MCMP – Ethics and Value Theory

Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Groningen) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (15 May, 2013) titled "Being a woman in (mathematical) philosophy". Abstract: Why are there so few women in philosophy, and in technical areas such as mathematical philosophy in particular? Philosophy has the worst gender balance of all fields in the humanities, at around 16%-25% worldwide. The presence of women in philosophy is comparable to engineering and physics; it is worse than in mathematics. Is this a problem? And if it is, what can be done about it? What is it like, being a woman in (mathematical) philosophy? In my talk, I discuss some unconscious psychological phenomena that are now thought to greatly contribute to the phenomenon of poor gender balance in several professional spheres, academia in particular. I will focus especially on implicit biases and stereotype threat, two phenomena widely documented by the literature in social psychology, and how they impact the position of women and other under-represented groups in academia, in philosophy in particular. Many points can be generalized to other dimensions of exclusion such as race/ethnicity, class, sexual orientation etc., but in this talk I will focus predominantly on the issue of gender imbalance. I will also discuss reasons why everyone should be concerned by this situation (i.e. not only the members of the under-represented groups themselves), as well as practical measures that may help improve the position of women in philosophy and elsewhere in academia.

Alessandra Palmigiano (ILLC) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (10 January, 2013) titled "Duality, Logic and Judgment Aggregation". Abstract: In the last decades, logic has facilitated the build-up of a critical mass of results and insights generalizing the original Arrovian problem in Social Choice, and culminating in the formation of judgment aggregation theory. Within this framework, the Arrovian-type impossibility results are obtained as consequences of characterization theorems, which provide necessary and su_cient conditions for agendas to have aggregator functions on them satisfying given axiomatic conditions. Methodologically, there are two tools, both derived from logic, underlying these generalizations: one is the ultra_lter argument, occurring both in a model-theoretic and in an algebraic setting; the other tool, providing a unifying framework for the agenda-based characterization theorems, is the notion of property space. Duality theory can provide insights into, and connections between, these two tools. In the present talk, Stone-type duality theory will be illustrated, as well as its main logical signi_cance: namely, providing a systematic, triangular connection between logical languages, their model-theoretic semantics and their algebraic semantics. Then, applications of duality theory will be discussed to the ultrafilter argument and property spaces.

John Broome (Oxford) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (2 May, 2013) titled "Normativity in reasoning". Abstract: Reasoning is a mental process in the course of which some premise-attitudes of yours give rise to a conclusion-attitude. Some reasoning is active: it is something you do rather than something that happens in you. It is often assumed that active reasoning has to involve beliefs with a normative content. I shall argue that this is not so.

Eckehart Köhler (Vienna) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (22 May, 2013) titled "Refutation of Putnam's Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy". Abstract: In 2002, Hilary Putnam shocked philosophers with the story that value terms have “thick” meanings, where facts and values are “entangled”. (“Crime” and “cruel” are especially “thick”.) This phenomenon is easy to explain, since many professionals treat norms factually, e.g. currently “valid” price quotations, whereas a document leaves the deontic modality ambiguous. Those same professionals certainly are able to distinguish the modalities of propositions they use in their professional work for themselves! (E.g., an active legislator can distinguish those bills which he wants passed from bad bills, etc., and similarly in all professions, at least where procedures for norming exist.) Putnam entirely ignores this. Putnam even ignores Decision Theory, where he has done work. This is crucial: standard Bayesian Decision Theory absolutely requires independence of facts and values, since probability and utility must be independent — if they were not, then no one could empirically predict behavior, nor could anyone recommend optimal policy to a client. Putnam got his collapse from Quine’s collapse of the analytic/synthetic dichotomy, and (correctly!) concluded that if the latter fails, so does the former. But since probabili-ties are “orthogonal” to utilities (which we know from their measurement), “Hume’s Law” is valid; and so is the analytic/synthetic dichotomy. I discuss Morton White’s attempt to subsume analyticity under ethical value. Finally, I claim that (Dewey’s and Quine’s) Naturalism collapses once this (empirically real) sensorium for observing normative validity is acknowledged which is separate from sensory perception.

David Kinkead (Queensland) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (23 April, 2014) titled "What's the Problem with the Boundary Problem?". Abstract: Democracy begins with the people; democratic theory simply presupposes them. But democratic theory is silent on who ought be included amongst the people. It can’t, because any democratic process first requires the identification of some determinate group of agents - the demos - in order to act democratically. So how should the demos be defined? It can’t be done democratically because that would require the identification of some prior demos to decide this question, and an infinite regress of who should vote on who should vote ensues. The question of who is logically and temporally prior to the question of how and what. Yet who the people are is also a fundamental driver of what they decide. Drawing borders in one location will lead to different political outcomes had those borders been drawn somewhere else. Denying a voice to outsiders affected by some policy, intentionally or otherwise, violates a key principle of justice. For accounts of democracy that rely on the quality of decisions or outcomes to justify the authority of the state, this presents a major challenge. This problem has become known as the Boundary Problem of democratic theory. First raised by Robert Dahl in 1970, the Boundary Problem has increasingly been recognised to pose an intractable challenge to justifications of democracy, one that cannot be addressed from within democratic theory itself. Yet despite the growing awareness of the Boundary Problem and it’s implications, literature on the specific conditions under which it arises, or which accounts of democratic legitimacy it challenges the most, is largely non-existent. A key factor contributing to the paucity of research on the problem is its counter-factual nature and associated lack of empiric data from which to make observations. In this paper, I attempt to overcome these methodological obstacles by taking a generative approach to political philosophy. Using mathematical modelling and computer simulation, I demonstrate that the Boundary Problem primarily affects certain types of democratic accounts that rely on difference making claims, and show how the clustering of agents and beliefs across and within polities plays a critical role in its manifestation.

Aviv Keren (Jerusalem) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (15 January, 2015) titled "The Logic of Love". Abstract: This philosophical work sets the ground for a game-theoretic account of (romantic) love, substantiating the folk-psychological conception of love as 'a unification of souls'. It does so by setting up a universal conceptual framework of cognitive agency, which makes this possible. Building on existing theories, this framework extends the gene's eye view of evolution towards the evolution of cognition, that is unified with a distributed theory of selfhood. In this framework, an application of a general principle of cooperation, in particular, produces love as a theoretical evolutionary prediction (unveiling its rationality).

Rosaria Conte (Institute for Cognitive Science and Technology/Rome) gives a talk at the Conference on Agent-Based Modeling in Philosophy (11-13 December, 2014) titled "Minding Norms. Mechanisms and Dynamics of Social Order in Agent Societies". Abstract: Despite ubiquity and universality, norms are still awaiting for a general comprehensive theory. In the presentation, a conceptual, theoretical, and computational framework will be proposed to provide a general account of norms, enabling us to investigate: (a) differences and commonalities among social, moral, and legal norms; (b) norm emergence and change; (c) the individual properties involved or responsible for bringing about norms. The main thesis is that observable conformity is only the tip of the normative iceberg, and that norms cannot emerge in society if they do not previously immerge in the mind, i.e. if they are not first converted into mental representations of some sort.

Jason Alexander (LSE) gives a talk at the Conference on Agent-Based Modeling in Philosophy (11-13 December, 2014) titled "The Structural Evolution of Morality". Abstract: One general problem faced by attempts to explain the origins of morality using traditional rational choice theory is that the demands of rationality and the demands of morality often fail to coincide. This can happen in at least three different ways. Sometimes our moral intuitions recommend actions which are identified as irrational (such as cooperating in the prisoner's dilemma or in the centipede game, or rejecting unfair offers in the ultimatum game). Sometimes our moral intuitions recommend an act which is only one of several recognised as rational (as can happen in games having multiple Nash equilibria). And sometimes we have multiple competing moral intuitions in cases where rationality recommends a unique act (such as in asymmetric bargaining games, in contrast to the Nash solution). In this talk, I present a number of results drawn from agent-based models of imitative learning on social networks, showing how this single framework manages to explain many of our moral intuitions across a wide variety of diverse cases.

Helen Beebee (University of Manchester) gives a talk at the Summer School (27 July - 2 August, 2014) titled "Women in Philosophy: Why Should We Get More of Them, and How Do We Do It?". Abstract: In this talk, I present some data on the underrepresentation of women in philosophy in the UK and elsewhere, consider some of the possible reasons for it, and make some suggestions for small, local changes in policies and behaviour that might just begin to make a difference. I focus in particular on the issue of gender stereotype - a phenomenon whose existence and effects are pretty well researched by social psychologists, and which (I shall argue) is highly relevant to the discipline of philosophy.

Eric Winsberg (USF) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (29 May, 2013) titled "Values and Uncertainties". Abstract: There has been a great deal of emphasis, in recent years, on developing methods for quantifying uncertainty in the predictions of global and regional climate models. Such an approach would allow a division of labor between those who discover the facts and those who decide what we should value. And it is in line with a famous defense of scientific objectivity due to Richard Jeffrey. I argue, however, that value neutral probabilities for climate model projections will be hard to come by in the foreseeable future. In this paper I consider a variety of alternative proposals for presenting what we know about the future from climate models. I suggest that any such proposal ought to take account of " risk aversion" and "ambiguity aversion."

John Broome (Oxford) gives a talk (3 May, 2013) titled "The public and private morality of climate change". Abstract: This talk takes up two important topics within the public morality of climate change. First I shall discuss the notion of 'dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system', which regulate much of the public debate. Then I shal discuss the possibility of a solution to the problem of climate change that requires no sacrifices from anybody.