Papers by Abelard Podgorski
This paper will argue that the assessment of an agent’s rationality is primarily concerned with p... more This paper will argue that the assessment of an agent’s rationality is primarily concerned with processes rather than states. To understand this view and the question it tries to answer, it will be helpful to consider it in relation to a more familiar question about whether norms or requirements (I use these terms interchangeably) of rationality are synchronic or diachronic. Most recent discussion of rational requirements on mental behavior concerns, explicitly or implicitly, norms that are synchronic, taking agents to be rational or irrational in virtue of the states they are in at individual times.1 Some so-called “time-slice” theorists have gone so far as to propose that all rational norms are of this kind.2 Other philosophers insist that we supplement such synchronic norms with those of a diachronic sort, governing agents’ temporally extended behavior in a way not reducible to demands on individual time-slices. At least one has suggested that all norms are of this latter kind.3 ...
According to commonsense morality, while we have reason to be concerned about the effects of our ... more According to commonsense morality, while we have reason to be concerned about the effects of our actions on anyone's welfare, we also have reason to be partial towards people to whom we bear certain special relationships. I have, for example, more reason to make sure that my own child gets into a good school than that my neighbor's child does. In this paper, I want to examine a kind of decision where the identity of people to whom we bear the special relationship-in particular, our future children-depends on our action. Ordinary moral thinking holds that even in such identity-affecting cases, the fact that my decision will lead to my future child having a better life counts in a special way in its favor, and the main accounts in the literature explicitly addressing such cases agree. I will argue that this is mistaken. This is because more generally, special concern doesn't give us reason to be picky-to select better identities for the occupants of our special relationships-and therefore does not give us reason to have better-off children rather than worse-off ones. Given that most of our decisions before our children's conception are identity-affecting, it will follow that our reasons to make sure our future children are well-off are merely reasons of general concern with the same character and strength as our reason to make sure anyone else is well-off. This thesis, that our future children are strangers to us morally, has surprising implications for the ethics of procreation, genetic engineering, and other identity-affecting practical decisions.
The dispute in decision theory between causalists and evidentialists remains unsettled. Many are ... more The dispute in decision theory between causalists and evidentialists remains unsettled. Many are attracted to the causal view's endorsement of a species of dominance reasoning, and to the intuitive verdicts it gets on a range of cases with the structure of the infamous Newcomb's Problem. But it also faces a rising wave of purported counterexamples and theoretical challenges. In this paper I will describe a novel decision theory which saves what is appealing about the causal view while avoiding its most worrying objections, and which promises to generalize to solve a set of related problems in other normative domains. Our path towards this view begins with a diagnosis of the problems facing causal decision theory as a special case of a more general phenomenon called decision-dependence-the possibility that some crucial input into our evaluation of options is affected by the decision we end up making. A wide range of attractive views in ethics and practical rationality run into cases of decision-dependence, and they will all face problems analogous to those troubling the causalist. We will go on to look at a promising initial thought about how to approach simple two-option decisions in these cases that I believe is on the right track, and see why attempts to generalize it to decisions with three or more options seem doomed to fall apart. The solution will be a radically revised approach to decision-making, Tournament Decision Theory, which models decision problems after the structure of a tournament, in which each option competes with each other option pairwise, and the winner is determined by the overall results. I will show how Tournament Decision Theory both provides us with tools to address the distinctive puzzles raised by decision-dependence, and allows us to claim new ground in the familiar battle between causalists and evidentialists.
One popular defence of moral omnivorism appeals to facts about the indirectness of the diner’s ca... more One popular defence of moral omnivorism appeals to facts about the indirectness of the diner’s causal relationship to the suffering of farmed animals. Another appeals to the claim that farmed animals would not exist but for our farming practices. The import of these claims, I argue, has been misunderstood, and the standard arguments grounded in them fail. In this paper, I develop a better argument in defence of eating meat which combines resources from both of these strategies, together with principles of population ethics, and discuss its implications for which sorts of meat it is permissible to eat. According to the diner’s defence, there is an asymmetry between producers and consumers of meat. Producers can prevent the suffering of animals without preventing their existence, but consumers cannot. This asymmetry grounds a defence against harm-based objections to eating meat which is available to the consumer alone, and which avoids the controversial commitments about moral status or the interests of nonhuman animals endemic to existing attempts to justify omnivorism.
According to a simple version of the moral theory called rule consequentialism, what we ought to ... more According to a simple version of the moral theory called rule consequentialism, what we ought to do is determined by which sets of rules it would be best if everyone followed. This view, however, faces a problem sometimes called the ideal world objection: there are rules that would be great for everyone to follow, but extremely poor guides to action in our world, where adherence is imperfect. In response, recent defenders of rule consequentialism (Brandt 2011) have rejected the simple version above in favor of views designed to be less idealistic, by evaluating worlds of partial adherence instead of, or in addition to, worlds of perfect adherence. In this paper, I will argue that these attempts to fix rule consequentialism rest on a misdiagnosis. The revisions of rule consequentialism are motivated by taking the degree of ideality in the worlds of evaluation as the source of the problem, and consequently, they try to avoid it by evaluating worlds with more realistic levels of adherence to norms. But the ideal world objection, I will show, is only a special case of a more general and fundamental problem that faces any view that determines what we as individuals ought to do in this world by evaluating worlds that differ from the actual world in more than what is up to us. While the degree of ideality is a flexible feature of rule consequentialism, the commitment to evaluating distant worlds is a core feature, and I aim to show that the generalized problem, which we might call the distant world objection, applies not only to the view in all its forms, but to a wide range of moral views which share this commitment.
Our beliefs often exhibit a kind of self-perpetuation. That is, once we have formed a belief, we ... more Our beliefs often exhibit a kind of self-perpetuation. That is, once we have formed a belief, we have a tendency to maintain it beyond what our evidence alone seems sufficient to explain. This tendency manifests in a number of different ways. It is harder, often much harder, to change the mind of someone who has already come to an opinion about something than to prevent them from forming that opinion in the first place. Minor influxes of evidence against our settled views rarely dislodge them, even when our original reasons were only marginally sufficient to justify those views, and we often continue to hold our beliefs even once we have lost track of those reasons. When presented with previously unconsidered alternatives to what we believe, we are inclined towards our original position even though we may be unable to articulate why that position is superior. 1
On the face of it, in ordinary practices of rational assessment, we criticize agents both for the... more On the face of it, in ordinary practices of rational assessment, we criticize agents both for the combinations of attitudes, like belief, desire, and intention, that they possess at particular times, and for the ways that they behave cognitively over time, by forming, reconsidering, and updating those attitudes. Accordingly, philosophers have proposed norms of rationality that are synchronic - concerned fundamentally with our individual time-slices, and diachronic - concerned with our temporally extended behavior. Recently, however, several epistemologists have begun to question whether an account of rationality requires both types of norms. My aim in this paper is to address what I take to be the most direct and general recent attack on diachronic epistemic rationality, the arguments for so-called “time-slice epistemology” by Brian Hedden. I argue that Hedden's attempt to motivate the rejection of diachronic rational norms ultimately fails, and in particular that an independently motivated view about the nature of such norms, one on which such norms govern processes, escapes his assault unscathed.
There has been considerable philosophical debate in recent years over a thesis called epistemic p... more There has been considerable philosophical debate in recent years over a thesis called epistemic permissivism. According to the permissivist, it is possible for two agents to have the exact same total body of evidence and yet differ in their doxastic attitudes towards some proposition, without either being irrational. However, I argue, not enough attention has been paid to the distinction between different ways in which permissivism might be true. In this paper, I will present a taxonomy of forms of epistemic permissivism framed as the upshot of different ways one might respond to a basic argument against the view from Roger White. I then introduce a new type of permissive view which the contemporary debate has completely ignored. This view permits differences in belief between evidential equals by rejecting static norms connecting an agent’s rational behavior to their evidence in favor of dynamic norms governing their processes of consideration. I'll show how the dynamic strategy of rejecting static norms on belief opens the door to a new kind of permissivism which is both independently attractive and especially well-placed to answer worries that have been raised against traditional permissivist views.
Drafts by Abelard Podgorski
In this paper, I attempt to develop an approach to population ethics which explains what we are p... more In this paper, I attempt to develop an approach to population ethics which explains what we are permitted to do in virtue of the possible complaints against our action. This task is made difficult by a serious problem that arises when we attempt to generalize the view from two-option cases to cases with more options. The solution makes two significant movesfirst, accepting that complaints are essentially pairwise comparative, and second, reimagining decision-making as a tournament between options competing two at a time. The right view about when one option defeats another with respect to complaints, paired with the right view about how to pick the winners of the tournament given the relations of defeat, leads to a uniquely attractive view in the person-affecting tradition.
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Papers by Abelard Podgorski
Drafts by Abelard Podgorski