“Conservatism and Uniqueness”: Conservatism is the idea that an agent’s beliefs should be stable as far as possible when she undergoes a learning experience. Uniqueness is the idea that any given body of total evidence uniquely determines what it is rational to believe. Epistemic Impartiality is the idea that you should not give special treatment to your beliefs solely because they are yours. I construe Epistemic Impartiality as a meta-principle governing epistemic norms, and argue that it is compatible with Conservatism. Then I show that if Epistemic Impartiality is correct, Conservatism and Uniqueness go together; each implies the other.
“Cognitive Decision Theory and Permissive Rationality”: In recent epistemology, philosophers have deployed a decision theoretic approach to justify various epistemic norms. A family of such accounts is known as Cognitive Decision Theory. According to Cognitive Decision Theory, rational beliefs are those with maximum expected epistemic value. How does Cognitive Decision Theory relate to the debate over permissive rationality? As one way of addressing this question, I present and assess an argument against Cognitive Decision Theory.
“Steadfastness, Deference, and Permissive Rationality”: Recently, Benjamin Levinstein has offered two interesting arguments concerning epistemic norms and epistemic peer disagreement. In his first argument, Levinstein claims that a tension between Permissivism and steadfast attitudes in the face of epistemic peer disagreement generally leads us to conciliatory attitudes; in his second argument, he argues that, given an ‘extremely weak version of a deference principle,’ Permissivism collapses into Uniqueness. However, in this chapter, I show that both arguments fail. This result supports the following claim: we should treat steadfast attitudes and at least some versions of a deference principle as viable positions in the discussion about several types of Permissivism, because they are compatible with any type of Permissivism.
The challenge with actualizing justice in many contemporary societies is the broad and often conflicting individual beliefs on rights and responsibilities that each member of a society maintains to describe the opportunities and compensations they attribute to themselves and others. This obscurity is compounded through a lack of academic or political alignment on the definition and tenets of justice.
The result of the deficiency of commonality of the definition and tenants of justice often result in myopic decisions by individuals and discontinuity within a society that reduce the available rights, obligations, opportunities, and/or compensations that could be available through alternative modalities.
The paper begins by assessing the challenge of establishing mutual trust in order to achieve cooperation. I then examine utility enhancement strategies available through cooperation. Next, I turn to models that describe natural and artificial sources of social contacts, game theory, and evolutionary fitness to produce beneficial results. I then examine social norms, including the dual inheritance theory, as models which can selectively reinforce certain cooperative behaviors and reduce others. In conclusion, a possible connection among these models to improve the overall fitness of society as defined by the net average increase in available utility, rights, opportunities, and compensations is offered.
Through an examination of concepts that inform individual choice and coordination with others, concepts within social coordination, the nature of social contracts, and consequentialist justice to coordinate behaviors through social norms may illustrate an integrated perspective and, through additional examination, produce a comprehensive model to describe how societies could identify and foster just human coordination.
Globally we are struggling to match the need for development with the available resources. Kate Raworth’s (2012) developed the idea of a “safe and just space” as a balance between the planetary boundary approach and ensuring a level of basic needs satisfaction for everyone. O’Neill et al. (2018) argue that countries are currently not able to provide their populations with basic needs without concurrently exceeding planetary boundary measures. While attempts have been made to get people to change their habits through moral self-sacrifice, this has not been successful. Kate Soper (2008) argues that a change towards sustainability will only be possible if an alternative to high consumption is offered, without trade-offs in well-being. Technological improvements are often thought to end up providing solutions to the problem of overconsumption, but as Jackson (2005) shows convincingly, this is highly unlikely due to the overwhelming scale of changes required.
‘Alternative hedonism’ (Soper 2008) is a philosophical approach that has been proposed to solve this dilemma. By changing what humanity pursues to be less focused on consumption and more linked to community interaction and living healthy, fulfilling lives, we would simultaneously reduce stress on the globally limited resources and sinks. By developing and understanding satiation points – the point beyond which well-being no longer increases because of increased consumption - affluence that wastes resources without improving well-being could be reduced. This paper explores how ‘alternative hedonism’ and the development of ‘satiation points’ could be helpful in getting humanity closer to the ‘safe and just space’. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges that taking up of ‘alternative hedonism’ would entail.