Doing the best one can (while trying to do better)

The thesis explores the question of how should a rational moral agent reason and make choices when he finds himself accepting inconsistent moral judgments. It is argued that it is both conceptually and psychologically justified to describe such an agent as suffering from uncertainty. Such uncertainty, however, is not uncertainty regarding the truth of some descriptive claim, but rather uncertainty regarding the truth of a normative claim. Specifically it is uncertainty regarding the truth of a moral judgement. In the literature this is sometimes called “moral uncertainty”. Two different lines of philosophical literatures that explore the idea of moral uncertainty are discussed. The first line – the one that originated from David Lewis‟ argument against the “Desire as Belief Thesis” – explores the mere possibility of moral uncertainty, while the second line explores the question how ought a rational moral agent choose in face of moral uncertainty. The discussion of these two lines of research leads to the conclusion that a consistent account of moral decision making under conditions of moral uncertainty that will be applicable to the kind of cases that the thesis explores, must make use of degrees of beliefs in comparative moral judgements (i.e. judgements of the form “act a is morally superior to act b”) and of them alone. Specifically, no references to degrees of moral value should be made. An attempt to present such an account in the framework of an extension of Leonard Savage‟s model for decision making is carried out. This attempt leads to a problematic result. Several implications of the result to ethic and meta-ethics are discussed as well as possible ways to avoid it. The conclusion is partly positive and partly negative: While a plausible account of moral decision making under conditions of moral uncertainty is presented, an account of moral reasoning that aims at finding a complete moral theory (i.e. a moral theory that gives a prescription to every possible moral choice) is shown to be a very difficult – if not impossible - aim to achieve

Desire, expectation, and invariance

The Desire-as-Belief thesis (DAB) states that any rational person desires a proposition exactly to the degree that she believes or expects the proposition to be good. Many people take David Lewis to have shown the thesis to be inconsistent with Bayesian decision theory. However, as we show, Lewis’s argument was based on an Invariance condition that itself is inconsistent with the (standard formulation of the) version of Bayesian decision theory that he assumed in his arguments against DAB. The aim of this paper is to explore what impact the rejection of Invariance has on the DAB thesis. Without assuming Invariance, we first refute all versions of DAB that entail that there are only two levels of goodness. We next consider two theses according to which rational desires are intimately connected to expectations of (multi-levelled) goodness, and show that these are consistent with Bayesian decision theory as long as we assume that the contents of ‘value propositions’ are not fixed. We explain why this conclusion is independently plausible, and show how to construct such proposition

Desire, belief, and conditional belief

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-132).This dissertation studies the logics of value and conditionals, and the question of whether they should be given cognitivist analyses. Emotivist theories treat value judgments as expressions of desire, rather than beliefs about goodness. Inference ticket theories of conditionals treat them as expressions of conditional beliefs, rather than propositions. The two issues intersect in decision theory, where judgments of expected goodness are expressible by means of decision-making conditionals. In the first chapter, I argue that decision theory cannot be given a Humean foundation by means of money pump arguments, which purport to show that the transitivity of preference and indifference is a requirement of instrumental reason. Instead, I argue that Humeans should treat the constraints of decision theory as constitutive of the nature of preferences. Additionally, I argue that transitivity of preference is a stricter requirement than transitivity of indifference. In the second chapter, I investigate whether David Lewis has shown that decision theory is incompatible with anti-Humean theories of desire. His triviality proof against "desire as belief' seems to show that desires can be at best conditional beliefs about goodness. I argue that within causal decision theory we can articulate the cognitivist position where desires align with beliefs about goodness, articulated by the decision making conditional. In the third chapter, I turn to conditionals in their own right, and especially iterated conditionals.(cont.) I defend the position that indicative conditionals obey the import-export equivalence rather than modus ponens (except for simple conditionals), while counterfactual subjunctive conditionals do obey modus ponens. The logic of indicative conditionals is often thought to be determined by conditional beliefs via the Ramsey Test. I argue that iterated conditionals show that the conditional beliefs involved in indicative supposition diverge from the conditional beliefs involved in learning, and that half of the Ramsey Test is untenable for iterated conditionals.by David Jeffrey Etlin.Ph.D

Objective Value is Always Newcombizable

This paper argues that evidential decision theory (EDT) is incompatible with options having objective values. After some scene-setting (§§1-3), we consider three arguments for our thesis: the argument from Newcomb’s Problem (§§4-5), the argument from Expectationism (§§6-7), and the argument from Newcombizability (§8). The first two arguments fail for instructive reasons. But the third succeeds. EDT is incompatible with options having objective values because objective value is always Newcombizable. What to make of this incompatibility is a matter on which the authors disagree. One is inclined to take it to be a reason for rejecting the claim that options have objective values; the other is inclined to take it to be a reason for rejecting EDT. The paper, itself, takes no stand on this downstream disagreement; it merely argues for the incompatibility

Bayesian variations: essays on the structure, object, and dynamics of Credence

According to the traditional Bayesian view of credence, its structure is that of precise probability, its objects are descriptive propositions about the empirical world, and its dynamics are given by (Jeffrey) conditionalization. Each of the three essays that make up this thesis deals with a different variation on this traditional picture. The first variation replaces precise probability with sets of probabilities. The resulting imprecise Bayesianism is sometimes motivated on the grounds that our beliefs should not be more precise than the evidence calls for. One known problem for this evidentially motivated imprecise view is that in certain cases, our imprecise credence in a particular proposition will remain the same no matter how much evidence we receive. In the first essay I argue that the problem is much more general than has been appreciated so far, and that it’s difficult to avoid without compromising the initial evidentialist motivation. The second variation replaces descriptive claims with moral claims as the objects of credence. I consider three standard arguments for probabilism with respect to descriptive uncertainty—representation theorem arguments, Dutch book arguments, and accuracy arguments—in order to examine whether such arguments can also be used to establish probabilism with respect to moral uncertainty. In the second essay, I argue that by and large they can, with some caveats. First, I don’t examine whether these arguments can be given sound non-cognitivist readings, and any conclusions therefore only hold conditional on cognitivism. Second, decision-theoretic representation theorems are found to be less convincing in the moral case, because there they implausibly commit us to thinking that intertheoretic comparisons of value are always possible. Third and finally, certain considerations may lead one to think that imprecise probabilism provides a more plausible model of moral epistemology. The third variation considers whether, in addition to (Jeffrey) conditionalization, agents may also change their minds by becoming aware of propositions they had not previously entertained, and therefore not previously assigned any probability. More specifically, I argue that if we wish to make room for reflective equilibrium in a probabilistic moral epistemology, we must allow for awareness growth. In the third essay, I sketch the outline of such a Bayesian account of reflective equilibrium. Given that (i) this account gives a central place to awareness growth, and that (ii) the rationality constraints on belief change by awareness growth are much weaker than those on belief change by (Jeffrey) conditionalization, it follows that the rationality constraints on the credences of agents who are seeking reflective equilibrium are correspondingly weaker

The Tactics of the Trinket: Spaces and Operations of the £1 Commodity Chain Within the Context of Contemporary Capitalism

The Tactics of the Trinket presents a material geography of the £1 commodity, following the trinket‟s journey from its beginning as raw material on a Chinese rubbish dump, to factories, international trade hubs, state-of-the-art distribution networks, over-flowing high street stores, and finally the homes of the consumer. This trajectory is used to uncover the places and operations of the typical £1 commodity and the ways in which it utilizes and creates a complicated array of tactics. Each of these tactics is explored in turn; from the embedding of a culture of immediacy, to the intrinsic necessity of disposability, to the creation of agglomerative logic, to the over-powering presence of abundance. Immediacy is explored in relation to the consumer and traditional notions of desire and mystification unpicked. Disposability is questioned in the context of the possibilities of entanglement with objects rather than possession of them. Agglomeration is analysed as a practice both contributing to, but in some ways hors de, capitalism, as well as a phenomenon carving out new types of spaces. Abundance is picked apart as one half of a double-edged relationship with scarcity and a way of understanding current rhetoric on fast capitalism. The trinket is considered as part of both micro situations (for example, the solidarity of manufacturers in China‟s „commodity city‟ of Yiwu) and macro geo-political movements (the impact of China‟s growth on the relationship between China and the EU). Its tactics are considered in the light of current capitalism and some initial principles for a new material manifesto are discussed