This paper presents results from a modified dictator experiment aimed at distinguishing and quantifying intrinsic motivations for giving. We employ an experimental design with three treatments that vary the recipient and amount passed. We find giving to the experimenter not to be significantly different from giving to a charity, when the amount the subject donates crowds out the amount donated by the experimenter such that the charity always receives a fixed amount. This result suggests that the latter treatment, first used (...) by Crumpler and Grossman :1011–1021, 2008), does not provide a clean test of warm glow motivation. We then propose a new method of detecting warm glow motivation based on the idea that in a random-lottery incentive scheme, such as the one we employ, warm glow accumulates and this may lead to satiation, whereas purely altruistic motivation does not. We also provide bounds on the magnitudes of warm glow and pure altruism as motives that drive giving in our experiment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Egalitarian Liberalism Revisited: On the Meaning and Justification of Social Justice by Per SundmanBharat RanganathanEgalitarian Liberalism Revisited: On the Meaning and Justification of Social Justice Per Sundman uppsala, sweden: uppsala universitet, 2016. 242 pp. $72.50Across a range of contemporary disciplines, discussions about justice abound. Despite the prevalence of these discussions, however, there is little consensus about what justice is and whether (and, if so, how) appeals to it (...) should be made. Moreover, if the interconnectedness and pluralism that obtain in our rapidly globalizing world are taken seriously, concerns about the content, meaning, and use of justice are amplified. Against this backdrop, Per Sundman aims to explicate and evaluate one particular form of justice: egalitarian liberalism. On his definition, egalitarian liberalism is "best understood as a triune conjunction of equality of opportunity, desert and self-ownership" (10). Over the course of eight substantive chapters, Sundman labors to show how these criteria both reinforce and don't contradict each other, aiming to clarify the meaning of social justice while considering known alternatives.To develop this argument, Sundman covers a truly impressive range of topics in contemporary debates about justice, including consequentialism and deontology, equality of opportunity and equality of resources, capabilities and rights, corrective and distributive policies, the natural and social lotteries, status in moral and political communities, and the politics of recognition and misrecognition. On the whole, covering such a range of topics proves to be a strength. Sundman introduces the reader to a number of important topics and how several important thinkers have treated those topics, and his discussion of these topics and thinkers is evenhanded and insightful. If you're familiar with (and interested in) one or more of these debates, you will be delighted to find a theological ethicist engaging in them. There's also a further reason for delight: Sundman enters and engages in these debates without bringing the all-too-frequent (and oftentimes empty) charge that liberalism is "impoverished"—a point to which I'll return. But depending on your level of familiarity with recent debates in moral and political philosophy, you may be left unsatisfied with some aspects of Sundman's discussion. Specifically, some of these topics and thinkers deserve further attention and scrutiny than Sundman provides, especially important given Sundman's stated desire to navigate alternative understandings. [End Page 189]I do want to draw the reader's attention to the penultimate chapter of Sundman's book, "Save Us from Liberalism." But first I want to make a larger point. I mentioned what I think is an all-too-frequent charge made in theological ethics: namely, that liberalism is impoverished. Sometimes, this charge is entirely warranted. But oftentimes, at least in my experience, it is empty: the person bringing the charge neither distinguishes among the diversity that obtains within liberalism nor charitably reads and represents the thinker with whom they are trying to engage. Given this disciplinary shortcoming, Sundman is to be commended for turning to Christian critiques of liberalism only after he's carefully worked (and guided the reader) through the myriad topics and thinkers that constitute egalitarian liberalism writ large.So what about this chapter in particular? Focusing on Christian communitarians—for example, Stanley Hauerwas and John Milbank—Sundman explores whether authentic Christian ethics contradicts and is superior to egalitarian liberalism. In the first half of the chapter, he examines the different ways in which Christian communitarians understand obedience to God's commands and have criticized the putative liberal obsession with "autonomy." Following an important discussion where he contrasts Christian and liberal understandings of the circumstances of justice, the second half of Sundman's chapter argues briefly but persuasively against Christian exclusivity (e.g., the recently popular Benedict Option) and for Christians to act out of love, for justice, and in the world.There is much to recommend about this book. Both substantively and structurally, it is admirable and instructive.Bharat RanganathanUniversity of Notre DameCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Everyday most of us fail to perform many charitable or benevolent acts that would alleviate or prevent suffering somewhere in the world. Moral philosophers have tended to consider failures to prevent suffering to be less important than acts which directly produce it. For example, letting someone die whom we could save is generally thought to be less heinous than murder. In part, philosophers are hesitant to consider omissions to be as bad as actions because they do not want to (...) adopt a position which puts people under such boundless obligations that they could not or would not comply with them. In Violence and Responsibility, John Harris contends that despite the drastic revision required of our ordinary moral beliefs, we are responsible for any harm we could prevent and we should face the moral implications of such responsibility. To support his contention, Harris examines and rejects a number of arguments to show that acts are more important than omissions. He believes we should acknowledge both our almost boundless obligations to help others and our need to revise our usual moral beliefs. One such revision that Harris proposes is a "survival lottery" which requires the killing of a fairly selected dying person whenever his organs could be used to save at least two people. Although the lottery involves killing an innocent person, it saves lives. To fail to institute such a lottery makes us responsible for the deaths of all those who could be saved. Harris's book is directed at a very important but oft-neglected issue in moral theory; it deserves to be widely read and discussed. Harris includes a useful bibliography for those who wish to do additional reading on the topic.--Milton Goldinger, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. (shrink)

U.S. immigration policies and enforcement can make immigrants fearful of accessing healthcare. Although current immigration policies restrict enforcement in “sensitive locations” including healthcare facilities, there are reports of enforcement actions in such settings.

Many critics seem to consider it inappropriate or unnecessary to ask what Montaigne means by the faculty of judgment. Laumonier speaks of "Ie bon sens, qu'il oppose si souvent a la memoire et qu'il appelle encore 'jugement' et 'entendement', c'est-a-dire la faculte de penser et de reflechir juste. " 1 Our appreciation of what is implied by judgment, that is by Montaigne's notion of judgment, has been delayed perhaps by a too facile acceptance of a so-called synonymity of meaning among (...) the psychological terms used by Montaigne. In a discussion of key concepts in Montaigne, Donald M. Frame has accurately summarized the present situation with regard to our knowledge of Montaigne's notion of judgment and other key concepts: "We all have our hunches, but we need more than that. " 2 For the expression of his interest and concern for the intellectual and moral activities and capabilities of the mind, Montaigne draws upon a broad and elementary semantic field. These primary psychological terms are jugement, entendement, sens, raison, discours, and conscience. Al­ though these words may be used synonymously, Montaigne does seem to maintain certain basic distinctions among them; frequent substi­ tutions of terms must be the result of semantic and ideational differ­ ences. Moreover, the association of several psychological words within a single sentence implies gradations, however slight they may be. (shrink)

Au xviiie siècle, la figure insistante de la «femme philosophe» s'articule à un imaginaire ambivalent de la différence des sexes, entre hantise d'une confusion délétère et quête d'un modèle d'harmonie. La femme travestit-elle la philosophie? Les Lumières ont-elles un genre?

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and PoeticsVirginia A. La CharitéSongs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, by John Taggart; 254 pp. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994, $29.95 paper.John Taggart is a highly respected American poet whose passion for objectivism permeates his critical reading as well as his own creative works. The volume Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics represents the (...) first time that his various critical articles have been collected into a single work. Of the eighteen essays, all but one were previously published in various journals between 1975 and 1989; the eighteenth is an essay or “A Preface” on one of his own collections of poetry, Peace on Earth. By addressing his own poetry, Taggart’s volume cleverly includes himself as poet in this study of what he considers valuable in a work of art. [End Page 398]Finding a poem to be a simple composition of words (principle) and an image suggested by that composition (process), Taggart adopts the title Songs of Degrees from Louis Zukofsy’s seven short poems published in 1956 as Some Time. A song is then a poetic form, a continuing complete statement which actualizes the separate entities (words) of its expression. However, and most importantly, a song does not begin as a visual report; rather, a song moves towards being visualized. Consequently, everything depends on technique and everything turns on its structure, as the mind coordinates the information received by the eye. Degrees, then, emerge as variations of consonance and dissonance or word-sound functions. To write down is to compose; to compose is to create. Hence, a song of degrees is both an actual object and a metaphor for that object.Under the poetic of objectivism, Taggart’s essays are primarily concerned with poets whose work is in accord with his own: George Oppen (three essays), Frank Sampori, William Bronk, Louis Zukofsy (three essays), Bruce Andrews, Susan Howe (two essays), Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Theodore Enslin. Taggart demonstrates here that he is a sensitive and intellectually alert reader. These essays on criticism are in actuality essays on Taggart’s concept of poetics. Implicit is Taggart’s bias as an objectivist poet who insists that poetry has a spiritual value in the visionary tradition of Robert Lowell and Robert Duncan and to an extent Wallace Stevens.But perhaps of even greater interest than Taggart’s superb readings of his poetic colleagues—and it can be justifiably argued that perhaps only Taggart can read these poets with the sympathetic eye that they deserve—is the inclusion of three essays on other arts: dance (Trina Collins), stained glass (Mark Rothko), and jazz (John Coltrane). By including these essays with those of literary criticism, Taggart expands the terms poetics and poetry to any text or object which is a moving line and complete at the same time. Form comes from language; language is then based on experience, not belief, and the resulting image is what is revealed and reflected, what is seen. A work (poem, song, text) is valuable because its visionary imagination captures the collective conscience to regain spiritual ascesis. The process of objectification is the metaphor or song, which emerges in degrees of interaction. The song has substance, it is tangible, and it has an objective existence of its own. To be critical is to objectify the composition or structure at hand. Critical is another term for technical, and indeed it is the technical aspect of writing poetry which Taggart so deftly elucidates in his volume of essays.For anyone interested in objectivist poetry, Taggart’s collection of essays is mandatory reading. His insights into this kind of cerebral poetry are invaluable, for he blends appreciation with analysis, information with inspiration, and logic with imagination. His own sensitivity to the struggle which is the poetic process brings a new consciousness to the poetics of poetry.Virginia A. La CharitéUniversity of KentuckyCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French ThoughtVirginia A. La CharitéDowncast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, by Martin Jay; xi & 632 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, $35.00.The book jacket flyleaf for Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes proclaims in exuberant and laudatory terms that this study has a double agenda: one is to show that vision is by no means the (...) dominant sense in ordering Western culture and the other is to posit instead a “plurality of ‘scopic regimes, particularly in the climate of postmodernism. Indeed, antiocularcentrism provides the unifying thread of Jay’s work, which reviews the theory of vision from Plato to Bergson in the first three chapters and concentrates on “the culture of modernity” in chapters four through eight; the ninth chapter interestingly and curiously places Derrida and feminist criticism side by side under the aegis of “phallogocularcentrism” and presents Derrida and Irigaray if not as the high points of modernism, then at least as the center of the poststructuralist discourse, which argues for the elevation of the word over the eye and so offers downcast eyes as the new logo for what is now identified as postmodernism. Jay’s last chapter addresses postmodernism as a foreclosure on visual practice or the ocularcentric. The short seven-page conclusion attempts to place a positive note on the author’s admitted denigration of the notion of visuality in modern French intellectual thought and culture by calling for a plural or multiple—“polyscopic”—visual experience. Hence, Jay concludes that his notion of downcast eyes or disillusionment is “no solution” (p. 592) to the problem. Certainly, Broodthaer’s “L’Oeil” on the jacket cover does not present [End Page 162] downcast eyes but rather the very feminine alluring eye of a seductress. In this sense, the real message of Jay’s work is reader, beware! His provocative title and even more provocative subtitle initiate from the outset a critique of one of the long-held and cherished myths about the dominance and prominence of the visual sense in Western culture, especially in modern French thought. It is the unsettling of the comfortableness of this notion which Jay’s work successfully undertakes.The study is well-organized and lucidly written. It forcefully argues the author’s case. Unfortunately, there is no bibliography. The omission of a bibliography undercuts the project and casts scholarly suspicion on the entire venture. In all truth, the inclusion of a bibliography would dramatically call attention to serious lacunae in the scholarship. The French thinkers presented and analyzed, such as Bataille, Barthes, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray, and Lyotard, have been studied in depth—at times brilliantly—but Jay ignores this rich corpus of critical material. In particular, his treatment of important French poets such as Rimbaud, the surrealists, Ponge, and others is so skewed in order to reinforce his denigration of the dominant role of vision in twentieth-century French writing that the reader in the field of French studies questions the quality of the basic research undertaken for the project and the author’s skill at reading with understanding and sensitivity hermetic material in the original French. Once these questions are raised, the very nature of Jay’s study itself becomes suspect.As the reader progresses through the volume, it seems that most of Jay’s analyses of the primary texts are based on English translations and are in fact limited to those works available in translation. While this may not be the actual case, the lack of a bibliography reinforces such a suspicion and contributes to the steady erosion of the credibility of the study. Even worse, it poses a troubling if not invidious question: who is the audience for Downcast Eyes? Surely, the audience is not humanists who specialize in twentieth-century French studies. If the intended audience is one of scholars and their students in cultural history and the social sciences with little grounding in contemporary French intellectual thought as manifested in its literature and literary criticism, this audience needs to begin its reading with Jay’s conclusion which is a masterfully subtle denigration of his own work on... (shrink)

The lottery paradox shows seemingly plausible principles of rational acceptance to be incompatible. It has been argued that we shouldn’t be concerned by this clash, since the concept of (categorical) belief is otiose, to be supplanted by a quantitative notion of partial belief, in terms of which the paradox cannot even be formulated. I reject this eliminativist view of belief, arguing that the ordinary concept of (categorical) belief has a useful function which the quantitative notion does not serve. I then (...) propose a solution to the paradox it engenders. (shrink)

The lottery paradox shows that the following three individually highly plausible theses are jointly incompatible: highly probable propositions are justifiably believable, justified believability is closed under conjunction introduction, known contradictions are not justifiably believable. This paper argues that a satisfactory solution to the lottery paradox must reject as versions of the paradox can be generated without appeal to either or and proposes a new solution to the paradox in terms of a novel account of justified believability.

We investigate corporate giving behaviors of prestigious business award winners in Korea. In particular, we examine whether firms strategically use corporate giving to enhance corporate reputation. We find that award winners generally make more charitable contributions than nonwinners prior to winning awards and maintain significant charitable contributions after winning awards; multiple award winners make even more charitable contributions than single-award winners; and an increase in charitable contributions does not raise the probability of winning awards in the (...) year after the increase. The results suggest that CEOs of award-winning firms do not use corporate giving opportunistically to enhance their status and reputation. Rather, significant charitable contributions by award winners may be indicative of a sound business strategy to maximize long-term firm value. (shrink)

Many have the intuition that the right response to the Lottery Paradox is to deny that one can justifiably believe of even a single lottery ticket that it will lose. The paper shows that from any theory of justification that solves the paradox in accordance with this intuition, a theory not of that kind can be derived that also solves the paradox but is more conducive to our epistemic goal than the former. It is argued that currently there is no (...) valid reason not to give preference to the derived accounts over the accounts from which they come. (shrink)

We talk and think about our beliefs both in a categorical and in a graded way. How do the two kinds of belief hang together? The most straightforward answer is that we believe something categorically if we believe it to a high enough degree. But this seemingly obvious, near-platitudinous claim is known to give rise to a paradox commonly known as the 'lottery paradox' – at least when it is coupled with some further seeming near-platitudes about belief. How to resolve (...) that paradox has been a matter of intense philosophical debate for over fifty years. This volume offers a collection of newly commissioned essays on the subject, all of which provide compelling reasons for rethinking many of the fundamentals of the debate. (shrink)

I argue that Schmidtet al, while correctly diagnosing the serious racial inequity in current ventilator rationing procedures, misidentify a corresponding racial inequity issue in alternative ‘unweighted lottery’ procedures. Unweighted lottery procedures do not ‘compound’ (in the relevant sense) prior structural injustices. However, Schmidtet aldo gesture towards a real problem with unweighted lotteries that previous advocates of lottery-based allocation procedures, myself included, have previously overlooked. On the basis that there are independent reasons to prefer lottery-based allocation of scarce lifesaving healthcare (...) resources, I develop this idea, arguing that unweighted lottery procedures fail to satisfy healthcare providers’ duty to prevent unjust population-level health outcomes, and thus that lotteries weighted in favour of Black individuals (and others who experience serious health injustice) are to be preferred. (shrink)

There are many ordinary propositions we think we know. Almost every ordinary proposition entails some "lottery proposition" which we think we do not know but to which we assign a high probability of being true (for instance: “I will never be a multi-millionaire” entails “I will not win this lottery”). How is this possible - given that some closure principle is true? This problem, also known as “the Lottery puzzle”, has recently provoked a lot of discussion. In this paper I (...) discuss one of the most promising answers to the problem: Stewart Cohen’s contextualist solution which is based on ideas about the salience of chances of error. After presenting some objections to it I sketch an alternative solution which is still contextualist in spirit. (shrink)

A popular way to relate probabilistic information to binary rational beliefs is the Lockean Thesis, which is usually formalized in terms of thresholds. This approach seems far from satisfactory: the value of the thresholds is not well-specified and the Lottery Paradox shows that the model violates the Conjunction Principle. We argue that the Lottery Paradox is a symptom of a more fundamental and general problem, shared by all threshold-models that attempt to put an exact border on something that is intrinsically (...) vague. We propose application of the language of relative analysis—a type of non-standard analysis—to formulate a new model for rational belief, called Stratified Belief. This contextualist model seems well-suited to deal with a concept of beliefs based on probabilities ‘sufficiently close to unity’ and satisfies a moderately weakened form of the Conjunction Principle. We also propose an adaptation of the model that is able to deal with beliefs that are less firm than ‘almost certainty’. The adapted version is also of interest for the epistemicist account of vagueness. (shrink)

This study examines the relation between firms’ corporate philanthropic giving and their performance in three other social domains – employee relations, environmental issues, and product safety. Based on a sample of 384 U.S. companies and using data pooled from 1998 through 2000, we find that worse performers in the other social areas are both more likely to make charitable contributions and that the extent of their giving is larger than for better performers. Analyses of each separate area of social (...) performance, however, indicate that the relation between giving and negative social performance (cited concerns) only holds for the environmental issues and product safety areas. We find no significant association between corporate philanthropy and employee relations concerns. In general, these findings suggest that corporate philanthropy may be more a tool of legitimization than a measure of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

This study examines the relation between firms' corporate philanthropic giving and their performance in three other social domains - employee relations, environmental issues, and product safety. Based on a sample of 384 U.S. companies and using data pooled from 1998 through 2000, we find that worse performers in the other social areas are both more likely to make charitable contributions and that the extent of their giving is larger than for better performers. Analyses of each separate area of social (...) performance, however, indicate that the relation between giving and negative social performance only holds for the environmental issues and product safety areas. We find no significant association between corporate philanthropy and employee relations concerns. In general, these findings suggest that corporate philanthropy may be more a tool of legitimization than a measure of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

The lottery preparation, a new general kind of Laver preparation, works uniformly with supercompact cardinals, strongly compact cardinals, strong cardinals, measurable cardinals, or what have you. And like the Laver preparation, the lottery preparation makes these cardinals indestructible by various kinds of further forcing. A supercompact cardinal κ, for example, becomes fully indestructible by <κ-directed closed forcing; a strong cardinal κ becomes indestructible by κ-strategically closed forcing; and a strongly compact cardinal κ becomes indestructible by, among others, the forcing to (...) add a Cohen subset to κ, the forcing to shoot a club Cκ avoiding the measurable cardinals and the forcing to add various long Prikry sequences. The lottery preparation works best when performed after fast function forcing, which adds a new completely general kind of Laver function for any large cardinal, thereby freeing the Laver function concept from the supercompact cardinal context. (shrink)

This paper defends the permissibility solution to the lottery paradox against an objection by Anna-Maria Asunta Eder. Eder argues that the permissibility solution should also be applicable to the preface paradox, but conflicts with a plausible principle about epistemic permissions when so applied. This paper replies by first criticizing Eder’s considerations in defense of her principle; in particular, it argues that the plausibility of her principle is to a large extent parasitic on the spurious plausibility of the principle of factual (...) detachment. The paper then presents a direct argument against Eder’s principle, which shows that her principle conflicts with a Pareto-style condition on permissible belief. (shrink)

The lottery paradox can be solved if epistemic justification is assumed to be a species of permissibility. Given this assumption, the starting point of the paradox can be formulated as the claim that, for each lottery ticket, I am permitted to believe that it will lose. This claim is ambiguous between two readings, depending on the scope of ‘permitted’. On one reading, the claim is false; on another, it is true, but, owing to the general failure of permissibility to agglomerate, (...) does not generate the paradox. The solution generalizes to formulations of the paradox in terms of rational acceptability and doxastic rationality. (shrink)

To resolve the lottery paradox, the “no-justification account” proposes that one is not justified in believing that one's lottery ticket is a loser. The no-justification account commits to what I call “the Harman-style skepticism”. In reply, proponents of the no-justification account typically downplay the Harman-style skepticism. In this paper, I argue that the no-justification reply to the Harman-style skepticism is untenable. Moreover, I argue that the no-justification account is epistemically ad hoc. My arguments are based on a rather surprising finding (...) that the no-justification account implies that people living in Taiwan typically suffer from the Harman-style skepticism. (shrink)

The allocation of vaccines and therapeutics for Covid‐19 obviously raises ethical questions, and physicians and ethicists have begun to address them. Writers have identified various criteria that should guide allocation decisions, but the criteria often conflict and need to be balanced against one another. This article proposes a model for thinking about how different considerations that are relevant to the distribution of vaccines and scarce treatments for Covid‐19 could be integrated into an allocation procedure. The model employs the construct of (...) a weighted lottery, which is a construct that has been employed in other contexts that involve the distribution of scarce resources. The article highlights the advantages of applying a weighted lottery to the Covid‐19 context and offers an illustration for how it might work in practice. The primary aim of the article is to articulate the structural features of a weighted lottery for this context and to bring out its advantages over other methods for allocating Covid‐19 medications. (shrink)

The lottery paradox plays an important role in arguments for various norms of assertion. Why is it that, prior to information on the results of a draw, assertions such as, “My ticket lost,” seem inappropriate? This paper is composed of two projects. First, I articulate a number of problems arising from Timothy Williamson’s analysis of the lottery paradox. Second, I propose a relevant alternatives theory, which I call the Non-Destabilizing Alternatives Theory , that better explains the pathology of asserting lottery (...) propositions, while permitting assertions of what I call fallible propositions such as, “My car is in the driveway.” Le paradoxe de la loterie joue un rôle important dans l’argumentation visant à défendre diverses normes de l’assertion. Comment se fait-il que, avant que les résultats d’un tirage soient connus, des assertions comme «Mon billet a perdu» semblent inappropriées? Cet article se compose de deux projets. Premièrement, je relève certains problèmes issus de l’analyse du paradoxe de la loterie par Timothy Williamson. Deuxièmement, je propose une théorie des alternatives pertinentes que j’appelle la «théorie des alternatives non-déstabilisantes» , et qui explique d’une meilleure façon la pathologie de l’assertion de propositions concernant la loterie, tout en permettant des assertions faillibles, telles que «Ma voiture est dans l’entrée». (shrink)

Objectivization forces the requirement of a high likelihood that an informant will be right if she is to be classified as a good one, but this does not, argues Craig, equal 1, for that figure has little basis in practical life. Nevertheless, the example of a lottery, and, in particular, the claim that one will not win, brings closer to our real experience the idea that one may not always be advised to act on information that has a chance of (...) less than 1 of being true. A similar push towards this stringent idea is sometimes exerted by the wish to draw inferences from multiple premises and to be able to rely on the result. However, though real situations can require a very high likelihood, they do not force us to set it at 1; that final push comes from reflection lying outside the framework of everyday practice. (shrink)

When charitable matching occurs, both the person initially offering the matching donation and the person taking up the offer may well feel they have done something better than if they had donated on their own without matching. They may well feel they deserve some credit for the matched donation as well as their own. Can they both be right? Natural assumptions about charitable matching lead to puzzles that are challenging to resolve in a satisfactory way.

Lottery puzzles involve an ordinary piece of knowledge which seems to imply knowledge of a so-called “lottery proposition,” which itself seems unknown: I might be said to know that I won’t be going on safari next year. But if I were to win the lottery, I would go, and I don’t know that I won’t win the lottery. Examples can be multiplied. Thus we seem left either with the paradoxical position of knowing certain ordinary propositions, but failing to know the (...) lottery propositions they imply, or else conceding to the skeptic. I present a version of reliabilism according to which empirical knowledge is true belief produced by a reliable process causally connecting belief and fact. According to this theory, if my ordinary belief and my belief in the lottery proposition are suitably connected to the facts that render them true, both count as knowledge. In cases where my ordinary belief and my belief in the lottery proposition are not suitably connected to the relevant facts, neither count as knowledge. Thus the paradoxical air of lottery puzzles is removed, and skepticism is avoided. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nicholas Pappas SOCRATES' CHARITABLE TREATMENT OF POETRY Of course this title seems wrong. If anything is certain about Socrates' treatment ofpoetry in Plato's dialogues, it is that he never gives a poem a chance to explain itself. He dismisses poems altogether on the basis of their suspect moral content {Republic II and III), or their representational form {Republic X), or their dramatic structure {Laws 719); he calls poets (...) ignorant {Apohgy, Ion) and—not obviously as a compliment—mad {Ion, Phaedrus); and when he wants to use a poem to support his own position, he unhesitatingly distorts its apparent meaning {Protagoras, Lysis). I will not argue that, in spite of this behavior, Socrates occasionally gives poetry its due, nor that even as he dismisses it he is willing to preserve some portion of it. When I refer to Socrates' charitable interpretations of poetry, I mean a way of reading a poem that motivates and grounds the mistreatments I have catalogued. Socrates is, at all times, prone to read a poem charitably; and that is part of his hostility toward poetry. To make this point I will discuss the last mistreatment of poetry I named: Socrates uses a poem in his defense by forcing it to say what its author plainly did not intend. We see the workings ofhis interpretive method in an extended analysis of Simonides in the Protagoras, and perhaps also in a use of Homer and Empedocles in the LysL·. I will argue that what looks at first simply odd in those passages may be shown to follow a principle of interpretation which in some extreme form resembles the principle of interpretive charity. Thus it is Socrates' excessive charity toward poetry that stands behind his abuse of it. That charity points to a new attitude toward poets, perhaps the first theoretically motivated rejection of the author. I think that this fate of 248 Nicholas Pappas249 the author in Socrates' interpretation will illuminate both his hostility toward poetry and his examination of his live interlocutors. More generally, Socrates' example will show how the search for truth in an interpretation is one way to deny appeals to the author. Although Socrates' interpretation of Simonides in the Protagoras has been discussed many times, its purport or explanation is usually left unexamined.1 What is uncontroversial is that in Protagoras 338e-348a, Plato's most extensive depiction of Socrates saying what a poem means, we find Socrates systematically misreading Simonides. He plucks individual lines out ofa poem, combines them with his own highly specific ethical beliefs, and from this conjunction deduces a point which he then attributes to the poet. We must decide whether this is all some sort of joke, or whether on the contrary, as I believe, the interpretation reveals a coherent and deliberate method. The text examined is a nearly continuous piece ofSimonides' writing, roughly twenty-five lines from a much longer poem. It is Protagoras who goads Socrates into interpreting the poem, as part ofthe intellectual battle between them that continues through the dialogue. Protagoras sets an interpretive problem for Socrates to solve: two bits ofSimonides' poem seem to contradict one another, for the first bit says it is hard to become good, and the second denies that it is hard to be noble (339). Socrates begins with the more modest aim of resolving that contradiction, but goes on through the poem to hang a sophisticated moral point on Simonides. At first Socrates tries to resolve the contradiction by saying that Simonides thinks it hard to become good or noble, but easy to remain in that state (to be noble) once it has been achieved (34Od). Protagoras ridicules this explanation, and Socrates quickly drops it in the face of objections (34Ie); but already the tone of Socratic interpretation has been set. In abroad sense, this paradoxical notion ofmoral improvement is a Socratic notion: the steps toward clarity of understanding are slow and taken only reluctantly, but the state of enlightenment can be maintained, Socrates usually seems to think, without effort (see, e.g., Symposium 21 Id ff.). Socrates, in other words, has made Simonides' thought consistent by identifying it with his own. But that is still too broadly... (shrink)

In this paper, we present the results of two surveys that investigate subjects’ judgments about what can be known or justifiably believed about lottery outcomes on the basis of statistical evidence, testimonial evidence, and “mixed” evidence, while considering possible anchoring and priming effects. We discuss these results in light of seven distinct hypotheses that capture various claims made by philosophers about lay people’s lottery judgments. We conclude by summarizing the main findings, pointing to future research, and comparing our findings to (...) recent studies by Turri and Friedman. (shrink)

One of the problems that Bayesian regularity, the thesis that all contingent propositions should be given probabilities strictly between zero and one, faces is the possibility of random processes that randomly and uniformly choose a number between zero and one. According to classical probability theory, the probability that such a process picks a particular number in the range is zero, but of course any number in the range can indeed be picked. There is a solution to this particular problem on (...) the books: a measure that assigns the same infinitesimal probability to each number between zero and one. I will show that such a measure, while mathematically interesting, is pathological for use in confirmation theory, for the same reason that a measure that assigns an infinitesimal probability to each possible outcome in a countably infinite lottery is pathological. The pathology is that one can force someone to assign a probability within an infinitesimal of one to an unlikely event. (shrink)

In a beautiful recent essay, the philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong explains the reasons for his departure from evangelical Christianity, the religious culture in which he was brought up. Sinnot-Armstrong contrasts the interpretive methods used by good philosophers and fundamentalist believers: Good philosophers face objections and uncertainties. They follow where arguments lead, even when their conclusions are surprising and disturbing. Intellectual honesty is also required of scholars who interpret philosophical texts. If I had distorted Kant’s view to make him reach a conclusion (...) that I preferred, then my philosophy professor would have failed me. The contrast with religious reasoning is stark. My Christian friends seemed happy to hide serious problems in the Bible and in their arguments. They preferred comfort to intellectual honesty. I couldn’t. To what extent can we, historians of philosophy, claim the virtue of intellectual honesty? Speaking frankly, I do not find the practice criticized by Sinnot-Armstrong’s philosophy professor rare or unusual at all. We very frequently distort the views of past philosophers in order to reach the conclusions we prefer. We just call it “Charitable Interpretation.” In this essay, I discuss and criticize the logic behind so-called charitable interpretations in the history of philosophy. This phenomenon is ubiquitous and is not at all restricted to a particular philosophical strand or ideology. Analytic philosophers and post-modernists, Marxists, liberals, secularists, and fundamentalists, we all engage in the very same domestication project. Even more disturbing than the sheer ideological pervasiveness of this phenomenon is the fact that, on many occasions, superb philosophers and historians take part in this fairly childish endeavor. In the first part of this essay, I discuss the general logic of charitable interpretations in the history of philosophy, mostly by addressing discussions in metaphysics and epistemology. In the second part, I focus on the somewhat less noticed use of charitable interpretations in the study of political philosophy, and point out the quintessential role ideology plays in these discussions. In both parts, I concentrate mostly on the interpretation of Spinoza’s thought. I do so not because I have special fondness for Spinoza (“guilty as charged,” I admit), but because Spinoza is such a beast (and may I add, an enchanting beast) and attracts a disproportionate share of the domestication efforts from historians and philosophers of all creeds and persuasions. In the third and final part of the paper, I will begin to outline an alternative methodology, which suggests that past philosophers can be most relevant to our current philosophical discussion, to the extent that they provide us with well-motivated challenges to our common-sense beliefs. Such challenges have the invaluable virtue of being able to undermine our most fundamental and secure beliefs, and force us to engage with the most fundamental questions. What more can we expect from good philosophy? (shrink)

Is it unethical to advertise lotteries? Many citizens think that states should not be actively promoting and encouraging the public tospend hard-earned dollars on a bet that they are virtually guaranteed to lose. Perhaps more importantly, business ethicists are concerned that lottery advertising may be targeting the most vulnerable markets: households with the lowest income and education levels. If this were true, then it would increase the already disproportionately large burden of lottery taxes on the poor. Fortunately, our research (...) finds no evidence to support the contention that advertising is responsible for high rates of lottery participation and expenditures by lower income groups or that low-income groups are more affected by advertising than high-income groups. On the contrary, awareness of lottery advertising seems to be associated with a higher probability to play Lotto only for the middle income group. This means that lottery advertising may actually reduce the regressivity of lottery taxes. (shrink)

We analyze the results from three different risk attitude elicitation methods. First, the broadly used test by Holt and Laury, HL, second, the lottery-panel task by Sabater-Grande and Georgantzis, SG, and third, responses to a survey question on self-assessment of general attitude towards risk. The first and the second task are implemented with real monetary incentives, while the third concerns all domains in life in general. Like in previous studies, the correlation of decisions across tasks is low and usually statistically (...) non-significant. However, when we consider only subjects whose behavior across the panels of the SG task is compatible with constant relative risk aversion, the correlation between HL and self-assessed risk attitude becomes significant. Furthermore, the correlation between HL and SG also increases for CRRA-compatible subjects, although it remains statistically non-significant. (shrink)

Faced with a choice between saving one stranger and saving a group of strangers, some people endorse weighted lotteries, which give a strictly greater chance of being saved to the group of strangers than the single stranger. In this paper I attempt to criticize this view. I first consider a particular version of the weighted lotteries, Frances Kamm's procedure of proportional chances, and point out two implausible implications of her proposal. Then, I consider weighted lotteries in general, (...) and claim (1) that the correct thing to distribute is not the chance of being saved but the good of being saved, (2) that assigning some chance to the single stranger is not the only way to give a positive (and equal) respect to the people concerned, and (3) that the weighted lottery appears to be deceptive since it would show the respect to the single stranger in a negligible way. (shrink)

Jim buys a ticket in a million-ticket lottery. He knows it is a fair lottery, but, given the odds, he believes he will lose. When the winning ticket is chosen, it is not his. Did he know his ticket would lose? It seems that he did not. After all, if he knew his ticket would lose, why would he have bought it? Further, if he knew his ticket would lose, then, given that his ticket is no different in its chances (...) of winning from any other ticket, it seems that by parity of reasoning he should also know that every other ticket would lose. But of course he doesn’t know that; in fact, he knows that not every ticket will lose. (shrink)

The lottery and preface paradoxes pose puzzles in epistemology concerning how to think about the norms of reasonable or permissible belief. Contextualists in epistemology have focused on knowledge ascriptions, attempting to capture a set of judgments about knowledge ascriptions and denials in a variety of contexts (including those involving lottery beliefs and the principles of closure). This article surveys some contextualist approaches to handling issues raised by the lottery and preface, while also considering some of the difficulties encountered by those (...) approaches. (shrink)

In a recent article, Douven and Williamson offer both (i) a rebuttal of various recent suggested sufficient conditions for rational acceptability and (ii) an alleged ‘generalization’ of this rebuttal, which, they claim, tells against a much broader class of potential suggestions. However, not only is the result mentioned in (ii) not a generalization of the findings referred to in (i), but in contrast to the latter, it fails to have the probative force advertised. Their paper does however, if unwittingly, bring (...) us a step closer to a precise characterization of an important class of rationally unacceptable propositions—the class of lottery propositions for equiprobable lotteries. This helps pave the way to the construction of a genuinely lottery-paradox-proof alternative to the suggestions criticized in (i). (shrink)

The lottery puzzle can elicit strong intuitions in favour of skepticism, according to which we ordinary language-users speak falsely about knowledge with shocking regularity. Various contextualist and invariantist responses to the puzzle attempt to avoid this unwelcome result and preserve the competence of ordinary speakers. I will argue that these solutions can be successful only if they respect intuitions of a certain kind, and proceed to judge competing solutions by this criterion.

How should we make distributive decisions when there is not enough of the good to go around, or at least not enough of it right now? What does fairness require in such cases? In what follows, we distinguish between cases of scarcity and bottleneck cases, and we argue that both arguments for lotteries and arguments for queues have merit, albeit for different distributive scenarios. When dealing with scarcity not everyone can get the good. A secondary good that can be (...) distributed fairly is the chances of obtaining the good. In cases of scarcity, lotteries are the best way of allocating chances of obtaining the good fairly. When dealing with bottlenecks, the secondary good that can and ought to be distributed fairly is waiting time. Queues are best suited to distribute the good of waiting time fairly. (shrink)

The thesis that high probability suffices for rational belief, while initially plausible, is known to face the Lottery Paradox. The present paper proposes an amended version of that thesis which escapes the Lottery Paradox. The amendment is argued to be plausible on independent grounds.

Lotteries have long been used to resolve competing claims, yet their recent implementation to allocate school places in Brighton and Hove, England led to considerable public outcry. This article argues that, given appropriate selection is impossible when parties have equal claims, a lottery is preferable to an auction because it excludes unjust influences. Three forms of contractualism are discussed and the fairness of lotteries is traced to the fact that they give each person an equal chance, as a (...) surrogate for their equal claim to the good. It is argued that this can be a reason to favour an artificially-constructed lottery to a 'natural' lottery where there is suspicion that the latter may be biased. (shrink)

Psychological well-being indicates individuals’ positive psychological functioning and well-being. A growing body of literature, largely based on adults and old people, suggests that volunteering and charitable donations are related to individuals’ psychological well-being. As emerging adulthood is a vital time for lifespan development, the aim of this study is to examine the effects of volunteering and charitable donation on individuals’ psychological well-being on college students. Relying on theories of altruism and the warm-glow theory, this study estimates the relationships (...) among hours of volunteering, amount of charitable donations, and psychological well-being from 1,871 Chinese college students. The linear regression results indicate that students’ hours of volunteering and the amount of charitable donations in the past year were positively associated with their psychological well-being. Volunteering, compared to charitable donations, had a slightly stronger association with psychological well-being. This study provides a rationale for academic institutions to integrate social service activities into the curriculum as a potential tool to promote students’ psychological well-being. (shrink)

The article is dedicated to the study of the peculiarities of charity development and the functioning of international charitable organizations that have acquired the status of an international entity. Such non-governmental actors are able to respond adaptively and act more quickly and locally on the world stage to address the most pressing issues, providing assistance and support to the most vulnerable categories and in the most critical geopolitical spaces. With the help of an interdisciplinary approach, it was possible to (...) identify the historical background of the origin of the phenomenon of selfless human activity, a systematic political and legal analysis of international and domestic legislation helped to identify the peculiarities of the functioning of international charitable organizations in the United States, Europe and Ukraine, and a generalization of the obtained results crystallized the foundations and features of their direct involvement in problem areas.The difference between international non-governmental organizations and international charitable organizations was proved. The author identifies the main sources of funding for such structures through grants, donations from individuals and legal entities, international organizations and governments. It is established that the tasks of establishing and operating international charitable organizations are implemented in three areas of activity, including non-refundable assistance, administration of response and recovery projects, lobbying and actualization of the problem for the world community through influence on the political establishment and public opinion. (shrink)

There are powerful fairness and efficiency arguments for making charitable donations to soup kitchens 100% deductible. These arguments have no purchase for donations to fund opulent church organs, yet these too are 100% deductible under the current tax code. This stark dichotomy is only the tip of the iceberg. Looking at a wider sampling of charitable gifts reveals a charitable continuum. Based on sliding scales for efficiency, multiple theories of fairness, pluralism, institutional competence and social welfare dictate (...) that charitable deductions should in most cases be fractions between zero and one. Moreover, the Central Limit Theorem strongly suggests that combining this welter of largely independent criteria with the wide variety of charitable gifts results in a classic bell-shaped normal curve of optimal deductions, with a peak at some central value and quickly decaying to zero at the extremes of 0% and 100%. Given that those are the only two options under the current tax code, the current charitable deduction regime inevitably makes large errors in most cases. Actually calculating a precise optimal percentage for each type of charitable donation is of course impractical. This Article suggests, however, that we can do much better than the systematically erroneous current charitable deduction. Granting a 100% deduction only for donations to the desperately poor, along with 50%, 25%, and 0% for gifts yielding progressively fewer efficiency, fairness, pluralism, and institutional competence benefits, promises to deliver a socially more desirable charitable deduction. (shrink)