study of human affairs might be reduced to the same kind of mathematical discipline that was already being achieved in the study of nature. Condorcet is to a great extent merely representative of the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who were led on by the prospect of developing moral and political sciences on the pattern of the natural sciences, (...)
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  • Condorget: Politics and Reason.Ian White - 1978 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures 12:110-139.
    From the time of its clearest origins with Pascal, the theory of probabilities seemed to offer means by which the study of human affairs might be reduced to the same kind of mathematical discipline that was already being achieved in the study of nature. Condorcet is to a great extent merely representative of the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who were led on by the prospect of developing moral and political sciences on the pattern of the natural sciences, (...)
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  • Political testimony.Han van Wietmarschen - 2019 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 18 (1):23-45.
    I argue that reliance on political testimony conflicts with two democratic values: the value of mutual justifiability and the value of equality of opportunity for political influence. Reliance on political testimony is characterized by a reliance on the assertions of others directly on a political question the citizen is asked to answer as part of a formal democratic decision procedure. Reliance on expert testimony generally, even in the context of political decision-making, does not similarly conflict with democratic values. As a (...)
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  • Deliberative institutional economics, or does homo oeconomicus argue?: A proposal for combining new institutional economics with discourse theory.Anne van Aaken - 2002 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 28 (4):361-394.
    Institutional economics and discourse theory stand unconnected next to each other, in spite of the fact that they both ask for the legitimacy of institutions (normative) and the functioning and effectiveness of institutions (positive). Both use as theoretical constructions rational individuals and the concept of consensus for legitimacy. Whereas discourse theory emphasizes the conditions of a legitimate consensus and could thus enable institutional economics to escape the infinite regress of judging a consensus legitimate, institutional economics has a tested social science (...)
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  • Efficiency, Effectiveness and Legitimation: Criteria for the Evaluation of Norms.Liisa Uusitalo - 1989 - Ratio Juris 2 (2):194-201.
    The paper deals with the mutual interest of both economic and social theory in exploring a broader concept of the rational and in finding validity claims for rational discourse. Efficiency and effectiveness are discussed as possible validity criteria in evaluating norms in practical discussion. In addition to the problem of defining validity criteria for argumentation on norms and social choices, a major difficulty arises from the lack of a legitimate reflective centre in society which could integrate behaviour with norms and (...)
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  • Regulating competing coalitions: a logic for socially optimal group choices.Paolo Turrini, Jan Broersen, Rosja Mastop & John-Jules Meyer - 2012 - Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics 22 (1-2):181-202.
    In Multi Agent Systems it is often the case that individual preferences are not compatible and coalitions compete to achieve a given result. The paper presents a language to talk about the conflict between coalitional choices and it expresses deontic notions to evaluate them. We will be specifically concerned with cases where the collective perspective is at odds with the individual perspective.
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  • Structural Indeterminacy.Alessandro Torza - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (2):365-382.
    The threat of ontological deflationism (the view that disagreement about what there is can be non‐substantive) is averted by appealing to realism about fundamental structure—or so tells us Ted Sider. In this paper, the notion of structural indeterminacy is introduced as a particular case of metaphysical indeterminacy; then it is argued that structural indeterminacy is not only compatible with a metaphysics of fundamental structure, but it can even safeguard it from a crucial objection; finally, it is shown that, if there (...)
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  • Laws of Nature and Theory Choice.Alessandro Torza - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-28.
    I articulate a Global Best-System Account (GBSA) of laws of nature along broadly Mill–Ramsey–Lewis lines. The guiding idea is that the job of laws is to capture real patterns across time—where a pattern is real if it allows to compress information about matters of particular fact. The GBSA’s key ingredient is a definition of ‘best system’ in terms of a ranking method that meets a number of desiderata: it is rigorously defined; it outputs the ranking based on the candidate systems’ (...)
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  • The human being as a bumbling optimalist: A psychologist's viewpoint.Masanao Toda - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):235-235.
  • Normative Uncertainty and Social Choice.Christian Tarsney - 2019 - Mind 128 (512):1285-1308.
    In ‘Normative Uncertainty as a Voting Problem’, William MacAskill argues that positive credence in ordinal-structured or intertheoretically incomparable normative theories does not prevent an agent from rationally accounting for her normative uncertainties in practical deliberation. Rather, such an agent can aggregate the theories in which she has positive credence by methods borrowed from voting theory—specifically, MacAskill suggests, by a kind of weighted Borda count. The appeal to voting methods opens up a promising new avenue for theories of rational choice under (...)
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  • Can we possibly subscribe to both liberty and equality at one and the same time?S. Subramanian - 2012 - Think 11 (30):103-110.
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  • Optimal confusion.Stephanie Stolarz-Fantino & Edmund Fantino - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):234-234.
  • Games machines play.Wynn C. Stirling - 2002 - Minds and Machines 12 (3):327-352.
    Individual rationality, or doing what is best for oneself, is a standard model used to explain and predict human behavior, and von Neumann–Morgenstern game theory is the classical mathematical formalization of this theory in multiple-agent settings. Individual rationality, however, is an inadequate model for the synthesis of artificial social systems where cooperation is essential, since it does not permit the accommodation of group interests other than as aggregations of individual interests. Satisficing game theory is based upon a well-defined notion of (...)
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  • On the Possibility of Testimonial Justice.Rush T. Stewart & Michael Nielsen - 2020 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (4):732-746.
    Recent impossibility theorems for fair risk assessment extend to the domain of epistemic justice. We translate the relevant model, demonstrating that the problems of fair risk assessment and just credibility assessment are structurally the same. We motivate the fairness criteria involved in the theorems as also being appropriate in the setting of testimonial justice. Any account of testimonial justice that implies the fairness/justice criteria must be abandoned, on pain of triviality.
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  • Avoid the push-pull dilemma in explanation.Kenneth M. Steele - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):233-234.
  • Extremum descriptions, process laws and minimality heuristics.Elliott Sober - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):232-233.
    The examples and concepts that Shoemaker cites are rather heterogeneous. Some distinctions need to be drawn. An optimality thesis involves not just an ordering of options, but a value judgment about them. So let us begin by distinguishing minimality from optimality. And the concept of minimality can play a variety of roles, among which I distinguish between extremum descriptions, statements hypothesizing an optimizing process, and methodological recommendations. Finally, I consider how the three categories relate to Shoemaker’s question that “Who is (...)
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  • No Title available: Reviews.Kenneth A. Shepsle - 1988 - Economics and Philosophy 4 (1):183-188.
  • Rational agents, real people and the quest for optimality.Eldar Shafir - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):232-232.
  • Populism and democracy: The challenge for deliberative democracy.Assaf Sharon - 2018 - European Journal of Philosophy 27 (2):359-376.
    European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  • Reason and Justice: The Optimal and the Maximal.Amartya Sen - 2017 - Philosophy 92 (1):5-19.
    This paper is a revised version of the Royal Institute of Philosophy’s Annual Lecture, 2016. It discusses the demands of critical reasoning in ethical arguments, and focuses in particular on the assessment of justice. It disputes the belief that reasoning about choice remains unfinished until an optimal alternative has been identified. A successful closure of a reasoning may identify a maximal alternative, which is not judged to be worse than any other available option. A maximal alternative need not be optimal (...)
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  • The strategy of optimality revisited.Paul J. H. Schoemaker - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):237-245.
  • The quest for optimality: A positive heuristic of science?Paul J. H. Schoemaker - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):205-215.
    This paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of one of science's most pervasive and flexible metaprinciples;optimalityis used to explain utility maximization in economics, least effort principles in physics, entropy in chemistry, and survival of the fittest in biology. Fermat's principle of least time involves both teleological and causal considerations, two distinct modes of explanation resting on poorly understood psychological primitives. The rationality heuristic in economics provides an example from social science of the potential biases arising from the extreme flexibility of (...)
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  • Arrow's proof and the logic of preference.Frederic Schick - 1969 - Philosophy of Science 36 (2):127-144.
    This paper is a critique of Kenneth Arrow's thesis concerning the logical impossibility of a constitution. I argue that one of the premises of Arrow's proof, that of the transitivity of indifference, is untenable. Several concepts of preference are introduced and counter-instances are offered to the transitivity of indifference defined along the standard lines in terms of these concepts. Alternate analyses of indifference in terms of preference are considered, and it is shown that these do not serve Arrow's purposes either. (...)
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  • On Quine on Arrow.Maurice Salles - 2017 - Social Choice and Welfare 48 (4):877-886.
    This paper describes an unknown episode in the development of the theory of social choice. In the Summer 1949, while at RAND, Quine worked on Arrow’s (im)possibility theorem. This work was eventually published as a paper on (applied) set theory totally disconnected from social choice. The working paper directly linked to Arrow’s work was never published. I alluded to this (then unwritten) paper in a number of presentations I made on ‘Logic and Social Choice’ in Turku, Bucharest, Boston, Strasbourg and (...)
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  • Should the quest for optimality worry us?Nils-Eric Sahlin - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):231-231.
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  • Theory Choice and Social Choice: Two Proposals to Escape from Arrovian Impossibility for ‘Large Scale’ Theory Choices Based on Kuhn’s Criteria.Cristina Sagrafena - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-17.
    By applying Arrow’s impossibility theorem for social choice to scientific theory choice, Okasha concludes that there is no acceptable theory choice rule. Okasha identifies the only way out of the impossibility in enriching the input for the theory choice rule, following Sen’s work for social choice. However, such a route seems not to be available for ‘large scale’ theory choices—i.e. choices among ‘key theories’ which imply a change of paradigm—based on Kuhn’s criteria, since these criteria cannot provide a richer input. (...)
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  • Seeking consistency with paired comparisons: a systems approach.Donald G. Saari - 2021 - Theory and Decision 91 (3):377-402.
    It is well known that decision methods based on pairwise rankings can suffer from a wide range of difficulties. These problems are addressed here by treating the methods as systems, where each pair is looked upon as a subsystem with an assigned task. In this manner, the source of several difficulties is equated with the standard concern that the “whole need not be the sum of its parts.” These problems arise because the objectives assigned to subsystems need not be compatible (...)
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  • The Applicability of Mathematics: Beyond Mapping Accounts.Davide Rizza - 2013 - Philosophy of Science 80 (3):398-412.
    In this article, I argue that mapping-based accounts of applications cannot be comprehensive and must be supplemented by analyses of other, qualitatively different, forms of application. I support these claims by providing a detailed discussion of the application of mathematics to a problem of election design that is prominent in social choice theory.
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  • Mathematical problem-solving in scientific practice.Davide Rizza - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):13621-13641.
    In this paper I study the activity of mathematical problem-solving in scientific practice, focussing on enquiries in mathematical social science. I identify three salient phases of mathematical problem-solving and adopt them as a reference frame to investigate aspects of applications that have not yet received extensive attention in the philosophical literature.
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  • Optimality as a prescriptive tool.Alexander H. G. Rinnooy Kan - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):230-231.
  • The Economic and Political Liberalization of Socialism: The Fundamental Problem of Property Rights.William H. Riker & David L. Weimer - 1993 - Social Philosophy and Policy 10 (2):79-102.
  • Democratic freedom of expression.Ricardo Restrepo - 2013 - Open Journal of Philosophy 3 (3):380-390.
    This paper suggests the democratic direction in which the right of freedom of expression should be conceived and applied. In the first two sections it suggests some counter-examples to, and diagnoses of, the libertarian and liberal conceptions of freedom of expression, taking Scanlon (1972) and Scanlon (1979), respectively, to be their chief proponents. The paper suggests that these conceptions cannot take into account clear examples, like fraudulent propaganda, which should not be legal. The democratic conception takes it to heart that (...)
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  • The Multidimensional Structure of ‘better than’.Erich H. Rast - 2022 - Axiomathes 32 (2):291-319.
    According to the mixed lexicographic/additive account of ‘better than’ and similar aggregative value comparatives like ‘healthier than’, values are multidimensional and different aspects of a value are aggregated into an overall assessment in a lexicographic way, based on an ordering of value aspects. It is argued that this theory can account for an acceptable definition of Chang’s notion of parity and that it also offers a solution to Temkin’s and Rachels’s Spectrum Cases without giving up the transitivity of overall betterness. (...)
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  • Dewey and Hayek on Democratic Experimentalism.Shane J. Ralston - 2012 - Contemporary Pragmatism 9 (2):93-116.
    Michael Dorf and Charles Sabel invoke John Dewey’s “pragmatist account of thought and action” as the “backdrop” for their theory of democratic experimentalism, an approach to governance emphasizing judicially monitored local decision making within a system of decentralized administrative authority. Little credit for influence is given to the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and his classic liberal ideas. Indeed, Sabel has been highly critical of Hayek’s ideas. Yet, an argument can be made that (i) democratic experimentalism is at least loosely Hayekian (...)
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  • Reconciling the liberal tradition in normative economics with the findings of behavioural economics: on J.S. Mill, libertarian paternalism and Robert Sugden’s The Community of Advantage.Mozaffar Qizilbash - 2021 - Journal of Economic Methodology 28 (4):409-418.
    In The Community of Advantage, Robert Sugden reconstructs and defends an account of the liberal tradition in normative economics in the light of the findings of Behavioural Economics. In...
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  • Pure Epistemic Proceduralism.Fabienne Peter - 2008 - Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 5 (1):33-55.
    In this paper I defend a pure proceduralist conception of legitimacy that applies to epistemic democracy. This conception, which I call pure epistemic proceduralism, does not depend on procedure-independent standards for good outcomes and relies on a proceduralist epistemology. It identifies a democratic decision as legitimate if it is the outcome of a process that satisfies certain conditions of political and epistemic fairness. My argument starts with a rejection of instrumentalism–the view that political equality is only instrumentally valuable. I reject (...)
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  • Algorithmic Fairness and Statistical Discrimination.John W. Patty & Elizabeth Maggie Penn - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 18 (1):e12891.
    Algorithmic fairness is a new interdisciplinary field of study focused on how to measure whether a process, or algorithm, may unintentionally produce unfair outcomes, as well as whether or how the potential unfairness of such processes can be mitigated. Statistical discrimination describes a set of informational issues that can induce rational (i.e., Bayesian) decision-making to lead to unfair outcomes even in the absence of discriminatory intent. In this article, we provide overviews of these two related literatures and draw connections between (...)
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  • Don't just sit there, optimise something.J. H. P. Paelinck - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):230-230.
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  • Some Rules of Constitutional Design.Peter C. Ordeshook - 1993 - Social Philosophy and Policy 10 (2):198-232.
    Events in both Eastern Europe and the former USSR illustrate the intimate connection between economic and political processes. Those events also remind us that political and economic institutions are human creations, and that when those institutions are poorly designed, political-economic failure is a direct consequence. It is axiomatic, then, that the transition to stable and prosperous societies in those former Communist states requires careful attention to the design and implementation of democratic institutions.
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  • Can groups have concepts? Semantics for collective intentions.Cathal O'Madagain - 2014 - Philosophical Issues 24 (1):347-363.
    A substantial literature supports the attribution of intentional states such as beliefs and desires to groups. But within this literature, there is no substantial account of group concepts. Since on many views, one cannot have an intentional state without having concepts, such a gap undermines the cogency of accounts of group intentionality. In this paper I aim to provide an account of group concepts. First I argue that to fix the semantics of the sentences groups use to make their decisions (...)
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  • Social justice, genomic justice and the veil of ignorance: Harsanyi meets Mendel.Samir Okasha - 2012 - Economics and Philosophy 28 (1):43-71.
    John Harsanyi and John Rawls both used the veil of ignorance thought experiment to study the problem of choosing between alternative social arrangements. With his ‘impartial observer theorem’, Harsanyi tried to show that the veil of ignorance argument leads inevitably to utilitarianism, an argument criticized by Sen, Weymark and others. A quite different use of the veil-of-ignorance concept is found in evolutionary biology. In the cell-division process called meiosis, in which sexually reproducing organisms produce gametes, the chromosome number is halved; (...)
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