In the first part of this paper, I clear the ground from frequent misconceptions of the relationship between fact and value by examining some uses of the adjective “natural” in ethical controversies. Such uses bear evidence to our “natural” tendency to regard nature as the source of ethical norms. I then try to account for the origins of this tendency by offering three related explanations, the most important of which is evolutionistic: if any behaviour that favours our equilibrium with the (...) environment is potentially adaptive, nothing can be more effective for this goal than developing an attitude toward the natural world that considers it as a dispenser of sacred norms that must be invariably respected. By referring to the Aristotelian notion of human flourishing illustrated in the first part of the paper, in the second I discuss as a case study some ethical problems raised by mini-chips implantable in our bodies. I conclude by defending their potential beneficial effects of such new technological instruments. (shrink)

Due to modern biochemistry and, in particular, recent developments in genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics, human samples have become the most important raw materials for advancement in the health sciences. Such material has been at the center of fundamental biomedical research for a long time. What is new is its increased usefulness in research with direct clinical relevance, such as the development of drugs. Because of the larger commercial involvement in such research, this has also led to greater economic interests in (...) human biological material and in the information that can be extracted from it. (shrink)

In the most common approaches to belief dynamics, states of belief are represented by sets that are closed under logical consequence. In an alternative approach, they are represented by non-closed belief bases. This representation has attractive properties not shared by closed representations. Most importantly, it can account for repeated belief changes that have not yet been satisfactorily accounted for in the closed approach.

Den moralfilosofiska traditionen har sina begränsningar. De frågor som stått i centrum för den moralfilosofiska diskussionen har ofta varit helt andra än de som människor i det praktiska livet har uppfattat som centrala moraliska problem. En viktig begränsning är att moralfilosofin, liksom beslutsteorin, nästan uteslutande har handlat om hur man hanterar välavgränsade problem där handlingsalternativen är givna. I det verkliga livet löser vi ofta moraliska problem genom att finna på nya handlingsalternativ, som inte fanns med från början.1 En annan begränsning (...) är att moralfilosofin till allra största delen har handlat om situationer där konsekvensen av de olika handlingsalternativen är välkänd. I det praktiska livet är det annorlunda. Vi vet sällan med säkerhet vad som kommer att bli följden av de olika alternativ som vi väljer mellan. Man kan också uttrycka detta så att moralfilosofin i huvudsak rör sig i en tänkt deterministisk värld, där man inte behöver räkna med någon slump. Detta är aningen märkligt mot bakgrund av det oerhörda genomslag som sannolikhetstänkande och på senare år även kaos har fått inom andra vetenskapsområden. Det finns naturligtvis förklaringar till detta moralfilosofins kvardröjande i en äldre världsbild. Redan i det deterministiska fallet uppstår svårhanterliga problem som man gärna ger sin odelade uppmärksamhet. Dessutom finns det en särskild disciplin, beslutsteorin, som behandlar beslut under risk och osäkerhet. Man har i allmänhet tänkt sig ett slags arbetsfördelning, där problemen med risk och osäkerhet utelämnas i moralfilosofin för att i stället hanteras inom beslutsteorin med rena rationalitetsprinciper (dvs. utan att moraliska principer är inblandade). Enligt min mening är denna arbetsfördelning inte hållbar. Betrakta t ex osäkerheten om hur klimatet kommer att förändras med nuvarande utsläppstrender för växthusgaser. Denna osäkerhet ger upphov inte enbart till ett problem om rationellt beslutsfattande utan också till moraliska problem.. (shrink)

Different similarity relations on sets are introduced, and their logical properties are investigated. Close relationships are shown to hold between similarity relations that are based on symmetrical difference and operators of belief contraction that are based on relational selection functions. Two new rationality criteria for minimal belief contraction, the maximizing property and the reducing property, are proposed.

Contrary to the received view, decision theory is not primarily devoted to instrumental (ends-to-means) reasoning. Instead, its major preoccupation is the derivation of ends from other ends. Given preferences over basic alternatives, it constructs preferences over alternatives that have been modified through the addition of value object modifiers (modes) that specify probability, uncertainty, distance in time etc. A typology of the decision-theoretical modes is offered. The modes do not have (even extrinsic) value, but they transform the value of objects to (...) which they are applied. A rational agent's total set of preferences should be coherent, but from this it does not follow that her preferences over mode-containing objects have to be derivable from her preferences over mode-free objects. (shrink)

Formal representations of values and norms are employed in several academic disciplines and specialties, such as economics, jurisprudence, decision theory and social choice theory. Sven Ove Hansson closely examines such foundational issues as the values of wholes and the values of their parts, the connections between values and norms, how values can be decision-guiding and the structure of normative codes with formal precision. Models of change in both preferences and norms are offered, as well as a method to base (...) the logic of norms on that of preferences. Hansson has developed a unified formal representation of values and norms that reflects both their static and their dynamic properties. This formalized treatment, carried out in terms of both informal value theory and precise logical detail, will contribute to the clarification of certain issues in the basic philosophical theory of values and norms. (shrink)

Sweden is probably one of the most secularized nations in the world. Therefore religious arguments tend to play a smaller role in the public bioethical debate than in most other countries. Issues such as abortion, stem-cell research, and therapeutic cloning have been far less controversial in Sweden than elsewhere. Instead, other issues have dominated recent bioethical debates in Sweden, in particular those concerning privacy and the control over biological information about individuals.

In standard Bayesian probability revision, the adoption of full beliefs (propositions with probability 1) is irreversible. Once an agent has full belief in a proposition, no subsequent revision can remove that belief. This is an unrealistic feature, and it also makes probability revision incompatible with belief change theory, which focuses on how the set of full beliefs is modified through both additions and retractions. This problem in probability theory can be solved in a model that (i) lets the codomain of (...) the probability function be a hyperreal-valued rather than the real-valued closed interval [0, 1], and (ii) identifies the full beliefs as the propositions whose probability is either 1 or infinitesimally smaller than 1. In this model, changes in the probability function will result in changes in the set of full beliefs (belief set), which constitutes a submodel that can be conceived as the “tip of the iceberg” within the larger model that also contains beliefs on lower levels of probability. The patterns of change in the set of full beliefs in this modified Bayesian model coincides with the corresponding pattern in a slightly modified version of AGM revision, which is commonly conceived as the gold standard of (dichotomous) belief change. The modification only concerns the marginal case of revision by an inconsistent input sentence. These results show that probability revision and dichotomous belief change can be unified in one and the same framework, or – if we so wish – that belief change theory can be subsumed under a modified version of probability revision that allows for iterated change and for the removal of full beliefs. (shrink)

In the middle of the 1980s, logical tools were discovered that make it possible to model changes in belief and knowledge in entirely new ways. These logical tools turned out to be applicable both to human beliefs and to the contents of databases. This is the first textbook in this new area. It contains both discursive chapters with a minimum of formalism and formal chapters in which proofs and proof methods are presented. By using different selections from the formal section (...) the book can be used on all levels of University education. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 1, Page 3-7, February 2022.

Analytical tools that give precision to the concept of "independence of syntax" are developed in the form of a series of substitutivity principles. These principles are applied in a study of the rôle of language in belief revision theory. It is shown that sets of sentences can be used in models of belief revision to convey more information than what is conveyed by the combined propositional contents of the respective sets. It is argued that it would be unwise to programmatically (...) restrain the use of sets of sentences to that of representing propositional contents. Instead, the expressive power of language should be used as fully as possible. Therefore, syntax-independence should not be seen as a criterion of adequacy for language-based models of information-processing, but rather as a property that emerges from some but not all the idealization processes through which such models are constructed. (shrink)

By replacement is meant an operation that replaces one sentence by another in a belief set. Replacement can be used as a kind of Sheffer stroke for belief change, since contraction, revision, and expansion can all be defined in terms of it. Replacement can also be defined either in terms of contraction or in terms of revision. Close connections are shown to hold between axioms for replacement and axioms for contraction and revision. Partial meet replacement is axiomatically characterized. It is (...) shown that this operation can have outcomes that are not obtainable through either partial meet contraction or partial meet revision. (shrink)

Healthcare depends increasingly on advanced medical technology. In addition, other forms of technology contribute to determine how our lives are influenced by disease and disability. The extent to which persons with impaired bodily functions are forced to live their lives differently than other people depends to a large part on a variety of technologies, from wheelchairs to computer interfaces, from hearing aids to garage doors. This wide-ranging influence of technology has important ethical aspects, but has seldom been discussed in bioethics, (...) the ethics of technology, or other branches of applied ethics. (shrink)

It has been much debated whether epistemic relativism in academia, for instance in the form of social constructivism, the strong programme, deconstructionism, and postmodernism, has paved the way for the recent upsurge in science denial, in particular climate science denial. In order to provide an empirical basis for this discussion, an extensive search of the social science literature was performed. It showed that in the 1990s, climate science was a popular target among academic epistemic relativists. In particular, many STS scholars (...) used it as an allegedly clear example of claims by natural scientists that should be treated as mere social constructions, rather than as reports on the actual state of the natural world. A few connections between social constructivists and corporate science denialism were also uncovered, but the extent of such connections could not be determined. With few exceptions, the stream of criticism of climate science from academic relativists has dwindled since the 1990s. One reason for this seems to be that the contrarian position lost its attraction when it became associated with corporate and right-wing propagandists. (shrink)

Mainstream moral theories deal with situations in which the outcome of each possible action is well-determined and knowable. In order to make ethics relevant for problems of risk and uncertainty, moral theories have to be extended so that they cover actions whose outcomes are not determinable beforehand. One approach to this extension problem is to develop methods for appraising probabilistic combinations of outcomes. This approach is investigated and shown not to solve the problem. An alternative approach is then developed. Its (...) starting-point is that everyone has a prima facie moral right not to be exposed to risk. However, this right can be overridden if the risk-exposure is part of an equitable system for risk-taking that works to the advantage of the individual risk-exposed person. (shrink)

Avdelningen för Filosofi, Institutionen för Filosofi och Teknikhistoria, KTH, Stockholm. Detta dokument får tills vidare fritt användas och kopieras.

In 1974, a wonderful little book came out entitled Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of Richard Montague, edited by Richmond H. Thomason. The book was a beautiful testimony to the fact that formal methods may indeed clarify, sharpen and solve philosophical problems, defusing airy philosophical intuitions in clear, crisp and concise ways while at the same time turning philosophical wonder into scientific inquiry.

In non-technical contexts, the word “risk” refers, often rather vaguely, to situations in which it is possible but not certain that some undesirable event will occur. In technical contexts, the word has many uses and specialized meanings. The most common ones are the following.

A new possible world semantics for deontic logic is proposed. Its intuitive basis is that prohibitive predicates (such as "wrong" and "prohibited") have the property of negativity, i.e. that what is worse than something wrong is itself wrong. The logic of prohibitive predicates is built on this property and on preference logic. Prescriptive predicates are defined in terms of prohibitive predicates, according to the wellknown formula "ought" = "wrong that not". In this preference-based deontic logic (PDL), those theorems that give (...) rise to the paradoxes of standard deontic logic (SDL) are not obtained. (E.g., O(p & q) → Op & Oq and Op → O(p v q)) are theorems of SDL but not of PDL.) The more plausible theorems of SDL, however, can be derived in PDL. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In his paper ?On Having Bad Contractions, Or: No Room for Recovery? [Te97], N. Tennant attacks the AGM research program of belief revision. We show that he misrepresents the state of affairs in this field of research.

A representation theorem is obtained for contraction operators that are based on Levi's recent proposal that selection functions should be applied to the set of saturatable contractions, rather than to maximal subsets as in the AGM framework. Furthermore, it is shown that Levi's proposal to base the selection on a weakly monotonic measure of informational value guarantees the satisfaction of both of Gärdenfors' supplementary postulates for contraction. These results indicate that Levi has succeeded in constructing a well-behaved operation of contraction (...) that does not satisfy the postulate of recovery. (shrink)

Ethicists have investigated ethical problems in other disciplines, but there has not been much discussion of the ethics of their own activities. Research in ethics has many ethical problems in common with other areas of research, and it also has problems of its own. The researcher’s integrity is more precarious than in most other disciplines, and therefore even stronger procedural checks are needed to protect it. The promotion of some standpoints in ethical issues may be socially harmful, and even our (...) decisions as to which issues we label as “ethical” may have unintended and potentially harmful social consequences. It can be argued that ethicists have an obligation to make positive contributions to society, but the practical implications of such an obligation are not easily identified. This article provides an overview of ethical issues that arise in research into ethics and in the application of such research. It ends with a list of ten practical proposals for how these issues should be dealt with. (shrink)

When is it morally acceptable to expose others to risk? Most moral philosophers have had very little to say in answer to that question, but here is a moral philosopher who puts it at the centre of his investigations.

The postulate of recovery is commonly regarded to be the intuitively least compelling of the six basic Gärdenfors postulates for belief contraction. We replace recovery by the seemingly much weaker postulate of core-retainment, which ensures that if x is excluded from K when p is contracted, then x plays some role for the fact that K implies p. Surprisingly enough, core-retainment together with four of the other Gärdenfors postulates implies recovery for logically closed belief sets. Reasonable contraction operators without recovery (...) do not seem to be possible for such sets. Instead, however, they can be obtained for non-closed belief bases. Some results on partial meet contractions on belief bases are given, including an axiomatic characterization and a non-vacuous extension of the AGM closure condition. (shrink)

The AGM (Alchourrón-Gärdenfors-Makinson) model of belief change is extended to cover changes on sets of beliefs that are not closed under logical consequence (belief bases). Three major types of change operations, namely contraction, internal revision, and external revision are axiomatically characterized, and their interrelations are studied. In external revision, the Levi identity is reversed in the sense that one first adds the new belief to the belief base, and afterwards contracts its negation. It is argued that external revision represents an (...) intuitively plausible way of revising one's beliefs. Since it typically involves the temporary acceptance of an inconsistent set of beliefs, it can only be used in belief representations that distinguish between different inconsistent sets of belief. (shrink)

Cost–benefit analysis (CBA) is much more philosophically interesting than has in general been recognized. Since it is the only well-developed form of applied consequentialism, it is a testing-ground for consequentialism and for the counterfactual analysis that it requires. Ten classes of philosophical problems that affect the practical performance of cost–benefit analysis are investigated: topic selection, dependence on the decision perspective, dangers of super synopticism and undue centralization, prediction problems, the indeterminateness of our control over future decisions, the need to exclude (...) certain consequences for moral reasons, bias in the delimitation of consequences, incommensurability of consequences, difficulties in defending the essential requirement of transferability across contexts, and the normatively questionable but equally essential assumption of interpersonal compensability. (Published Online July 31 2007). (shrink)

The advantages and disadvantages of formalization in philosophy are summarized. It is concluded that formalized philosophy is an endangered speciality that needs to be revitalized and to increase its interactions with non-formalized philosophy. The enigmatic style that is common in philosophical logic must give way to explicit discussions of the problematic relationship between formal models and the philosophical concepts and issues that motivated their development.

This book provides a critical examination of how the choice of what to believe is represented in the standard model of belief change. In particular the use of possible worlds and infinite remainders as objects of choice is critically examined. Descriptors are introduced as a versatile tool for expressing the success conditions of belief change, addressing both local and global descriptor revision. The book presents dynamic descriptors such as Ramsey descriptors that convey how an agent’s beliefs tend to be changed (...) in response to different inputs. It also explores sentential revision and demonstrates how local and global operations of revision by a sentence can be derived as a special case of descriptor revision. Lastly, the book examines revocation, a generalization of contraction in which a specified sentence is removed in a process that may possibly also involve the addition of some new information to the belief set. (shrink)

The prescriptive has both an objective and a subjective interpretation. In the objective sense, what one ought to do depends on what is actually true. In the subjective sense it depends on what one believes to be true. Ordinary usage seems to vacillate between these two interpretations. An example (the indecisive terrorist) is used to show that a subjective ought statement can have a determinate truth-value in situations where the corresponding objective ought statement has no truth-value, not even an unknowable (...) one. Therefore the subjective ought is not definable in terms of the objective ought. However, definability in the other direction is not excluded by this argument. (shrink)

The purpose of this presentation is to introduce both the concept of risk and the precautionary principle, that is a major policy principle in present-day risk management. Since risk has been the subject of many misconceptions I will do this in large part by criticizing seven views on risk that I believe to have caused considerable confusion both among scientists and policy-makers. But before looking at the seven myths of risk, let us begin with the basic issue of defining “risk”. (...) The word “risk” often refers, rather vaguely, to situations in which it is possible but not certain that some undesirable event will occur. In addition, the word has several more specialized meanings. Let me illustrate this by making a few statements about the single most important preventable health hazard in non-starving countries. First: “Lung cancer is one of the major risks that affect smokers.” Here, we use “risk” in the following sense: (1) risk = an unwanted event which may or may not occur. 1 (15). (shrink)

A definition of pseudoscience is proposed, according to which a statement is pseudoscientific if and only if it (1) pertains to an issue within the domains of science, (2) is not epistemically warranted, and (3) is part of a doctrine whose major proponents try to create the impression that it is epistemically warranted. This approach has the advantage of separating the definition of pseudoscience from the justification of the claim that science represents the most epistemically warranted statements. The definition is (...) used to explain why proponents of widely divergent criteria for the demarcation between science and pseudoscience tend to be in almost complete agreement on the particular demarcations that should presumably be based on these general criteria. (shrink)

In his paper 'Changing the Theory of Theory Change: Reply to My Critics', N. Tennant (1997b) reacts to the critical reception of an earlier article of his. The present note rectifies some of the most serious misrepresentations in Tennant's reply.