Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 3, Page 37-48, May–June 2022.

This letter responds to the essay “If Not Now, Then When? Taking Disability Seriously in Bioethics,” by Debjani Mukherjee, Preya S. Tarsney, and Kristi L. Kirschner, in the May‐June 2022 issue of the Hastings Center Report.

Cesario's analysis has three key flaws. First, the focus on whether an effect is “real” overlooks the importance of theory testing. Second, obsession with effects sidelines theoretically informed questions about when and why an effect may arise. Third, failure to take stock of cultural and historical context strips findings of meaning.

I describe a thought experiment in which an agent must choose between suffering a greater pain in the past or a lesser pain in the future. This case demonstrates that the ‘temporal value asymmetry’ – our disposition to attribute greater significance to future pleasures and pains than to past – can have consequences for the rationality of actions as well as attitudes. This fact, I argue, blocks attempts to vindicate the temporal value asymmetry as a useful heuristic tied to the (...) asymmetry of causation. Since the two standard arguments for the rationality of the temporal value asymmetry appeal to causal asymmetry and the passage of time respectively, the failure of the causal asymmetry explanation suggests that the B-theory, which rejects temporal passage, has substantial revisionary implications concerning our attitudes toward past and future experience. (shrink)

In the growing literature on decision-making under moral uncertainty, a number of skeptics have argued that there is an insuperable barrier to rational "hedging" for the risk of moral error, namely the apparent incomparability of moral reasons given by rival theories like Kantianism and utilitarianism. Various general theories of intertheoretic value comparison have been proposed to meet this objection, but each suffers from apparently fatal flaws. In this paper, I propose a more modest approach that aims to identify classes of (...) moral theories that share common principles strong enough to establish bases for intertheoretic comparison. I show that, contra the claims of skeptics, there are often rationally perspicuous grounds for precise, quantitative value comparisons within such classes. In light of this fact, I argue, the existence of some apparent incomparabilities between widely divergent moral theories cannot serve as a general argument against hedging for one's moral uncertainties. (shrink)

Defenders of deontological constraints in normative ethics face a challenge: how should an agent decide what to do when she is uncertain whether some course of action would violate a constraint? The most common response to this challenge has been to defend a threshold principle on which it is subjectively permissible to act iff the agent's credence that her action would be constraint-violating is below some threshold t. But the threshold approach seems arbitrary and unmotivated: what would possibly determine where (...) the threshold should be set, and why should there be any precise threshold at all? Threshold views also seem to violate ought agglomeration, since a pair of actions each of which is below the threshold for acceptable moral risk can, in combination, exceed that threshold. In this paper, I argue that stochastic dominance reasoning can vindicate and lend rigor to the threshold approach: given characteristically deontological assumptions about the moral value of acts, it turns out that morally safe options will stochastically dominate morally risky alternatives when and only when the likelihood that the risky option violates a moral constraint is greater than some precisely definable threshold (in the simplest case, .5). I also show how, in combination with the observation that deontological moral evaluation is relativized to particular choice situations, this approach can overcome the agglomeration problem. This allows the deontologist to give a precise and well-motivated response to the problem of uncertainty. (shrink)

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 (...) normative uncertainty. The Borda rule, however, is open to at least two serious objections. First, it seems implicitly to ‘cardinalize’ ordinal theories, and so does not fully face up to the problem of merely ordinal theories. Second, the Borda rule faces a problem of option individuation. MacAskill attempts to solve this problem by invoking a measure on the set of practical options. But it is unclear that there is any natural way of defining such a measure that will not make the output of the Borda rule implausibly sensitive to irrelevant empirical features of decision-situations. After developing these objections, I suggest an alternative: the McKelvey uncovered set, a Condorcet method that selects all and only the maximal options under a strong pairwise defeat relation. This decision rule has several advantages over Borda and mostly avoids the force of MacAskill’s objection to Condorcet methods in general. (shrink)

How should an agent decide what to do when she is uncertain not just about morally relevant empirical matters, like the consequences of some course of action, but about the basic principles of morality itself? This question has only recently been taken up in a systematic way by philosophers. Advocates of moral hedging claim that an agent should weigh the reasons put forward by each moral theory in which she has positive credence, considering both the likelihood that that theory is (...) true and the strength of the reasons it posits. The view that it is sometimes rational to hedge for one's moral uncertainties, however, has recently come under attack both from those who believe that an agent should always be guided by the dictates of the single moral theory she deems most probable and from those who believe that an agent's moral beliefs are simply irrelevant to what she ought to do. Among the many objections to hedging that have been pressed in the recent literature is the worry that there is no non-arbitrary way of making the intertheoretic comparisons of moral value necessary to aggregate the value assignments of rival moral theories into a single ranking of an agent's options. -/- This dissertation has two principal objectives: First, I argue that, contra these recent objections, an agent's moral beliefs and uncertainties are relevant to what she rationally ought to do, and more particularly, that agents are at least sometimes rationally required to hedge for their moral uncertainties. My principal argument for these claims appeals to the enkratic conception of rationality, according to which the requirements of practical rationality derive from an agent's beliefs about the objective, desire-independent value or choiceworthiness of her options. Second, I outline a new general theory of rational choice under moral uncertainty. Central to this theory is the idea of content-based aggregation, that the principles according to which an agent should compare and aggregate rival moral theories are grounded in the content of those theories themselves, including not only their value assignments but also the metaethical and other non-surface-level propositions that underlie, justify, or explain those value assignments. (shrink)

The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk (like Pascal's Mugging), and intolerably paradoxical in cases like the St. Petersburg and Pasadena games. In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, stochastic dominance reasoning can capture most of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding most of its pitfalls. Specifically, given sufficient background uncertainty (...) about the choiceworthiness of one's options, many expectation-maximizing gambles that do not stochastically dominate their alternatives "in a vacuum" become stochastically dominant in virtue of that background uncertainty. But, even under these conditions, stochastic dominance will not require agents to accept options whose expectational superiority depends on sufficiently small probabilities of extreme payoffs. The sort of background uncertainty on which these results depend looks unavoidable for any agent who measures the choiceworthiness of her options in part by the total amount of value in the resulting world. At least for such agents, then, stochastic dominance offers a plausible general principle of choice under uncertainty that can explain more of the apparent rational constraints on such choices than has previously been recognized. (shrink)

Grill (2023) defends the Sum of Averages View (SAV), on which the value of a population is found by summing the average lifetime welfare of each generation or birth cohort. A major advantage of SAV, according to Grill, is that it escapes the Egyptology objection to average utilitarianism. But, we argue, SAV escapes only the most literal understanding of this objection, since it still allows the value of adding a life to depend on facts about other, intuitively irrelevant lives. Moreover, (...) SAV has a decisive drawback not shared with either average or total utilitarianism: it can evaluate an outcome in which every individual is worse off as better overall, even when exactly the same people exist in both outcomes. These problems, we argue, afflict not only Grill’s view but any view that uses a sum of subpopulation averages, apart from the limiting cases of average and total utilitarianism. (shrink)

Even if I think it very likely that some morally good act is supererogatory rather than obligatory, I may nonetheless be rationally required to perform that act. This claim follows from an apparently straightforward dominance argument, which parallels Jacob Ross's argument for 'rejecting' moral nihilism. These arguments face analogous pairs of objections that illustrate general challenges for dominance reasoning under normative uncertainty, but (I argue) these objections can be largely overcome. This has practical consequences for the ethics of philanthropy -- (...) in particular, it means that donors are often rationally required to maximize the positive impact of their donations. (shrink)

Quest after values and their realization constitute innate necessity for human being. This presupposes knowledge of Reality and knowledge of the value-schema. In this context, a distinction can be drawn between descriptive awareness of Reality and prescriptive awareness of Values. For the latter, the pῡrva mimāmsā system postulates ‘codanā’ as a means of knowledge. In Indian Culture, two types of values are enunciated, viz. preyas and śreyas. The Taittirῑya upaniṣad puts forth a five-dimensional theory of human constitution and accordingly advocates (...) a fivefold value-schema. In general, theory of puruṣartha has been accepted by all the cultural traditions of India with variant details. It would be interesting and enlightening to discuss different aspects and issues concerning this theory. Knowledgeable scholars may delineate on related issues as well. (shrink)

ch. 1. Istorii︠a︡ sot︠s︡iologicheskikh ucheniĭ -- ch. 2. Nauchnai︠a︡ teorii︠a︡ obshchestva.

Interpretation of Hetvābhāsasāmānyanirukti of Gaṅgeśa, 13th cent., treatise on Nyaya philosophy; based on other classical commentaries.

_This paper discusses the concept of compassion fatigue in light of the importance that political decisions, especially the application of the concept of public spirit, have had on care and nursing in a Danish hospital context during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper is based on recent research literature in the field as well as the author’s own participatory observation study. The paper suggests that nurses already show a sense of public spirit due to their authorization and professional ethics, but at (...) the same time they must balance the ambiguity of nursing care. A linguistic-philosophical study of public spirit shows that the concept can have a discursive, double-binding and interpellative effect on nurses, who may therefore have an experience of inadequacy and compassion fatigue. In this context, compassion fatigue must be understood as the fact that nurses cannot provide the care they want or that is expected of them. Public spirit can be said to have had a renaissance and linguistic and moral supremacy during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper views the concept of __waywardness 1 as a possible response for how to prevent or completely avoid compassion fatigue, so that nurses instead have an experience of compassion / self-compassion. This could in the end be important for encouraging more nursing students and nurses who have the desire and opportunity to stay in the profession._ _Keywords_: Nursing care, compassion fatigue, public spirit, compassion, COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the search for the nature of the ontology of an art work on the example of a literary work. Tradition viewed a work of art as the discovery of a higher truth. Analytical philosophy deprived literature of the status of truth in general, and thereby deprived it of any ontological dimension. Heidegger’s attempt to return this dimension to literature through its relationship with being did not find continuation in philosophy. The author proposes to consider a (...) literary work as a model of the world, primarily the social world. This approach makes liken a literary work to a mathematical theory. A mathematical theory is built as a correlation of simple elements; in a literary work such elements are characters (sometimes things). A mathematical theory is built on clearly defined axioms, a literary work is also built on axioms, but they do not have an explicit expression within the work and cannot always be perceived intuitively. The author shows that the mathematical theory never fully meets the specified conditions, and the mathematicians themselves note that in the future they will largely lose their strength. Thus, a literary work is of the same nature as a mathematical theory, only it presents a more complex case. The problem of truth serves as the way to find the ontological dimension. Analysis shows that in mathematics it is solved not by reducing a hypothesis to axioms, but by recognizing a theory through its effectiveness or applicability. For a work of art, such a criterion is its perception by its readers. In both cases, the ontological dimension is in the mind of the reader. (shrink)

The rationality of future bias figures crucially in various metaphysical and ethical arguments (Prior 1959; Parfit 1984; Fischer 2019). Recently, however, philosophers have raised several arguments to the effect that future bias is irrational (Dougherty 2011; Suhler and Callender 2012; Greene and Sullivan 2015). Particularly, Greene and Sullivan (2015) claim that future bias is irrational because future bias leads to two kinds of irrational planning behaviors in agents who also seek to avoid regret. In this paper, I join others who (...) have objected to Greene and Sullivan’s argument (Dorsey 2016; Tarsney 2017), but for significantly different reasons that put into question an unchallenged premise in the debate. These reasons are based on the relationship between the alleged irrational planning behaviors and certain features of regret that regret shares with future bias. First, regret is dynamic, involving preferences that change over time and in inconsistent ways. Second, regret comes in degrees, meaning that we can rank our potential regrets. Because regret has these features, I show that the future-biased agents in Greene and Sullivan’s cases do not need to act in irrational ways to rationally avoid regret. (shrink)

Hegel’s idealism is generally perceived as a system of rational sublation (Aufhebung) of all empirical contingencies: nothing resists notional mediation which, in a movement of negation of negation, establishes a rational totality. Already Schelling opposed to this complete sublation an “indivisible remainder” of empirical contingency. However, a close reading of Hegel makes it clear that the concluding moment of a dialectical movement of sublation is an empirical remainder which totalizes it, like the body of Christ in Christianity. And the same (...) goes for the process of “negation of negation”: it concludes with a failure of negation, and its ultimate form is a failed suicide where the subject survives as a living dead. Such a reading of Hegel makes him a thinker of our time which is the time of a failed negation: most of us live as survivors of our death, with life dragging on in depressive apathy. (shrink)

“Gerçekten Öyle mi Olmuş?” kitabında, tarih disiplininin nasıl bir süreçten geçtiğine kısaca değinilerek küresel gelişmeler ışığında hangi yönlere evirildiği konu edildi. Çalışma, bir anlamda tarihin ve tarih eğitiminin varlık-amaç işlevlerinin belirlenmesinin temelinde yatan nedenleri, geçmiş-gelecek diyalektiği çerçevesinde sorgulamaya dayandı. Bu bağlamda geçmişin çağrışımının siyasetle ilişkisi, günümüz bilgi teknolojilerindeki değişim, dördüncü sanayi devrimiyle dönüşecek toplumsal yapının dinamikleri ve en nihayetinde toplumun geçmiş ve gelecek algısı ile bu algının post-truth (gerçek ötesi) dönemdeki yansımaları örneklerle ele alındı. Post-truth olarak adlandırılan bu yeni dönemde, (...) tarihçilik açısından problematik görünen üç ana konu incelendi. Bunlardan ilki, tarihin ve tarihçiliğin geleceğine ilişkin riskler ve tehditler. Diğeri, ilkiyle bağlantılı olarak tarihin öteden beri siyasiler tarafından bir meşruiyet aracı olarak kullanılıyor olmasının günümüzdeki durumu ve suistimaller. Son olarak da yeni medyada üretilen tarihsel bilginin gerçekliğinin denetlenememesiyle ortaya çıkan ve toplumsal kutuplaşmalara yol açan bilgi kirliliği. Böylelikle, post-truth çağında gerçeğin peşinden koşan tarihçilerin ve tarih severlerin, yeni medya ve onun uzantılarıyla nasıl yüz yüze kalacağı konusunda bir resim sunulmaya çalışıldı. Amacımız, bu üç soruna çözümler getirerek konu sonlandırmak olmayıp konunun özellikle akademisyenler tarafından tartışılmasını sağlayacak bir gündemin oluşturulmasıdır. (shrink)

On the fundamentals of Vaiśeṣika and Nyaya school in Hindu philosophy with Saptapadārthīṭīkā commentary.

A close observation on the rapid change in the mind of young cohort has been made. Our Surveillance is before and after pandemic periods compels us to re-write some pre-occupied conceptions in the core of Philosophy and Psychology. We have worked on mind-body & mind-soul relationship from three angles that are Medical Science, Psychology and Philosophy. It is seen that the level of confidence is gradually diminishing among the youth due to different impetus and as a result many powerful strengths (...) are going out. Proclamation of human values in a new way must be declared so that we can save a thankful number of creative lives. Discussions have been made on thoughts, distress, medical causes of suicide or suicidal attempts, personality disorders, neuropsychology to open up a new world before the present generation. Each and every characteristics of life has positive impact and here we have tried to establish this fact. Physical and metaphysical aspects are reciprocating our lives and this should be injected in the mind of present generation and an approach can be taken to incorporate the matter in the curriculum right now. We have the intention to explain metaphysical love and its high, intelligent values proclaimed strength of mind of youth to infuse our dear world with great moral values. It may also save the earth from natural decay with their surprising discoveries. (shrink)

Research work on various manifestations and philosophies related to Gaṇeśa, Hindu deity.

Study of Pañcadaśi of Mādhava, d. 1386, compendium on Advaita philosophy.