Mind 130(520), 2021 Abstract The Bayesian maxim for rational learning could be described asconservative changefrom one probabilistic belief orcredencefunction to another in response to new information. ). But can this conservative-change maxim be extended to revising one’s credences in response to entertaining propositions or concepts of which one was previously unaware? The economists,) make a proposal in this spirit. Philosophers have adopted effectively the same rule: revision in response to growing awareness should not affect the relative probabilities of propositions in one’s ‘old’ epistemic state. The rule is compelling, but only under the assumptions that its advocates introduce. It is not a general requirement of rationality, or so we argue. We provide informal counterexamples. And we show that, when awareness grows, the boundary between one’s ‘old’ and ‘new’ epistemic commitments is blurred. Accordingly, there is no general notion of conservative change in this setting.

in Synthese (2020) AbstractWhen an agent learns of an expert’s credence in a proposition about which they are an expert, the agent should defer to the expert and adopt that credence as their own. This

Institute for Futures Studies Working Paper 2013:1. A revised version is published in World Politics, 1-50, 2015.

Working Paper 2007 No. 3 A revised version is published in the European Sociological Review, 24 (4). Lars Brännström

Richard Arneson: Should we reward the deserving? Some puzzles

Do plausible fundamental principles of justice incorporate the idea of rewarding the deserving? Utilitarianism is famously indifferent between a world in which saints fare badly and scoundrels fare we

Mind Abstract Candice Delmas’ A Duty to Resist arrives, fittingly, in a world of increasing authoritarianism, and the caged children and burning forests left in its wake. Widely diagnosed as a failure t

Beyond Operation Protective Edge

This is a seminar on international law and war ethics, taking Operation Protective Edge as an example. The seminar was held at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm 2015. Participants: He

Richard Arneson is a political philosopher with a special interest in theories of social justice.  AbstractDo plausible fundamental principles of justice incorporate the idea of rewarding the deserving?

Ethics, Politics & Society. A Journal in Moral and Political Philosophy, N. 1, 2018, pp.89-122. Abstract Who should have a right to take part in which decisions in democratic decision making? This ““a people”, who takes decision in a democratic fashion. However, that a decision is made with a democratic decision method by a certain group of people doesn’t suffice for making the decision democratic or satisfactory from a democratic perspective. The group also has to be the right one. But what makes a group the right one? The criteria by which to identify the members of the people entitled to participate in collective decisions have been surprisingly difficult to pin down. In this paper, I shall revisit some of the problems discussed in my 2005 paper in light of some recent criticism and discussion of my position in the literature, and address a number of new issues.

In N. Marschner, C. Richter, J. Patz, & A. Salheiser (Eds.), Contested climate justice – Challenged democracy: International perspectives (pp. 59-71). Campus Verlag GmbH Abstract Earth is on a catastryet, there is little sign of halting the rise of global greenhouse gas emissions orstopping the extraction of fossil fuels. Against this background, in this articlewe re-engage with a recently proposed typology supposed to cover three modesthrough which effective climate action has been obstructed. These are, first,primary obstruction, that is, the spread of disinformation and/or denying the veryexistence of anthropogenic climate change. Second, secondary obstruction concernsmore or less deliberate obstruction via opposition to climate action and policiesvia, for example, reference to “the threat of deindustrialisation”. Finally, tertiaryobstruction denotes modes of living which, while not necessarily obstructingeffective climate change intentionally, concerns “living in denial”. Drawing onrecent research and examples, we revisit this typology.