Research

Alexander Pruss's Blog

• Punishment, criticism and authority 2021-04-09
  It is always unjust to punish without the right kind of authority over those that one punishes. Sometimes that authority may be given to us by them (as in the case of a University’s authority over adult students, or maybe even in the case of mutual authority in friendship) and sometimes it may come from […]
• What does it mean for persons to have infinite value? 2021-04-07
  It is intuitive to say that persons have infinite value, and recently Rasmussen and Bailey have given some cool arguments for this thesis. But what does it mean to say that humans have infinite value? If we think of values as something very much like numbers, then I guess it just means that humans have […]
• Non-propositional representations 2021-04-07
  I used to think that it’s quite possible that all our mental representations of the world are propositional in nature. To do that, I had to have a broad notion of proposition, much broader than what we normally consider to be linguistically expressible. Thus, I was quite happy with saying that Picasso’s Guernica expresses a […]
• Quasi-divinization and love 2021-04-06
  When we deeply love someone, we are apt to raise them to a quasi-divine status in our hearts. If naturalism is right, this is misguided, for the evolved clouds of particles that are the people we love do not in fact have any quasi-divine status. If theism is right, then this quasi-divinization could well be […]
• Best estimates and credences 2021-04-05
  Some people think that expected utilities determine credences and some thing that credences determine expected utilities. I think neither is the case, and want to sketch a bit of a third view. Let’s say that I observe people playing a slot machine. After each game, I make a tickmark on a piece of paper, and […]
• Going against currently expected utilities 2021-04-01
  Today I am making an important decision between A and B. The expected utilities of A and B depend on a large collection of empirical propositions p1, ..., pn. Yesterday, I spent a long time investigating the truth values of these empirical propositions and I calculated the expected utility of A to be much higher than that […]
• Complicity, Fetal Tissue and Vaccines 2021-03-31
  I just got permission from the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly to post my 2006 paper on fetal tissue and vaccines. It is here.
• Vaccines and cell-lines descended from tissue derived from abortion 2021-03-30
  A number of Catholic authorities have made a moral distinction between the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, on the one hand, and the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, on the other, with respect to the involvement of cells that descend (after many generations) from an aborted fetus (e.g., see here and here). The difference appears […]
• The pace of reception of goods 2021-03-29
  Suppose I know that from now on for an infinite number of years, I will be offered an annual game. A die will be rolled, I will be asked to guess whether the die will show six, and if I guess right, I will get a slice of delicious chocolate cake (one of my favorite […]
• Credences and decision-theoretic behavior 2021-03-26
  Let p be the proposition that among the last six coin tosses worldwide that proceeded my typing the period at the end of this sentence, there were exactly two heads tosses. The probability of p is 6!/(26⋅2!⋅4!) = 15/64. Now that I know that, what is my credence in p? Is it 15/64? I don’t think so. […]
• Doing and refraining, and proportionality 2021-03-24
  In my previous post, I suggested that proportionality considerations in Double Effect work differently for positive actions (doings) than for negative ones (refrainings). One thing that is now striking me is that there is an interesting asymmetry with respect to relational features that is brought out by thinking about pairs of trolley cases with different […]
• Doing, refraining and Double Effect 2021-03-22
  The Principle of Double Effect seems to imply that either there are real dilemmas—cases where an action is both forbidden and required—even for agents who have always been virtuous and well-informed, or else there is a morally significant distinction between doing and refraining. Here is the argument. Consider two cases. In both cases, you know […]
• More dwindling of the prospects for an accuracy-based argument for probabilism in infinite cases 2021-03-19
  Let P be the set of countably additive probabilities on a countable set Ω. A strictly proper accuracy scoring rule on some set of credences C that includes P is a function s from C to [ − ∞, M]Ω for some finite M such that Eps(p)>Eps(q) for any p ∈ P and any q ∈ C: i.e., from the point of […]
• A necessary truth that explains a contingent one 2021-03-19
  Van Inwagen’s famous argument against the Principle of Sufficient Reason rests on the principle: A necessary truth cannot explain a contingent one. For a discussion of the argument, see here. I just found a nice little counterexample to (1). Consider the contingent proposition, p, that it is not the case that my next ten tosses […]
• Scoring rules for finitely additive probabilities on an infinite space 2021-03-19
  Michael Nielsen has drawn my attention to the interesting question of scoring rules for forecasts on an infinite sample space Ω. Suppose that the forecasts are finitely additive probabilities on Ω, and that a scoring rule assigns an inaccuracy score s(p) to every finitely additive probability p on Ω (and maybe also to some or […]
• Valuations and credences 2021-03-18
  One picture of credences is that they are derived from agents’ valuations of wagers (i.e., previsions) as follows: the agent’s credence in a proposition p is equal to the agent’s valuation of a gamble that pays one unit if p is true and 0 units if p false. While this may give the right answer […]
• Presumption of legal permissibility 2021-03-16
  A standard principle in the interpretation of Catholic canon law is the principle that restrictive laws are understood narrowly and permissive ones broadly: i.e., in case of ambiguity, we err on the side of freedom. I’ve wondered if this presumption in favor of freedom is just a principle internal to Catholic canon law or if […]
• Abortion, contraception and Christian tradition 2021-03-15
  It is traditional Christian teaching, as far back as we can trace it, that: Abortion is always wrong. Nonetheless, historically many Christian theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, accepted the best science and philosophy of the day (Aristotle!) which held that: Human existence starts about a month and a half after conception. Our science no longer […]
• Strict propriety of credential scoring rules 2021-03-08
  An (inaccuracy) scoring rule measures how far a probabilistic forecast lies from the truth. Thus, it assigns to each forecast p a score s(p) which is a [0, ∞]-valued random variable varying over the probability space Ω that measures distance from truth. Let’s work with finite probability spaces and assume all the forecasts are consistent probability […]
• Harm Principle 2021-03-05
  Consider this Harm Principle: Without a relevant connection to actual, intended or risked harm, there is no wrongdoing. Now suppose Carl tortures Bob because he has justified practical certainty that this torture will lead Bob to abandon beliefs that Carl takes to be heretical and thereby cause him to avoid the pains of hell. (How […]