Tag: Believing What’s True
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Inequality of What? Socioeconomic Status and Amartya Sen’s Entitlements Approach
Responding to the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Socioeconomic Status, Peter Levine discusses some of the difficulties in measuring socioeconomic status: To take another example: you need wealth and family connections to be admitted to certain snobby clubs. But having wealth and family connections might hurt your chances of hanging out with the cool kids…
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Conceptual and Practical Obstacles to Futarchy
In his comments on my post last week, Robin Hanson asked about the conceptual work still needed to advance the cause of prediction markets as tools for governance.
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Hanson on doubt and justifying beliefs using markets
Robin Hanson channels and extends Thomas Reid: What can you do about serious skepticism, i.e., the possibility that you might be quite mistaken on a great many of your beliefs? For this, you might want to consider which of your beliefs are the most reliable, in order to try to lean more on those beliefs…
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Personal identity intuitions
Most philosophers start with the big theories: psychological continuity, embodied persistence, “no further fact” anticriterialism. Yet in a vaguely Parfitian way, I’ve been wondering whether our identity intuitions can or should be forced to line up under a particular theory. So let’s look at some of the intuition pumps and see if they ought, in…
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Can I Buy a Vowel? Joe Pettit and Godless Morality
My colleague Joe Pettit has posted a defense of theism that takes up the traditional Christian onto-theological response to the Euthyphro problem. God is the Measure Rather than speak of God as in some sense separate from the moral law, Pettit posits that God is the moral law. That way, there’s no dilemma when we…
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Wikileaks and War
Is this the argument? 1. (Our) wars are unjust. 2. Stopping (our) wars will prevent further injustice. combined with: 3. (Our) wars depend on secrecy in inception and in daily practice. 4. Thus, (our) wars can be prevented by eliminating the secrecy in inception. 5. Moreover, (our) wars can be stopped by eliminating the secrecy…