May 2, 2009

Parfit and the Priority View
By Mike Otsuka

An article by Alex Voorhoeve and me entitled ‘Why It Matters That Some Are Worse Off Than Others: An Argument against the Priority View’ has just been published in Philosophy & Public Affairs. The article includes a link to this post ‘for remarks by Derek Parfit in reply to this article, plus the authors’ response’. Unfortunately, this exchange won’t be ready until after Parfit has finished his book On What Matters. So once you see that book for sale, watch this space for his response to our critique. See below the fold for an abstract of the article:

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Posted on May 2, 2009 at 8:00 am in Mike Otsuka's Posts, Normative Ethics, Political Philosophy | 1 Comment

October 5, 2007

Kamm’s Intricate Ethics: Chapter 14
By Mike Otsuka

Chapter 14, entitled ‘Moral Intuitions, Cognitive Psychology, and the Harming/Not-Aiding Distinction’, engages with well-known empirical studies by Kahneman and Tversky that are thought to cast doubt on the reliability of our judgments about what ought to be done in particular cases. Kahneman and Tversky argue that such judgments are unreliable because they are susceptible to ‘framing effects’. A person’s judgments are subject to a framing effect if he comes to a different conclusion about what ought to be done in a given set of circumstances when presented with a different true description (i.e., framing) of the available options. One and the same policy can, for example, be described as protecting against losses or as yielding gains. According to Kahneman and Tversky, people tend to regard the sacrifice that is justifiable for the sake of preventing losses as greater than the sacrifice that is justifiable for the sake of securing equivalent gains. Hence their judgments shift if one and the same policy is (accurately) described (a) as protecting from losses or (b) as yielding gains:

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Posted on October 5, 2007 at 12:01 am in Kamm Reading Group, Mike Otsuka's Posts, Normative Ethics | 10 Comments

August 26, 2007

[Insert title here]
By Mike Otsuka

Heard of any good titles of articles in moral, legal, or political philosophy lately? (I’m just after good titles. Never mind the quality of the articles themselves.) Here are a couple off the top of my head:

Hillel Steiner, “Silver spoons and golden genes: talent differentials and distributive justice”, in The Genetic Revolution and Human Rights (OUP, 1999)

and

Peter Vallentyne, “Of mice and men: equality and animals”, Journal of Ethics (2005)

Steiner’s piece is on the relevance of nature and nurture to distributive justice. (Steiner laments that it was Thomas Nagel rather than he who coined the phrase “silver spoons and golden genes”.) Vallentyne’s is on whether egalitarians ought to massively redistribute resources from human beings to lesser animals in order to compensate the latter for their relatively unimpressive lives.

The title of this article …

G. A. Cohen, “If you’re an egalitarian, how come you’re so rich?” Journal of Ethics (2000)

…was good enough to end up on the cover of the author’s next book. I’m still waiting for someone to write a companion piece entitled “If you’re a libertarian, how come your income is so average?”.

But the best title I can think of is…

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Posted on August 26, 2007 at 1:18 pm in Mike Otsuka's Posts, Normative Ethics, Political Philosophy | 7 Comments