21 found
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  1. A new well‐being atomism.Gil Hersch & Daniel Weltman - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (1):3-23.
    Many philosophers reject the view that well-being over a lifetime is simply an aggregation of well-being at every moment of one's life, and thus they reject theories of well-being like hedonism and concurrentist desire satisfactionism. They raise concerns that such a view misses the importance of the relationships between moments in a person's life or the role narratives play in a person's well-being. In this article, we develop an atomist meta-theory of well-being, according to which the prudential value of a (...)
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  2. Well-Being Coherentism.Gil Hersch - 2022 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (4):1045-1065.
    Philosophers of well-being have tended to adopt a foundationalist approach to the question of theory and measurement, according to which theories are conceptually before measures. By contrast, social scientists have tended to adopt operationalist commitments, according to which they develop and refine well-being measures independently of any philosophical foundation. Unfortunately, neither approach helps us overcome the problem of coordinating between how we characterize well-being and how we measure it. Instead, we should adopt a coherentist approach to well-being science.
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  3. No Theory-Free Lunches in Well-Being Policy.Gil Hersch - 2020 - Philosophical Quarterly 70 (278):43-64.
    Generating an account that can sidestep the disagreement among substantive theories of well-being, while at the same time still providing useful guidance for well-being public policy, would be a significant achievement. Unfortunately, the various attempts to remain agnostic regarding what constitutes well-being fail to either be an account of well-being, provide useful guidance for well-being policy, or avoid relying on a substantive well-being theory. There are no theory-free lunches in well-being policy. Instead, I propose an intermediate account, according to which (...)
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  4. The usefulness of well-being temporalism.Gil Hersch - 2022 - Journal of Economic Methodology 30 (4):322-336.
    It is an open question whether well-being ought to primarily be understood as a temporal concept or whether it only makes sense to talk about a person’s well-being over their whole lifetime. In this article, I argue that how this principled philosophical disagreement is settled does not have substantive practical implications for well-being science and well-being policy. Trying to measure lifetime well-being directly is extremely challenging as well as unhelpful for guiding well-being public policy, while temporal well-being is both an (...)
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  5. You Can Bluff but You Should Not Spoof.Gil Hersch - 2020 - Business and Professional Ethics Journal 39 (2):207-224.
    Spoofing is the act of placing orders to buy or sell a financial contract without the intention to have those orders fulfilled in order to create the impression that there is a large demand for that contract at that price. In this article, I deny the view that spoofing in financial markets should be viewed as morally permissible analogously to the way bluffing is permissible in poker. I argue for the pro tanto moral impermissibility of spoofing and make the case (...)
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  6. Can an evidential account justify relying on preferences for well-being policy?Gil Hersch - 2015 - Journal of Economic Methodology 22 (3):280-291.
    Policy-makers sometimes aim to improve well-being as a policy goal, but to do this they need some way to measure well-being. Instead of relying on potentially problematic theories of well-being to justify their choice of well-being measure, Daniel Hausman proposes that policy-makers can sometimes rely on preference-based measures as evidence for well-being. I claim that Hausman’s evidential account does not justify the use of any one measure more than it justifies the use of any other measure. This leaves us at (...)
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  7. It’s Not the Slope that Matters: Well-Being and Shapes of Lives.Gil Hersch & Daniel Weltman - forthcoming - Journal of Moral Philosophy.
    Many believe that an upward-sloping life is better than a downward-sloping life because of its shape. This is a common way of formulating the shape of a life hypothesis. We argue that the hypothesis is mistaken. We need not assume that there is something intrinsically valuable in the shape of one’s life to justify the tendency to judge an upward-sloping life as better than a downward sloping one. Instead, we can appeal to more fundamental and less controversial claims to justify (...)
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  8. The Narrowed Domain of Disagreement for Well-Being Policy.Gil Hersch - 2018 - Public Affairs Quarterly 32 (1):1-19.
    in recent years, policy makers have shown increasing interest in implementing policies aimed at promoting individual well-being. But how should policy makers choose their well-being policies? a seemingly reasonable first step is to settle on an agreed-upon definition of well-being. yet there currently is significant disagreement on how well-being ought to be characterized, and agreement on the correct view of well-being does not appear to be forthcoming. Nevertheless, i argue in this paper that there are several reasons to think that (...)
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  9.  96
    Lotteries, Queues, and Bottlenecks.Gil Hersch & Thomas Rowe - 2024 - In David Sobel & Steven Wall (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, vol. 10. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 186-210.
    How should we make distributive decisions when there is not enough of the good to go around, or at least not enough of it right now? What does fairness require in such cases? In what follows, we distinguish between cases of scarcity and bottleneck cases, and we argue that both arguments for lotteries and arguments for queues have merit, albeit for different distributive scenarios. When dealing with scarcity not everyone can get the good. A secondary good that can be distributed (...)
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  10. When is Green Nudging Ethically Permissible?C. Tyler DesRoches, Daniel Fischer, Julia Silver, Philip Arthur, Rebecca Livernois, Timara Crichlow, Gil Hersch, Michiru Nagatsu & Joshua K. Abbott - 2023 - Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 60:101236.
    This review article provides a new perspective on the ethics of green nudging. We advance a new model for assessing the ethical permissibility of green nudges (GNs). On this model, which provides normative guidance for policymakers, a GN is ethically permissible when the intervention is (1) efficacious, (2) cost-effective, and (3) the advantages of the GN (i.e. reducing the environmental harm) are not outweighed by countervailing costs/harms (i.e. for nudgees). While traditional ethical objections to nudges (paternalism, etc.) remain potential normative (...)
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  11. Experimental economics' inconsistent ban on deception.Gil Hersch - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 52:13-19.
    According to what I call the ‘argument from public bads’, if a researcher deceived subjects in the past, there is a chance that subjects will discount the information that a subsequent researcher provides, thus compromising the validity of the subsequent researcher’s experiment. While this argument is taken to justify an existing informal ban on explicit deception in experimental economics, it can also apply to implicit deception, yet implicit deception is not banned and is sometimes used in experimental economics. Thus, experimental (...)
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  12.  22
    It’s Not the Slope that Matters: Well-Being and Shapes of Lives.Gil Hersch & Daniel Weltman - 2024 - Journal of Moral Philosophy.
    Many believe that an upward-sloping life is better than a downward-sloping life because of its shape. This is a common way of formulating the shape of a life hypothesis. We argue that the hypothesis is mistaken. We need not assume that there is something intrinsically valuable in the shape of one’s life to justify the tendency to judge an upward-sloping life as better than a downward sloping one. Instead, we can appeal to more fundamental and less controversial claims to justify (...)
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  13. The Need for Governmental Inefficiency in Plato’s Republic.Gil Hersch - 2021 - Journal of History of Economic Thought 43 (1):103 - 117.
    In book II of Plato’s Republic, Socrates discusses the cities of necessity and luxury (372d-373a). Discussions of these cities have often focused on citizens desiring more than they need, which creates a demand for luxury. Yet the second part of the equation, which is not usually recognized, is that there must be sufficient supply to meet this demand. The focus of this article is on the importance of supply in the discussion of the first two cities in book II of (...)
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  14. Procedural Fairness in Exchange Matching Systems.Gil Hersch - 2022 - Journal of Business Ethics 188 (2):367-377.
    The move from open outcry to electronic trading added another responsibility to futures exchanges—that of matching orders between buyers and sellers. Matching systems can affect the level and speed of price discovery, the distribution of revenue, as well as the level of price efficiency of a given market. Whether the matching system is procedurally fair is another important consideration. I argue that while FIFO (First In First Out) is a fair procedure in principle and is perceived as the default matching (...)
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  15.  22
    Ignoring Easterlin; Why Easterlin’s Correlation Findings Need Not Matter to Public Policy.Gil Hersch - 2018 - Journal of Happiness Studies 19 (8):2225-2241.
    Many believe that the lack of correlation between happiness and income, first discovered by Richard Easterlin in 1974, entails the conclusion that well-being policies should be made based on happiness measures, rather than income measures. I argue that distinguishing between how well-being is characterized and how that characterization is measured introduces ways of denying the conclusion that policies should be made based on happiness measures. It is possible to avoid the conclusion either by denying that well-being hedonism is true or (...)
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  16. The Irrelevance of Unsuccessful Traders.Gil Hersch - 2018 - Business Ethics Journal Review 6 (8):41-46.
    Alasdair MacIntyre argues that moral virtues are antithetical to what is required of those who trade in financial markets to succeed. MacIntyre focuses on four virtues and argues that successful traders possess none of them: (i) self-knowledge, (ii) courage, (iii) taking a long-term perspective, and (iv) tying one’s own good with some set of common goods. By contrast, I argue that (i)–(iii) are, in fact, traits of successful traders, regardless of their normative assessment. The last trait – caring about the (...)
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  17. From Models to Experiments.Gil Hersch & Daniel Houser - 2018 - In Richard E. Wagner (ed.), James M. Buchanan: A Theorist of Political Economy and Social Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 921-937.
    In this paper we discuss James Buchanan’s contribution in the narrow domain of understanding committee voting under majority rule. We then go on to discuss Charles Plott’s seminal experimental work on the topic that sparked a wave of public choice experimental work. However, given Plott’s claims that Buchanan influenced him significantly, it is puzzling that his work with Morris Fiorina explores a question outside of those which Buchanan and Tullock found interesting. We suggest several ways to resolve this tension. Our (...)
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  18. Educational Equipoise and the Educational Misconception; Lessons from Bioethics.Gil Hersch - 2018 - Teaching and Learning Inquirey 6 (2):3-15.
    Some advances in bioethics regarding ethical considerations that arise in the context of medical research can also be relevant when thinking about the ethical considerations that arise in the context of SoTL research. In this article, I aim to bring awareness to two potential ethical challenges SoTL researchers might face when playing a dual role of teacher and researcher that are similar to the challenges physicians face in their dual role of physician and researcher. In this article, I argue that (...)
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  19.  6
    From Models to Experiments; James Buchanan and Charles Plott.Gil Hersch & Daniel Houser - 2018 - In Richard E. Wagner (ed.), James M. Buchanan: A Theorist of Political Economy and Social Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 921-937.
    Buchanan’s work, and in particular The Calculus of Consent, which he wrote with Gordon Tullock, has been foundational in the field of public choicePublic choice. One of his students, Charles Plott, became a pioneer with multiple seminal contributions in the field of experimental public choice. In this chapter we focus on Buchanan’s work on decision making under majority rule, and any influence it may have had on Plott. While Buchanan and Tullock address environments with single decisions, they focus much more (...)
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  20.  21
    A Theory of Subjective Well-Being, Mark Fabian. Oxford University Press, 2022, x + 305 pages. [REVIEW]Gil Hersch - 2023 - Economics and Philosophy 39 (3):528-532.
  21.  31
    Law for Sale: A Philosophical Critique of Regulatory Competition, by Johanna Stark. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 210 pp. [REVIEW]Gil Hersch - 2020 - Business Ethics Quarterly 30 (3):433-436.