Dear All, There will be a small workshop on decision theory, featuring talks from Brian Hedden (Sydney) and Jack Spencer (MIT), on the morning of Tuesday, June 7. The workshop will take place in the Adrian House Seminar room at the Burrell’s Field site of Trinity College (accessible from the Burrell’s Field Porter’s Lodge on Grange Road). The schedule, and abstract for the talks, is below.
The workshop is open to anyone who is interested, and I hope that, in spite of the late notice, I’ll get to see many of you there. However, if you’re planning to go, please drop me a line beforehand (at [email protected]), so that I can arrange enough coffee etc. When the workshop ends at 1pm, I’m planning to go for lunch with the speakers, probably at the Punter. I hope that lots of people will join us for this part as well – but again I’d be really grateful if you could let me know if you’re interested, so I can make the necessary arrangements. All the best, Bernhard Schedule: 09.15-09.30 Coffee as people arrive 09.30-11.00 Brian Hedden “Individual Time Bias and Social Discounting” 11.00-11.30 Coffee Break 11.30-13.00 Jack Spencer “Rational Monism, Rational Pluralism, and the Metaethical Foundations of Causal Decision Theory” (joint work with Ian Wells) Abstracts: Brian Hedden “Individual Time Bias and Social Discounting” Consider two questions about appropriate attitudes to time: Within a single life, is it permissible to weight the well-being of one’s near future selves more heavily than one’s farther selves? And as a society, it is permissible to weight the well-being of near-future people more heavily than farther future people? While many economists and philosophers have suggested that these two questions are independent, so that our answer to one does not tightly constrain our answer to the other, I argue that they should be treated in parallel, so that individual time-bias is permissible if and only if social discounting is permissible. (Brian has also made his paper available to those who want to read it beforehand – please email me if you’d like me to send it to you.) Jack Spencer and Ian Wells “Rational Monism, Rational Pluralism, and the Metaethical Foundations of Causal Decision Theory” The familiar form of causal decision theory admits of counterexamples. We fault the underlying metaethics. In this paper, we develop an alternative metaethical foundation for decision theory – rational pluralism. Causal decision theory cast upon a foundation of rational pluralism is capable of avoiding the counterexamples that plague the familiar form of causal decision theory. _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
