How to Be Helpful to Multiple People at Once

When someone hosts a party, when governments choose an aid program, or when assistive robots decide what meal to serve to a family, decision-makers must determine how to help even when their recipients have very different preferences. Which combination of people’s desires should a decision-maker serve? To provide a potential answer, we turned to psychology: What do people think is best when multiple people have different utilities over options? We developed a quantitative model of what people consider desirable behavior, characterizing participants’ preferences by inferring which combination of “metrics” (maximax, maxsum, maximin, or inequality aversion [IA]) best explained participants’ decisions in a drink-choosing task. We found that participants’ behavior was best described by the maximin metric, describing the desire to maximize the happiness of the worst-off person, though participant behavior was also consistent with maximizing group utility (the maxsum metric) and the IA metric to a lesser extent. Participant behavior was consistent across variation in the agents involved and  tended to become more maxsum-oriented when participants were told they were players in the task (Experiment 1). In later experiments, participants maintained maximin behavior across multi-step tasks rather than shortsightedly focusing on the individual steps therein (Experiment 2, Experiment 3). By repeatedly asking participants what choices they would hope for in an optimal, just decision-maker, and carefully disambiguating which quantitative metrics describe these nuanced choices, we help constrain the space of what behavior we desire in leaders, artificial intelligence systems helping decision-makers, and the assistive robots and decision-makers of the future.     

Free to Be Happy: Economic Freedom and Happiness in US States

While the measurement of subjective well-being and its usefulness as a policy objective is a matter of contention, a burgeoning field of happiness economics is emerging. This paper examines the relationship between the institutions of economic freedom and happiness as reported by respondents to the Generalized Social Survey (GSS) in the United States. GSS responses are matched via geocode to state of residence. This allows individual responses in the GSS to be matched to institutional characteristics of the state of residence. A novel contribution of this study is that analysis of the effect of economic freedom on reported happiness is conducted both at the individual level and using state averages. It is found that the level of economic freedom in US states has a positive effect on both individual reported happiness and state average happiness. Dynamic panel analysis is also conducted both as a robustness check and in an effort to control for endogeneity. This confirms the relationship as positive and is suggestive of a causal positive impact of economic freedom on average state happiness.     

People with Disabilities – In Order to Belong,They Need to Be Missed!

People with disabilities are often excluded within our churches: Why is that so? This paper will explore why disabled people are not missed within our churches as a mission group and as a member of the body of Christ. It will also explore why the fact that they are not missed makes them feel like they do not belong in the church. The paper will conclude with what people with disabilities have to offer the church, and what the church can positively do to help them feel like they belong through our mission and inclusion of them into the full ministry of the church.     

Can God or the Market Set People Free?

Both Protestant theologians and “preference” economists believe that freedom is necessary for moral action, but such theologians and economists have seemingly irreconcilable accounts of freedom and, thus also, morality. Instead of learning from each other, they typically ignore each other or claim that one field reigns supreme over the other. This essay digs into the theological and economic traditions of each side to find points of similarity between them. It engages Adam Smith and Ernst Troeltsch to develop a view of “ethical freedom” that pulls together the “libertarian freedom” emphasized by preference economics and the “egalitarian freedom” emphasized in much Protestant theology. The three‐part view of freedom draws the disciplines together and opens possibilities for a more robust theory of moral action.     

How to Be a Bayesian Dogmatist

Rational agents have (more or less) consistent beliefs. Bayesianism is a theory of consistency for partial belief states. Rational agents also respond appropriately to experience. Dogmatism is a theory of how to respond appropriately to experience. Hence, Dogmatism and Bayesianism are theories of two very different aspects of rationality. It's surprising, then, that in recent years it has become common to claim that Dogmatism and Bayesianism are jointly inconsistent: how can two independently consistent theories with distinct subject matter be jointly inconsistent? In this essay I argue that Bayesianism and Dogmatism are inconsistent only with the addition of a specific hypothesis about how the appropriate responses to perceptual experience are to be incorporated into the formal models of the Bayesian. That hypothesis isn't essential either to Bayesianism or to Dogmatism, and so Bayesianism and Dogmatism are jointly consistent. That leaves the matter of how experiences and credences are related, and so in the remainder of the essay I offer an alternative account of how perceptual justification, as the Dogmatist understands it, can be incorporated into the Bayesian formalism.     

How to Be a Humean Interventionist

This paper aims to provide Humean metaphysics for the interventionist theory of causation. This is done by appealing to the hierarchical picture of causal relations as being realized by mechanisms, which in turn are identified with lower‐level causal structures. The modal content of invariances at the lowest level of this hierarchy, at which mechanisms are reduced to strict natural laws, is then explained in terms of projectivism based on the best‐system view of laws.     

To Be is to Be the Object of a Possible Act of Choice

Aim of the paper is to revise Boolos’ reinterpretation of second-order monadic logic in terms of plural quantification ([4], [5]) and expand it to full second order logic. Introducing the idealization of plural acts of choice, performed by a suitable team of agents, we will develop a notion of plural reference. Plural quantification will be then explained in terms of plural reference. As an application, we will sketch a structuralist reconstruction of second-order arithmetic based on the axiom of infinite à la Dedekind, as the unique non-logical axiom. We will also sketch a virtual interpretation of the classical continuum involving no other infinite than a countable plurality of individuals.     

Wishing to Be White: Begging to Be Black

With race in mind, in this response the author draws on her own experiences of exilic consciousness, racial melancholia, whiteness, dissociation, and self-censorship to dialogue with Yvette Esprey. The author explores the issue of voice and how this is affected by context. The notions of the normative unconscious, K (nots), and the anti-analytic third are differentiated from one another. The relative weight given in the literature to unconscious processes such dissociation as opposed to more conscious self-censorship is explored in theory and with reference to Esprey’s case studies.     

Self-Injurious Thoughts and Behaviors May Be More Common and Severe Among People Identifying as a Sexual Minority

Research indicates that people who identify as a sexual minority are at higher risk of numerous negative outcomes, including self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITBs). The minority stress model proposes that people identifying as a sexual minority are at higher risk of these behaviors due to sexual orientation-specific stressors—however, it does not clarify whether SITBs will be more severe among these individuals. The present study tested whether SITBs are more common and more severe among people identifying as a sexual minority using several metrics, including frequency of SITB engagement, age of onset of SITB, desire to discontinue SITB engagement, and likelihood of future SITBs. Four independent research samples were used to test this model. Results were then combined and tested in an internal meta-analysis. Findings converge to indicate a longer and more severe course of SITB engagement among people identifying as a sexual minority. Future research is needed to replicate these findings and to advance the understanding of why this imbalance in risk and severity might exist, and how it can be prevented.     

How to Be a Friend of Absolute Goodness

This paper critically examines Richard Kraut’s attack on the notion of absolute value, and lays out some of the conceptual work required to defend such a notion. The view under attack claims that absolute goodness is a property that provides a reason to value what has it. Kraut’s overall challenge is that absolute goodness cannot play this role. Kraut’s own view is that goodness-for, instead, plays the reason-providing role. My targets are Kraut’s double-counting objection, and his ethical objection against absolute value. After explaining the double-counting objection, and discussing the idea of non-additive reasons, I examine and reject Kraut’s reasons for holding that nonadditivity can rescue relative value but not absolute value. I proceed then to explore a different reply to the double-counting objection by introducing a distinction between normative reasons for action and reasons that explain why a certain consideration is a reason for action. Such a distinction (hinted at by Kraut) would either help both Kraut and the friend of absolute value, or neither of them. I defend the distinction from the objection that it would make absolute value just a ‘shadow’. Finally, I reply to Kraut’s ethical objection that being motivated by absolute value is depersonalizing, on two grounds: 1) if thinking in terms of absolute value depersonalizes relationships, then we have absolute-value-given reasons not to think in those terms; 2) the distinction between normative and explanatory reasons explains why even a motivation centred on absolute value need not be depersonalizing.