Research seminar with Matthew Adler, Duke UniversityREGISTERAbstract The philosophical literature on consequentialism regularly distinguishes between “person-affecting” and “impersonal” moral justifica

Campbell, T. Axiological Retributivism and the Desert Neutrality Paradox. Philosophies 2022, 7, 80. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7040080 Abstract: According to axiological retributivism, people canan outcome in which someone gets what she deserves, even if it is bad for her, can thereby haveintrinsic positive value. A question seldom asked is how axiological retributivism should deal withcomparisons of outcomes that differ with respect to the number and identities of deserving agents.Attempting to answer this question exposes a problem for axiological retributivism that parallels awell-known problem in population axiology introduced by John Broome. The problem for axiologicalretributivism is that it supports the existence of a range of negative wellbeing levels such that if adeserving person comes into existence at any of these levels, the resulting outcome is neither betternor worse with respect to desert. However, the existence of such a range is inconsistent with a setof very plausible axiological claims. I call this the desert neutrality paradox. After introducing theparadox, I consider several possible responses to it. I suggest that one reasonable response, thoughperhaps not the only one, is to reject axiological retributivism.

Place: At the Institute for Futures Studies, Holländargatan 13, Stockholm, or online.REGISTERAbstractThe principle of neutrality can be seen as a direct response to the totalistapproach to evaluating popu

Katie Steele: Neutrality About Creating Good Lives - No Panacea For Longtermism

The principle of neutrality can be seen as a direct response to the totalist approach to evaluating populations of varying constitution and size: while the latter holds that the addition of a good lif

Synthese 196(7): 2885–2906. doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1587-5 Abstract The concept of information has well-known difficulties. Among the many issues that have been discussed is the alethic nature of a se

Larry S. Temkin is Distinguished Professor at Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University.ABSTRACTThis talk explores and challenges several common assumptions regarding the assessment of outcome good

Philosophy of Science, Vol. 82, No. 4, p. 602-625. DOI: 10.1086/682915 Abstract Chance Neutrality is the thesis that, conditional on some proposition being true (or being false), its chance of being true

On the 4th of October we welcomed Daniel Naurin to our research seminar. Daniel Naurin is associate professor of political science at the University of Gothenburg and at the seminar he presented new r

Ludvig Beckman

I am Professor in Political Science at Stockholm University. In 2000 I defended my dissertation at Uppsala University. I participate in the research project "The Boundary Problem in Democratic Theory" t

Management and Organization Review, Volume 13, Issue 4 (Special Issue Celebrating and Advancing the Scholarship of Kwok Leung (1958–2015))  Abstract Violators of cooperation norms may be informally punis