From outside of ethics: Moss, Sarah. Probabilistic Knowledge

Book Review published in the From Outside of Ethics section of Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy. Moss, Sarah. Probabilistic Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 288. $54.00 (cloth)

Technology assessment between risk, uncertainty and ignorance

The use of most if not all technologies is accompanied by negative side effects, While we may profit from today’s technologies, it is most often future generations who bear most risks. Risk analysis therefore becomes a delicate issue, because future risks often cannot be assigned a meaningful occurance probability. This paper argues that technology assessement most often deal with uncertainty and ignorance rather than risk when we include future generations into our ethical, political or juridal thinking. This has serious implications as probabilistic decision approaches are not applicable anymore. I contend that a virtue ethical approach in which dianoetic virtues play a central role may supplement a welfare based ethics in order to overcome the difficulties in dealing with uncertainty and ignorance in technology assessement

If Not Only Numbers Count: Allocation of Equal Chances

It is assumed that medical guidelines specify the appropriate amount of a divisible good which each individual should receive. Individual requirements and probabilities that the treatment is successful if an appropriate amount is received differ. The same applies to the success probabilities if individuals are inadequately treated. If supply is insufficient to serve all with appropriate amounts an allocation decision is necessary. We define probabilistic allocation rules that allocate chances of successful treatment to all individuals. We analyse a specific random allocation rule that assigns maximal equal gains of chances. We characterize the equal gain rule axiomatically.allocation rules, distributive justice, health ethics, health economics, equal gain rule

Utilitarianism and animal cruelty: Further doubts

Utilitarianism has an apparent pedigree when it comes to animal welfare. It supports the view that animal welfare matters just as much as human welfare. And many utilitarians support and oppose various practices in line with more mainstream concern over animal welfare, such as that we should not kill animals for food or other uses, and that we ought not to torture animals for fun. This relationship has come under tension from many directions. The aim of this article is to add further considerations in support of that tension. I suggest three ways in which utilitarianism comes significantly apart from mainstream concerns with animal welfare. First, utilitarianism opposes animal cruelty only when it offers an inefficient ratio of pleasure to pain; while this may be true of eating animal products, it is not obviously true of other abuses. Second, utilitarianism faces a familiar problem of the inefficacy of individual decisions; I consider a common response to this worry, and offer further concerns. Finally, the common utilitarian argument against animal cruelty ignores various pleasures that humans may get from the superior status that a structure supporting exploitation confers

Promotion as contrastive increase in expected fit

What is required for an action to promote the satisfaction of a desire? We reject extant answers and propose an alternative. Our account differs from competing answers in two ways: first, it is contrastive, in that actions promote the satisfaction of desires only as contrasted with other possible actions. Second, it employs a notion of expected fit between desire and world, defined as the weighted sum of the fit between the desire and the world in all possible outcomes, where each weight is given by the probability of the agent’s obtaining the relevant outcome. According to our proposal, then, an action promotes a desire when the expected fit for the desire given that the agent performs the action is greater than the expected fit of the desire given that the agent performs the contrasting action. We highlight this account’s attractive features and explain how it improves on its competitors

Entitlement, epistemic risk and scepticism

Crispin Wright maintains that the architecture of perceptual justification is such that we can acquire justification for our perceptual beliefs only if we have antecedent justification for ruling out any sceptical alternative. Wright contends that this principle doesn’t elicit scepticism, for we are non-evidentially entitled to accept the negation of any sceptical alternative. Sebastiano Moruzzi has challenged Wright’s contention by arguing that since our non-evidential entitlements don’t remove the epistemic risk of our perceptual beliefs, they don’t actually enable us to acquire justification for these beliefs. In this paper I show that Wright’s responses to Moruzzi are ineffective and that Moruzzi’s argument is validated by probabilistic reasoning. I also suggest that Wright cannot answer Moruzzi’s challenge without weakening the support available for his conception of the architecture of perceptual justification

Reply to Valverde

Professor Thompson responds to Valverde\u27s argument, in the last issue, that his approach to Risk puts too much emphasis on the distinction between Risk subjectivism and Risk objectivism. In doing so, he asserts, inter alia, that anchoring Risk judgments in a probabilistic framework does not go far enough in rejecting reigning Risk-analysis notions of real Risk