Friday May 9
14.00 – 16.00 Laurie Paul (Yale), open and hybrid seminar
Value by Acquaintance
I argue that we should recognize the importance of value by acquaintance, both as a philosophical concept in its own right and as a concept with applications for decision making. My argument centers on how the distinctive epistemic structure of knowledge-how is reflected in a distinctive capacity to value. After delineating my account of value by acquaintance and discussing its connection to Molyneux’s problem and the neuroscience of decision making, I discuss its role in reasoning and practical decision making, including transformative decision making, connecting it to the reference class problem and the role of generativity in artificial intelligence. My discussion, in effect, shows how experience can matter for expertise in value assessment, and why such expertise (or wisdom) can be needed for practical decision making.
Registration via the IFFS website.
Saturday May 10
10.30 – 11.30 Krister Bykvist (IFFS/SU):
Shifts happen: A search for a stable standard of wellbeing when attitudes change
One of my main research tasks in our project is to write a book about wellbeing and changing attitudes. The aim of the book is to develop an attitude-sensitive theory of wellbeing that provides a plausible answer to the challenge of changing attitudes. This challenge can be put in this way: How can we find a stable standard of wellbeing when attitudes can change both across time and across worlds? This challenge is particularly severe since attitudes can change in so many different ways. Their strength can change, they can become stronger or weaker; their valence can change, e.g., from favouring to disfavouring, or from disfavouring to favouring. Sometimes we acquire new attitudes, e.g., when we undergo an epistemically transformative experience, and sometimes we lose attitudes we used have, as when one is struck by a severe form of dementia.
In this talk, I will introduce a simple framework that provides a perspicuous representation of these changes, no matter whether they occur across time or across worlds (or both). I will also show how one can use this framework to more precisely define the main theoretical contenders and identify crucial differences between them. Furthermore, it is easy to formulate various constraints on an acceptable theory in this framework, as I will show. One of the more general constraints I want to defend in my book is what I call ‘world-boundedness’: the wellbeing of a person’s life (or any part thereof) in a world is determined exclusively by her attitudes in that world. I will argue that this constraint has intuitive plausibility, and that it also makes our theoretical life much easier by considerably reducing the complexity of our task. However, some objections to world-boundedness need to be addressed, and I am curious to know whether you find my replies convincing.
11.40 – 12.40 Katie Steele (ANU):
Aging as transformative experience: implications for lifetime wellbeing
Empirical evidence suggests that our attitudes towards diachronic or global properties of our life change as we age. In particular, our assessments of the trade-off between overall quality of life and longevity may evolve as we age. In this talk I examine how the possibility of such attitudinal change bears on lifetime wellbeing. My focus is preference-based accounts. I argue that any such account under which preferences about diachronic properties of a life are conceived as located in time faces problems in handling the relevant attitudinal changes (if they are truly about diachronic properties of a life). This has implications for whether preferences about diachronic properties of a life and preferences about synchronic properties of a life can both feature in the one preference-based account of lifetime wellbeing.
12.40 – 14.00 Lunch
14.00 – 15.00 Richard Bradley (LSE):
Opportunities, capabilities and preference change
A person's circumstances at a time include what they are capable of doing or achieving at that time: more generally, their opportunities. Future opportunities are valuable at least in part because we might not know, or be sure about, what we will want to choose or prefer at that time. To capture this idea I suggest that our evaluation of opportunity sets should conform to the principle that one set is better than another if it contains alternatives that we might want to choose that are not contained in the other set, but the reverse is not true. In this talk I will try to make this principle more precise before turning the problems posed by preference changes for evaluations of opportunity sets that confirm with it.
15.10 – 16.10 Tim Campbell (IFFS):
Dementia and the Authority of Advance Directives
Advance directives (ADs) allow competent adults to express how they wish to be treated medically if they later become decisionally incapacitated – for example, due to advanced dementia. As many have recognized, it is not obvious that ADs can be said to have legitimate authority in such cases. For instance, Emily Walsh argues that that the progression of dementia is epistemically and personally transformative. A person who signs an AD may be unable to make a fully informed decision, insofar as she cannot know what it is like to live with dementia. There may also be an important sense in which a patient with advanced dementia is “someone else”, i.e., not the person who signed the AD. It is difficult to see how an AD could have legitimate authority if the person who signs it is not the same person as the patient who is later impacted by others carrying out its instructions. This has become known as ‘the someone else problem’. In this talk, I focus mainly on the someone else problem. I first criticize some attempts to affirm the legitimate authority of ADs in the face of the someone else problem. I then explore a new attempt, which appeals to a kind of ethical symmetry between honouring ADs in cases of severe dementia, and actions that affect a child whose later adult self would retrospectively endorse those actions, despite being (in some important sense) someone else. If anticipated retrospective endorsement can be viewed as authoritative in the second case, then ADs can be viewed as authoritative in the first case. Finally, I consider some doubts about, and potential limitations of, this response to the someone else problem.
16.20 – 17.20 Anders Herlitz (IFFS/Lund):
Transformative experiences, incomparability and rational choice
Some experiences have been said to radically a change a person’s knowledge and/or preferences, life goals and the way they act in the world. Do such transformative experiences make options so hard to compare so that we can speak of them as incomparable, and would that undermine the possibility of rational choice? This paper first explores in what circumstances the phenomenon transformative experiences render options incomparable. Secondly, it outlines what this means for the possibility of rational choice.
Sunday May 11
9.30 – 10.30 Julia Mosquera (IFFS) and Orri Stefansson (IFFS/SU):
Choosing What Cannot Be Undone: Irreversibility and Permanency in Transformative Choices
Much philosophical work on transformative experiences has centered on their epistemically and personally transformative aspects. One important aspect that has mostly been overlooked, however, is to what extent such transformations are irreversible and, more generally, permanent. The primary aim of this paper is to, first, clarify how permanency relates to transformative experience, and, second, to examine how the potential permanency of transformative experiences should affect our reasoning about transformative choices. Finally, we argue that there is a tension in Paul (2014) as far as permanency is concerned: her focus on authenticity is most plausible, we think, for choices whose effects are (more or less) permanent, while here suggested “reconfiguration solution” is most plausible for choices whose effects are easy to reverse.
10.40 – 11.40 Richard Pettigrew (Bristol):
Permissible preferences, cognitive disability, and paternalism
There are many areas concerning which rationality permits many different preferences: there are many permissible ways to discount the future; many permissible ways to weigh the value of some items versus others; many permissible ways to weigh one’s own well-being and that of one’s loved ones against the well-being of others. And yet, for many of these, we treat a core of them as the default and, in certain cases in which we act as carers for others, we require further justification before pursuing preferences they express that lie outside of the core. For instance, while we might count quite a steep discounting function as rationally permissible when expressed by someone without a cognitive disability, people often hesitate before pursuing it for someone with such a disability; and similarly for weighting the well-being of themselves against the well-being of others. I’ll try to explain what is happening in such cases and what it is legitimate for a carer to do when these cases arise.