Alexander Pruss's Blog

• Two more counterexamples to utilitarianism 2024-12-16
  It’s an innocent and pleasant pastime to multiply counterexamples to utilitarianism even if they don’t add much to what others have said. Thus, if utilitarianism is true, I have to do so. 🙂 Suppose you capture Hitler. Torturing him to death would appal many but, given fallen human nature, likely significantly please hundreds of millions […]
• Bailey's Priority Principle 2024-12-11
  Andrew Bailey formulated and defended the Priority Principle (PP), that we think our thoughts in a primary rather than inherited way. His main argument for PP is a two-thinkers argument: if I think my thoughts in an inherited way, then something else—the thing I inherit the thoughts from—thinks them as well, but there aren’t two […]
• Correction to "Goodman and Quine's nominalism and infinity" 2024-12-11
  In an old post, I said that Goodman and Quine can’t define the concept of an infinite number of objects using their logical resources. Allen Hazen corrected me in a comment in the specific context of defining infinite sentences. But it turns out that I wasn’t just wrong about the specific context of defining infinite […]
• Property inheritance 2024-12-10
  There seems to be such a thing as property inheritance, where x inherits a property F from y which has F in a non-derivative way. Here are some examples of this phenomenon on various theories: I inherit mass from my molecules. A person inherits some of their thoughts from the animal that constitutes the person. […]
• Dualism, humans and galaxies 2024-12-10
  Here is a mildly interesting thing I just noticed: given dualism, we cannot say that we are a part of the Milky Way galaxy. For galaxies, if they exist at all, are material objects that do not have souls as parts.
• Hachette v. Internet Archive 2024-12-09
  I am not a lawyer, but I love constructing counterexamples. I’ve been thinking about the Hachette v. Internet Archive. The Archive scanned a bunch of books they owned, and then lent the scans to users on the Internet, making sure that for each physical book, only one scan was lent at a time. The courts […]
• Dignity, ecosystems and artifacts 2024-12-06
  If a part of x has dignity, x has dignity. Only persons have dignity. So, a person cannot be a proper part of a non-person. (1–2) A person cannot be a proper part of a person. So, a person cannot be a proper part of anything. (3–4) If any nation or galaxy or ecosystem exists, […]
• Pairs 2024-12-06
  As a warmup to his arguments against the existence of ordinary objects, Trenton Merricks argues against the existence of pairs of gloves. Here’s another argument against pairs of gloves. I recently bought a pack of 200 nitrile gloves. How many pairs am I buying? Intuitively, there were a hundred pairs in the box. But if […]
• Continuous variation 2024-12-04
  Some arguments against restricted composition—the view that some but not all pluralities compose a whole—are based on the idea that a feature that cuts reality at the joints, such as composition, cannot be vague, and that if composition is restricted, one can have a continuous series of cases from a case of composition to a […]
• Modal details in Unger's argument against his existence 2024-11-21
  Unger famously argues that he doesn’t exist, by claiming a contradiction between three claims (I am quoting (1) and (2) verbatim, but simplifying (3)): I exist. If I exist, then I consist of many cells, but a finite number. If I exist and I consist of many but a finite number of cells, then removal […]
• Sexual symmetry and asymmetry 2024-11-21
  I want to think a bit about conservative Christian views of sex and gender, but before that I want to offer two stories to motivate a crucial distinction. Electrons and Positrons Electrons and positrons (a positron is a positively charged anti-particle to the electron) are very different in one way but not so much in […]
• Against group intentional action 2024-11-19
  Alice, Bob and Carl are triumvirate that unanimously votes for some legislation, for the following reasons: Alice thinks that hard work and religion are intrinsically bad while entertainment is intrinsically good, and believes the legislation will decrease the prevalence of hard work and religion and increase that of entertainment. Bob thinks that hard work and […]
• Reasons of identity 2024-11-16
  In paradigm instances of parental action, my reason for action is the objective fact that I am a parent, not because of the subjective fact that I think I'm a parent or identify with being a parent. There are times when it makes sense to act on the subjective fact. If I'm asked by someone […]
• Goodman and Quine and transitive closure 2024-11-11
  In the previous post, I showed that Goodman and Quine’s counting method fails for objects that have too much overlap. I think (though the technical parts here are more difficult) that the same is true for their definition of the ancestral or transitive closure of a relation. GQ showed how to define ancestors in terms […]
• No fix for Goodman and Quine's counting 2024-11-08
  In yesterday’s post, I noted that Goodman and Quine’s nominalist mereological definition of what it is to say that there are more cats than dogs fails if there are cats that are conjoint twins. This raises the question whether there is some other way of using the same ontological resources to generate a definition of […]
• Goodman and Quine and shared bits 2024-11-07
  Goodman and Quine have a clever way of saying that there are more cats than dogs without invoking sets, numbers or other abstracta. The trick is to say that x is a bit of y if x is a part of y and x is the same size as the smallest of the dogs and […]
• Trope theory and merely numerical differences in pleasures 2024-11-05
  Suppose I eat a chocolate bar and this causes me to have a trope of pleasure. Given assentiality of origins, if I had eaten a numerically different chocolate bar that caused the same pleasure, I would have had had a numerically different trope of pleasure. Now, imagine that I eat a chocolate bar in my […]
• Does one's vote make a difference? 2024-11-03
  Suppose that there is a simple majority election, with two candidates, and there is a large odd number of voters. Suppose polling data makes the election too close to call. How likely is it that you can decide which candidate wins? I could look up this stuff, but it’s more fun to figure it out. […]
• Theology and source critical analysis 2024-10-28
  There is reason to think that a number of biblical texts—paradigmatically, the Pentateuch—were redacted from multiple sources that scholars have worked to tease apart and separately analyze. This is very interesting from a scholarly point of view. But I do not know that it is that interesting from the theological point of view. Vatican II, […]
• An impartiality premise 2024-10-24
  In an argument that David Lewis’s account of possible worlds leads to inductive skepticism, I used this premise: If knowing that x is F (where F is purely non-indexical and x is a definite description or proper name) does not epistemically justify inferring that x is G (where G is purely non-indexical), then neither does […]