The Agent‐Relative Probability Threshold of Hope

Nearly all contributors to the philosophical analysis of hope agree that if an agent hopes that p, she both desires that p and assigns to p a probability which is greater than zero, but less than one. According to the widely‐endorsed Standard Account, these two conditions are also (jointly) sufficient for ‘hoping that’. Ariel Meirav has recently argued, however, that the Standard Account fails to distinguish hoping for a prospect from despairing of it – due to cases where two agents equally desire an outcome and assign to it the same probability, yet one hopes for the outcome while the other despairs of it. I argue, against Meirav, that these putative counterexamples depend crucially on the assumption – previously unquestioned – that the degree of probability necessary for hope is invariant across individuals. If the probability threshold is instead understood as agent‐relative, the difficulty disappears. Further, I argue that there is strong independent reason for taking the probability threshold of hope to be agent‐relative, based on similarities to the widely‐accepted agent‐relative probability thresholds of industriousness and risk aversion. And I conclude by noting how the agent‐relative modification to the Standard Account is better equipped than is Meirav's positive view to yield intuitive results. ¹      

Diversity and Community: The Role of Agent‐Based Modeling

Community psychology involves several dialectics between potentially opposing ideals, such as theory and practice, rights and needs, and respect for human diversity and sense of community. Some recent papers in the American Journal of Community Psychology have examined the diversity‐community dialectic, some with the aid of agent‐based modeling and concepts from network science. This paper further elucidates these concepts and suggests that research in community psychology can benefit from a useful dialectic between agent‐based modeling and the real‐world concerns of community psychology.     

Hutchesonian Inspired Agent‐Based Virtue Ethics

Francis Hutcheson's moral sense theory is the inspiration for both act utilitarianism and a contemporary virtue ethics approach that Michael Slote calls agent‐based virtue ethics. In this essay, I look at other possibilities for ethical theory that spring from Hutcheson's writings and conclude that the landscape of sentimentalist inspired ethics is richer than many realize. I begin this article with a short explanation of Hutcheson's moral sense theory. I explain that Hutcheson proposes and embraces three distinct criteria of moral evaluation, one of which is concerned with the evaluation of motives and two of which are concerned with the evaluation of acts. Act utilitarianism adopts one of the criteria of act evaluation, and Slote's agent‐based virtue ethics adopts the remaining criterion of act evaluation and the criterion of motive evaluation. Then, after pointing out what I believe are shortcomings of Slote's agent‐based virtue ethics, I propose two Hutchesonian inspired theories, each of which is a compromise between act utilitarianism and agent‐based virtue ethics. The first, which I call hypothetical agent‐based virtue ethics, adopts two of Hutcheson's three criteria and is similar structurally to a virtue ethics theory articulated by Rosalind Hursthouse and Linda Zabzebski. The second, which, for lack of a better name, I call Hutchesonian hybridism, adopts all three of Hutcheson's criteria and is a hybrid combination of Slote's actualist agent‐based virtue ethics and hypothetical agent‐based virtue ethics. I argue that both hypothetical agent‐based virtue ethics and Hutchesonian hybridism overcome the shortcomings (pointed out earlier in this essay) of Slote's actualist agent‐based virtue ethics, and that both of these theories are, therefore, worthy of further consideration.     

自利的契约论和非自利的契约论

契约论的基本思想是:道德应该仿效人们相互间所同意的互惠或地位平等的人之间的合作,或者预设于其中.一个行动是对是错必须取决于该行动是否符合或违反某些原则,这些原则是平等的人们之间达成的或者可能达成的合乎需要的契约的对象.自利的契约论认为,各方的平等状况仅仅是事实上的,各方对原则的选择也是以理性地自利为基础的.非自利的契约论则认为,合理的互惠或道德上平等的人们之间的公平性的一种理想.     

Contractualism and Restrictions

T.M. Scanlon writes that deontological constraints on taking lives are to be defended “by considering what principles licensing others to take our lives could be reasonably rejected.” I argue that Scanlon can offer no such defence of deontological constraints.     

Contractualism and the Non-Identity Problem

This paper argues that T.M. Scanlon’s contractualism can provide a solution to the non-identity problem. It first argues that there is no reason not to include future people in the realm of those to whom we owe justification, but that merely possible people are not included. It then goes on to argue that a person could reasonably reject a principle that left them with a barely worth living life even though that principle caused them to exist, and that current people could not justify creating people with barely worth living lives on the grounds that it caused those people to exist.     

Intention and Permissibility: T. M. Scanlon

It is clearly impermissible to kill one person (or refrain from giving him treatment that he needs in order to survive) because his organs can be used to save five others who are in need of transplants. It has seemed to many that the explanation for this lies in the fact that in such cases we would be intending the death of the person whom we killed, or failed to save. What makes these actions impermissible, however, is not the agent's intention but rather the fact that the benefit envisaged does not justify an exception to the prohibition against killing or the requirement to give aid. The difference between this explanation and one appealing to intention is easily overlooked if one fails to distinguish between the prospective use of a moral principle to guide action and its retrospective use to appraise the way an agent governed him or herself. Even if this explanation is accepted, however, it remains an open question whether and how an agent's intention may be relevant to the permissibility of actions in other cases.     

Contractualism and Global Economic Justice

This article examines Rawls's and Scanlon's surprisingly undemanding contractualist accounts of global moral principles. Scanlon's Principle of Rescue requires too little of the world's rich unless the causal links between them and the poor are unreliable. Rawls's principle of legitimacy leads him to theorize in terms of a law of peoples instead of persons, and his conception of a people leads him to spurn global distributive equality. Rawls's approach has advantages over the cosmopolitan egalitarianism of Beitz and Pogge. But it cannot generate principles to regulate the entire global economic order. The article proposes a new cosmopolitan economic original position argument to make up for this lack in Rawls's Law of Peoples.     

Contractualism and the paradox of deontology

Philosophical Studies - Scanlonian contractualism rejects the consequentialist assumptions about morality, value, and rationality in virtue of which deontological constraints appear paradoxical....