Category: Perspectives on Science seminar

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Tuesday 9.3., Jack Vromen (Erasmus University Rotterdam) will give a presentation titled “Just how unobjectionable is the Pareto principle?”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 3 to 5 pm.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To receive the Zoom invitation, please sign up here.

Abstract:

The Pareto principle (roughly, the principle that social state B is to be preferred to A if some are better off in B than in A and no one is worse off in B than in A) seems to be generally and routinely accepted by economists without further justification. Economists grant that the principle is weak, in the sense that it applies to only a small subset of comparisons of social states, but almost never seem to call its acceptability in question. Indeed, some economists even state that they cannot see how anyone could possibly object to the Pareto principle. In the paper I argue that reasonable objections, related for example to distributional concerns, can be made to the principle. I first note that that the principle is treacherously simple: it can (and has actually been) interpreted, used and applied in various ways. I then point out that if we confine our attention to how welfare economists standardly interpret and use the principle, the principle can do justice to distributional concerns. Yet I also argue that there are limits to this. Strictly speaking, the Pareto principle implies that no external (“extra-welfarist”) concern can possibly override social welfare changes (as defined by the principle), no matter how weighty the external concern and how small the welfare changes. In principle, such extreme implications can be avoided by generalizing the Pareto principle. But the price to be paid for such a generalization is that the principle becomes even weaker in the sense that it applies to an even smaller set of comparisons of social states.

Author bio:

Jack Vromen is professor of philosophy at the Erasmus School of Philosophy and Director of the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics (EIPE, both at Erasmus University Rotterdam). He co-edits with N. Emrah Aydinonat the Journal of Economic Methodology. His research is at the intersection of economics and philosophy, with special attention to foundations of evolutionary economics, new institutional economics and neuroeconomics. More recently his research focuses on social preferences, on what they are, how they could have evolved, what might motivate them and whether their satisfaction should be included in welfare evaluations.

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 1.3., Kristina Rolin (Tampere University) will give a presentation titled “Trust in Science: The Moral Dimension”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT, the Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To receive the Zoom invitation, please sign up here.

Abstract:

Trust in alleged experts is thought to be rational when the experts are trustworthy, and one has good reasons to believe that they are trustworthy, and one trusts the experts because of these reasons. Trustworthiness is thought to have two dimensions: the epistemic and the moral. Whereas the epistemic dimension involves expertise (to a reasonable degree in a relevant domain), the moral dimension involves honesty and good will towards those who are epistemically dependent on the expert. Trustworthiness is rarely transparent to others, and hence, the assessment of trustworthiness is dependent on the social indicators of trustworthiness (e.g., indicators of expertise, honesty, good will, and capability to make sound moral judgments). While there is a fair amount of discussion about the social indicators of expertise (Anderson 2011; Goldman 2006), there is surprisingly little discussion about the social indicators of the moral dimension of trustworthiness. In my presentation, I focus on the moral dimension of trustworthiness and its social indicators. In the first part of my presentation, I explain why Baier’s (1986) moral conception of trust (rather than mere reliance) is appropriate in an analysis of trust in science. In the second part of my presentation, I argue that to understand the social indicators of the moral dimension of trustworthiness, we need to distinguish between two types of cases, the ones in which honesty and good will can be assumed by default and the ones in which they cannot be assumed by default. Finally, I analyze the social indicators of the moral dimension in the latter case.

Author bio:

Kristina Rolin is University Lecturer in Research Ethics at Tampere University. She is the PI of the research project “Social and Cognitive Diversity in Science: An Epistemic Assessment” (2018-2022). Her areas of research are philosophy of science and social science, social epistemology, and feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. She is interested in diversity in science, the role of trust and values in science, collective knowledge, epistemic responsibility, and objectivity.

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 22.2., Antti Kauppinen (University of Helsinki) will give a presentation titled “How Not to Make Trade-Offs Between Health and Other Goods”. The seminar is organised as a joint seminar with the Moral & Political Philosophy Research Seminar series. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT, the Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To join the seminar, please sign up here.

Abstract:

In the context of a global pandemic, there is good health-based reason for governments to impose various social distancing measures. However, in addition to health benefits, such measures also cause economic and other harms. In this paper, I look at proposals to make use of existing QALY (quality-adjusted life year) valuations and WELLBYs (wellbeing-adjusted life-years) as the currency for making trade-offs between health and other goods. I argue that both methods are problematic. First, whether the costs and benefits are translated into money or well-being, the result is that morally irrelevant utilities are weighed against morally relevant ones. Second, neither of these approaches can capture the fundamental moral asymmetry between doing and allowing harm, since they construe trade-offs in terms of outcomes while ignoring information about the role of various agents in the causal chains that bring them about. I conclude that deliberation about trade-offs should remain a messy and communal process that can’t be replaced with well-intentioned calculation.

Author bio:

Antti Kauppinen is a Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki and PI of the Academy of Finland Research Project Responsible Beliefs: Why Ethics and Epistemology Need Each Other ​(2019-2023).  He works mostly on ethics and metaethics, on topics like normativity, meaning in life, well-being, and moral sentiments. He also like to teach political philosophy. More information about him can be found here.