Lse Philosophy

"Given the ubiquity of uncertainty, it is striking that the philosophical discussion of the requirements of egalitarian distributive justice under uncertainty is far less developed than it is for conditions of risk. Here, we take a step toward remedying this lack"
New open access paper by Alex Voorhoeve & Thomas Rowe: "Egalitarianism under Severe Uncertainty"

"This will be a venue for scientifically informed philosophy as well as philosophically informed science."
Look out for Conjectures and Refutations, our brand new seminar series starting next term.
Sign up to the mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/gewEP9

Theron Pummer (St Andrews): "Suboptimal Charity"
#LSEChoiceGroup Room 2.06, Lakatos Building Join the Choice Group mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/bk_IVD
... Suppose a building is collapsing, and six children are trapped inside. If you do nothing, they will die. If you support the wall to your left, one child will escape unharmed. If you instead support the wall to your right, the other five will escape unharmed. Supporting either wall would result in both your arms being crushed. It seems plausible that (1) it is permissible not to save any of the children, and (2) it is wrong to save the one rather than the five. Joe Horton has argued that (1) and (2) together support the seemingly implausible claim that, if you are not going to save all five children, you ought to save none. I argue that there is a plausible way of avoiding this claim while nonetheless accepting (1) and (2). I then turn to the implications for charitable giving. I present three types of argument against suboptimal charitable giving, based on claims like (2). I show that, while the first two appeal to controversial general principles, the third does not, and constitutes a flexible tool for arguing against a variety of forms of suboptimal charitable giving.
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Who exactly was J. O. Wisdom, one of the earliest members of our Department? What was his favourite non-academic past-time? And what relation, if any, did he bear to J. A. T. D. Wisdom?
Find out all this (and more!) in the latest post from the Irish Philosophy Blog

Laurenz Hudetz (LSE): “The conceptual schemas account of interpretation”
#SigmaClub Room LAK 2.06, Lakatos Building Join the Sigma Club mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/bc31M9
... Philosophers of physics often discuss how particular theories could or should be interpreted. But what exactly is it to interpret a formalism in the first place? This is the question addressed in this talk. I propose a general framework for making talk of interpretations more rigorous. First, I clarify what I mean by a formalism. Second, I give an account of what it is to establish a link between a formalism and data. For this purpose, I draw on the theory of relational databases to explicate what data schemas and collections of data are. I introduce the notion of an interpretive link using ideas from mathematical logic. Third, I address the question how a formalism can be interpreted in a way that goes beyond a connection to data. The basic idea is that one extends a data schema to an ontological conceptual schema and links the formalism to this extended schema. I illustrate this account of interpretation using the harmonic oscillator as a simple running example. And I highlight how the account can be fruitfully applied to address issues in philosophy of physics such as the question whether the Newtonian theory of gravitation is fully equivalent to the geometrised Newton-Cartan theory.
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"Assertions are, speaking roughly, descriptive statements which purport to describe some fact about the world. Philosophers have given a lot of attention to the idea that assertions come with special norms governing their behaviour. Frequently, in fact, philosophers claim that for something to count as an assertion it has to be governed by these norms. So what exactly are the norms of assertion?"
Liam Kofi Bright argues that the scientists qua scientist makes no assertion in this NEW VIDEO from 15 January's Popper Seminar.

Paul Menzel (Pacific Lutheran): “The Subjective Value of Life: What Is It?”
#LSEChoiceGroup Room 2.06, Lakatos Building Join the Choice Group mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/bk_IVD
... One kind of value that a person’s life has is subjective – the value of life to the person whose life it is. This value plays an important role in certain moral philosophies, in health economics and health policy, and in a wide range of normative judgments about death and saving lives. It is surprisingly difficult, however, to say just what it is we are referring to with this concept.
After clarifying its basic conceptual characteristics, I proceed to argue that substantively, the subjective value of life for individual human persons is comprised of three indispensable components: an “all-of-life” element (an aggregate of all temporal segments of a person’s life), a “time-relative interest” element (developed notably by philosopher Jeff McMahan), and the effect of highly varying reference points on both of these elements. Important different versions of the first two, especially, leave us with stubborn ambiguities. The result is that it is difficult if not impossible to say what it is we are referring to when we use the concept.
This is disconcerting for any clear use of the value of life in health benefit evaluation for moral and social policy decision making. Several responses have constructive potential, but they still leave the situation muddled. Despite difficulties in our notion of the subjective value of life, however, dispensing with it is not a viable option.
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COMING SOON: Out of the Vat, a brand new podcast from LSE Philosophy and the Forum for Philosophy.
Watch (listen to) this space.

Starting to feel the chill? Then why not wrap up warm in one of our exclusive LSE Philosophy™ sweatshirts?
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"All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists." — W. E. B. Du Bois
Liam Kofi Bright discusses art, truth and power on next week's Start the Week with Andrew Marr. 21 January, 9am on BBC Radio 4.
Not to be missed!

Balázs Gyenis (LSE): “A proof of tendency towards equilibrium”
#SigmaClub Room LAK 2.06, Lakatos Building Join the Sigma Club mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/bc31M9
... When two gases mix their temperatures equalize. In the talk we take a look at a simple proof that aims to demonstrate this phenomena from historical, philosophical, and pedagogical perspectives. We argue that the proof can be viewed as a charitable reconstruction of Maxwell’s own 1860 argument, and if so, then Maxwell preceded Boltzmann’s first attempt to give a mechanical explanation of tendency towards equilibrium with at least 6 years. Albeit the proof makes a problematic probabilistic independence assumption – and, according to a recent criticism, also a problematic physical assumption in case the masses of the molecules are different -, in this regard it does not fare worse than other later attempts. On the other hand the probabilistic independence assumption of the proof is geometrically intuitive and even invites some speculation about the physical basis of irreversibility. The proof is also simpler than many later attempts and could reasonably be included in a course on classical mechanics.
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Annette Zimmermann (Princeton): “Algorithmic Injustice Beyond Discrimination”
#LSEChoiceGroup Room 2.06, Lakatos Building Join the Choice Group mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/bk_IVD
... Algorithmic decision-making (ADM) is increasingly being used to support probabilistic, predictive decision-making procedures of political and social significance. This includes, for instance, decisions in the criminal justice process, law enforcement, benefits allocation, hiring, and credit lending. A growing body of research in computer science and statistics reveals that algorithmic ex ante judgments are often subject to algorithmic bias: a disproportionately high risk of error concerning predictive assessments about racial and religious minorities, women, and other socially disadvantaged groups. Furthermore, due to certain features of algorithmic decision-making in its contemporary form—such as low explainability, low contestability, and automation bias—there is reason to worry that ADM may not only reproduce large-scale social injustices, but that it may also exacerbate them.
One possible response is to attempt to identify all instances in which ADM leads to outcomes that impose discriminatory harms on persons. Then, one might think, we could try to improve the predictive accuracy of ADM to prevent future discriminatory harm, and we could compensate people for past discriminatory harm.
But aside from the fact that this response is subject to a range of complex feasibility constraints, it rests on unpersuasive normative assumptions. In particular, I show that it is wrong to assume that ADM is fair just if it does not lead to discriminatory harm. Due to the predictive nature of ADM, algorithmic assessments often involve not only the disproportionate distribution of particular harms, but also the disproportionate distribution of risks of harm. As recent contributors to the philosophical debate on the ethics of risk have argued, risk impositions may be morally wrongful even if they never eventuate in actual harm (‘pure risks’). I build on existing autonomy-based accounts of the wrongness of pure risk (the view that pure risks are wrong just if their presence objectionably constrains a risk-bearer’s valuable choice set) by arguing that an additional and underacknowledged reason why pure risk can be wrongful is if, and because, it is distributed unfairly. This suggests that, contrary to what the overwhelming majority of analyses of algorithmic bias seem to assume, the problem of algorithmic injustice reaches far beyond the problem of discriminatory harm caused by predictive inaccuracy. This constitutes an urgent gap in the literature. In response to this gap, my account systematically maps the types of cases in which the deployment of ADM can be wrongful even if its predictive assessments do not lead to discriminatory harm.
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Liam Kofi Bright (LSE): “The Scientists Qua Scientist Makes No Assertion” [Joint work with Haixin Dang (University of Pittsburgh)]
#PopperSeminar Room LAK 2.06, Lakatos Building Join the Popper Seminar mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/c71Lwn
... Assertions are, speaking roughly, descriptive statements which purport to describe some fact about the world. Philosophers have given a lot of attention to the idea that assertions come with special norms governing their behaviour. Frequently, in fact, philosophers claim that for something to count as an assertion it has to be governed by these norms. So what exactly are the norms of assertion? Here there is disagreement. Some philosophers believe assertions are governed by special factive norms, to the effect that an assertion must be true, or known to be true, or known with certainty to be true – or in any case that an assertion is normatively good just in case it meets some condition that entails its truth. Other philosophers place weaker epistemic constraints on good assertion. For instance the claim that an assertion is justified given the assertor’s evidence. We argue that no such norm could apply to a special class of scientific utterances – namely, the conclusions of scientific papers, or more generally the sort of utterances scientists use to communicate the results of their inquiry. Such utterances might look like paradigm instances of descriptive statements purporting to describe some fact, yet the norms of assertion philosophers have surveyed are systematically inapt for science. Hence, either philosophers are generally wrong about these norms, or strictly speaking scientists should not be considered to be making assertions at all when they report their results. After surveying our argument for this negative claim, we end by suggesting a norm of utterance that would be more appropriate to scientific practice.
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Christian List looks at free will in a physical world in this video from the Center for Logic, Language, and Cognition at the University of Turin.

…and in first place, 12 points clear at the top of the table, it's…
[drum roll]
… "Africana Philosophy and the Social Epistemology of Science" an interview with Assistant Professor Liam Kofi Bright!
... Happy New Year!
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...just missing out on the top spot, but still qualifying for a Philosophy Blog Champions League place, it's "After Obamacare" by former Lachmann Research Fellow, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Daniel M. Hausman.

A very Merry Christmas from everybody at LSE Philosophy!

...creeping up the blog post table, and thereby avoiding relegation, at number 3 it's "Reproductive Choices and Climate Change Part 1" by Philippe van Basshuysen and Eric Brandstedt.