http://hdl.handle.net/1842/1292 2013-05-18T14:16:40Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/3125 Title: Good, Reason and Objectivity in Aristotle Authors: Scaltsas, Dory Abstract: In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle begins his investigation by exploring the nature of the end of all action. In the very first sentence of the work he says: "Every art and every enquiry and similarly every action and pursuit is thought to aim at some good and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim" (1094al-3). It is easy, says Aristotle, to find verbal agreement between people regarding that good because they all consider it to be happiness (eudaimonia). Aristotle says: " Let us resume our inquiry and state in view of the fact that all knowledge and every pursuit aims at some good, what it is that we say that Political Science aims at and what is the highest of all good achievable by action. Verbally, there is very general ageement; for both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness, arrd identify living well and doing well with being happy" (1095a13-19). But there is no agreement between people with regard to what the good is. Some think it is pleasure, others wealth, others honour and so on, for each what happens to be most desirable to them. As is well known Aristotle's general method of approach to a new subject relies on the endoxrg namely the respected opinions of society. But in this case, as he informs us, there is much and radical disagreement on the accepted even the respected positions within society on the subject of what eudaimonia is. For this reason, far from finding the truth in the respected opinions of society, Aristotle cannot use them even as his starting point. Thus we'find him turning to argument, a metaphysical one at that, in order to be assisted in his endeavour to determine the nature of the good at which human action aims. This is the well known function (ergon) argument. My concern in the present article is to study the steps of this 1996-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/2111 Title: Doomsday, Bishop Ussher and simulated worlds Authors: Richmond, Alasdair M Abstract: This paper attempts three tasks in relation to Carter and Leslie’s Doomsday Argument. First, it criticises Timothy Chambers’ ‘Ussherian Corollary’, a striking but unsuccessful objection to standard Doomsday arguments. Second, it reformulates the Ussherian Corollary as an objection to Bradley Monton’s variant Doomsday and Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument. Finally, it tries to diagnose the epistemic/metaphysical problems facing Doomsday-related arguments. 2007-11-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/2092 Title: Utilitarianism and prioritarianism II Authors: McCarthy, David Abstract: The priority view has become very popular in moral philosophy, but there is a serious question about how it should be formalized. The most natural formalization leads to ex post prioritarianism, which results from adding expected utility theory to the main ideas of the priority view. But ex post prioritarianism entails a claim which is too implausible for it to be a serious competitor to utilitarianism. In fact, ex post prioritarianism was probably never a genuine alternative to utilitarianism in the first place. By contrast, ex ante prioritarianism is defensible. But its motivation is very different from the usual rationales offered for the priority view. Given the untenability of ex post prioritarianism, it is more natural for most friends of the priority view to revert to utilitarianism. 2007-11-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/1979 Title: Theories of team agency Authors: Gold, Natalie; Sugden, Robert Abstract: In decision theory, it is almost universally presupposed that agency is invested in individuals: each person acts on her own preferences and beliefs. A person’s preferences may take account of the effects of her actions on other people; she may, for example, be altruistic or have an aversion to inequality. Still, these are her preferences, and she chooses what she most prefers. Opposing this orthodoxy is a small body of literature which allows teams of individuals to count as agents, and which seeks to identify distinctive modes of team reasoning that are used by individuals as members of teams. This idea has been around for some time, having been proposed in different forms by David Hodgson (1967), Donald Regan (1980), Margaret Gilbert (1989), Susan Hurley (1989), Robert Sugden (1993, 2003), Martin Hollis (1998) and Michael Bacharach (1999, 2006). Closely related, but less directly concerned with decision theory, is the literature of collective intentions, exemplified by the work of Raimo Tuomela and Kaarlo Miller (1988), John Searle (1990) and Michael Bratman (1993). These ideas have yet to capture the attention of mainstream decision theory. There seems to be a suspicion either that team reasoning is a particular case of individual reasoning, distinguished only by the particular assumptions it makes about preferences, or that it is not reasoning in the true sense of the word. The main contribution of the present paper is to represent team reasoning explicitly, as a mode of reasoning in which propositions are manipulated according to well-defined rules—an approach that has previously been used by Natalie Gold and Christian List (2004). Our basic building block is the concept of a schema of practical reasoning, in which conclusions about what actions should be taken are inferred from explicit premises about the decision environment and about what agents are seeking to achieve. We use this theoretical framework to compare team reasoning with the individual reasoning of standard decision theory, and to compare various theories of team agency and collective intentionality. Description: To appear in "Rationality and Commitment" Feb 2008 http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/EthicsMoralPhilosophy/?view=usa&ci=9780199287260 2007-01-01T00:00:00Z