Krister Bykvist
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 1036129 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Krister Bykvist |
| NOMBRES | Krister |
| APELLIDO | Bykvist |
| FIRMA | BYKVIST K |
| AFILIACIONES | Stockholm University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4370-7201 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 29 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 48 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 28 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1996 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
A plea for modelling in ethics
We present an argument about the methodology of ethics, broadly conceived, drawing on recent research on modelling in the philosophy of science. More specifically, we argue that normative ethics should adopt the methodology of modelling. We make our case in two parts. First, despite the perhaps unfamiliar terminology, modelling already happens in ethics. We identify it, and argue that its practice could be improved by recognising that it is model…
Wellbeing and Changing Attitudes Across Time
The fact that our attitudes change poses well-known challenges for attitude-sensitive wellbeing theories. Suppose that in the past you favoured your adventurous youthful life more than the quiet and unassuming life you expected to live as an old person; now when you look back you favour your current life more than your youthful past life. Which period of your life is better for you? More generally, how can we find a stable attitude-sensitive stan…
Can we compare health states when our standards change
Among health economists, who think that preferences are the correct standard of the value of health states, it is common to assume, at least implicitly, that the correct criterion of this value takes the following schematic form: H1 is a better health state than H2 iff the members of group S prefer (on average) being in H1 to being in H2. Various candidates for members of S have been proposed, including medical experts, the general public, H1-pat…
Evaluative Uncertainty and Population Ethics
In the debate about population ethics, it is often assumed that we need to decide on one principle of population ethics, and then apply it to real world problems. One obvious problem with this approach is that we are not certain which principle to apply. Indeed, the many paradoxes of population ethics show that there is nothing resembling a consensus on which intuitive principle should be dropped to avoid contradictions. One possible way forward …
The Oxford Handbook of Population Ethics
This handbook presents up-to-date theoretical analyses of problems associated with the moral standing of future people in current decision-making. Future people pose an especially hard problem for our current decision-making, since their number and their identities are not fixed but depend on the choices the present generation makes. Do we make the world better by creating more people with good lives? What do we owe future generations in terms of…
Cullity's system‐building
Cullity has written a splendid and extremely ambitious book, full of novel ideas and interesting arguments. It offers nothing less than a complete foundation of almost the whole of morality, and from this foundation Cullity derives crucial norms and values that have many illuminating applications. The number of issues covered is breath-taking, and the knowledge of the field extremely impressive. What sticks out in particular is the combination of…
Oxford Handbook of Population Ethics
Governing for Future Generations
Policy decisions, and public preferences about them, often entail judgements about costs people should be willing to pay for the benefit of future generations. Economic analyses discount policies’ future benefits based on expectations about increasing standards of living, while empirical studies in psychology have found future-oriented people are more motivated to protect the environment. In this article, using original surveys and survey experim…
Quasi-realism and normative certitude
Just as we can be more or less certain that there is extraterrestrial life or that Goldbach’s conjecture is correct, we can be more or less certain about normative matters, such as whether euthanasia is permissible or whether utilitarianism is true. However, accommodating the phenomenon of degrees of normative certitude is a difficult challenge for non-cognitivist and expressivist views, according to which normative judgements are desire-like att…
Taking values seriously
Recently, there has been a revival in taking empirical magnitudes seriously. Weights, heights, velocities and the like have been accepted as abstract entities in their own right rather than just equivalence classes of objects. The aim of my paper is to show that this revival should include value magnitudes. If we posit such magnitudes, important value comparisons (cross-world, cross-time, mind to world, cross-theory, cross-polarity, ratio) can be…
Comments on Broome’s ‘Rationality versus Normativity’
Broome’s target in his paper is the popular claim that rationality consists in responding correctly to reasons. He takes this to be the reductive claim that rationality reduces to responding correctly to reasons, which in turn he takes to entail that the property of rationality is identical to the property of responding correctly to reasons. It is this identity claim that Broome attempts to refute by showing that the properties that are supposed …
Consequentialism, Ignorance, and Uncertainty
Act consequentialism provides an answer to the question of what one ought to do, no matter which situation one is in. The problem, however, is that this answer is rarely if ever known by the agent herself. Ordinary agents do not know all the consequences of their actions, nor do they know how to assess all possible consequences. This lack of both empirical and evaluative knowledge means that ordinary agents often, or always, do not know what act …
Moral Uncertainty
Very often, we’re uncertain about what we ought, morally, to do. We don’t know how to weigh the interests of animals against humans, or how strong our duties are to improve the lives of distant strangers, or how to think about the ethics of bringing new people into existence. But we still need to act. So how should we make decisions in the face of such uncertainty? Though economists and philosophers have extensively studied the issue of decision-…
Persson's Merely Possible Persons
All else being equal, creating a miserable person makes the world worse, and creating an ecstatic person makes it better. Such claims are easily justified if it can be better, or worse, for a person to exist than not to exist. But that seems to require that things can be better, or worse, for a person even in a world in which she does not exist. Ingmar Persson defends this seemingly paradoxical claim in his latest book, Inclusive Ethics . He argu…
Moral uncertainty
What should we do when we are not certain about what we morally should do? There is a long history of theorizing about decision-making under empirical uncertainty, but surprisingly little has been written about the moral uncertainty expressed by this question. Only very recently have philosophers started to systematically address the nature of such uncertainty and its impacts on decision-making. This paper addresses the main problems raised by mo…
The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism, the approach to ethics based on the maximization of overall well-being, continues to have great traction in moral philosophy and political thought. This Companion offers a systematic exploration of its history, themes, and applications. First, it traces the origins and development of utilitarianism via the work of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and others. The volume then explores issues in the formulation of ut…
Against the Being For Account of Normative Certitude
Just as we can be more or less certain about empirical matters, we can be more or less certain about normative matters. Recently, it has been argued that this is a challenge for noncognitivism about normativity. Michael Smith presented the challenge in a 2002 paper and James Lenman and Michael Ridge responded independently. Andrew Sepielli has now joined the rescue operation. His basic idea is that noncognitivists should employ the notion of bein…
Happiness, Ethics, and Politics
John Broome, Weighing Lives (Oxford
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Can Unstable Preferences Provide a Stable Standard of Well-Being
How do we determine the well-being of a person when her preferences are not stable across worlds? Suppose, for instance, that you are considering getting married, and that you know that if you get married, you will prefer being unmarried, and that if you stay unmarried, you will prefer being married. The general problem is to find a stable standard of well-being when the standard is set by preferences that are not stable. In this paper, I shall s…
Expressivism and Moral Certitude
Michael Smith has recently argued that non‐cognitivists are unable to accommodate crucial structural features of moral belief, and in particular that non‐cognitivists have trouble accounting for subjects' certitude with respect to their moral beliefs. James Lenman and Michael Ridge have independently constructed ‘ecumenical’ versions of non‐cognitivism, intended to block this objection. We argue that these responses do not work. If ecumenical non…
Violations of normative invariance
It seems paradoxical to say that an action's normative status ‐ whether it is right, wrong, or obligatory ‐ depends on whether or not it is performed. In this paper, I shall argue that in itself this dependency is not paradoxical. I shall argue that we should not reject a normative theory just because it implies this kind of dependency. Not all dependencies of this kind are bad, or at least not bad enough to warrant wholesale rejection. Instead, …
Prudence for Changing Selves
What is the prudentially right thing to do in situations in which our actions will shape our preferences? Suppose, for instance, that you are considering getting married, and that you know that if you get married, you will prefer being unmarried, and that if you stay unmarried, you will prefer being married. This is the problem I will deal with in this article. I will begin by explaining why preferences matter to prudence. I will then go on to di…
The Moral Relevance of Past Preferences
Utilitarianism
1. Introduction 2. How to Assess Normative Theories 3. The Basic Elements of Utilitarianism 4. Well-being 5. Aggregation 6. Utilitarianism as a User-Friendly Guide to Action 7. Is Utilitarianism Too Demanding? 8. Is Utilitarianism Too Permissive? 9. Outcomes 10. The Place of Rules in Utilitarianism 11. Conclusion.
Governing for Future Generations
Policy decisions, and public preferences about them, often entail judgements about costs people should be willing to pay for the benefit of future generations. Economic analyses discount policies’ future benefits based on expectations about increasing standards of living, while empirical studies in psychology have found future-oriented people are more motivated to protect the environment. In this article, using original surveys and survey experim…
Prudence for Changing Selves
What is the prudentially right thing to do in situations in which our actions will shape our preferences? Suppose, for instance, that you are considering getting married, and that you know that if you get married, you will prefer being unmarried, and that if you stay unmarried, you will prefer being married. This is the problem I will deal with in this article. I will begin by explaining why preferences matter to prudence. I will then go on to di…
Can Unstable Preferences Provide a Stable Standard of Well-Being
How do we determine the well-being of a person when her preferences are not stable across worlds? Suppose, for instance, that you are considering getting married, and that you know that if you get married, you will prefer being unmarried, and that if you stay unmarried, you will prefer being married. The general problem is to find a stable standard of well-being when the standard is set by preferences that are not stable. In this paper, I shall s…
Expressivism and Moral Certitude
Michael Smith has recently argued that non‐cognitivists are unable to accommodate crucial structural features of moral belief, and in particular that non‐cognitivists have trouble accounting for subjects' certitude with respect to their moral beliefs. James Lenman and Michael Ridge have independently constructed ‘ecumenical’ versions of non‐cognitivism, intended to block this objection. We argue that these responses do not work. If ecumenical non…
Sumner On Desires and Well-Being
A person's welfare or well-being concerns what is good for him, what makes his life worth living. It therefore depends crucially on facts about the person and his life. As William James once remarked, whether a life is worth living depends on the liver. How this dependency should be spelled out is a controversial question. Desire theorists, or as I shall call them well-being preferentialists, claim that a person's well-being depends on his desire…
Persson's Merely Possible Persons
All else being equal, creating a miserable person makes the world worse, and creating an ecstatic person makes it better. Such claims are easily justified if it can be better, or worse, for a person to exist than not to exist. But that seems to require that things can be better, or worse, for a person even in a world in which she does not exist. Ingmar Persson defends this seemingly paradoxical claim in his latest book, Inclusive Ethics . He argu…
Normative Supervenience and Consequentialism
Act-consequentialism is usually taken to be the view that we ought to perform the act that will have the best consequences. But this definition ignores the possibility of various non-maximizing forms of act-consequentialism, e.g. satisficing theories that tell us to perform the act whose consequences will be good enough. What seems crucial to act-consequentialism is not that we ought to maximize value but that the normative status of alternative …
A plea for modelling in ethics
We present an argument about the methodology of ethics, broadly conceived, drawing on recent research on modelling in the philosophy of science. More specifically, we argue that normative ethics should adopt the methodology of modelling. We make our case in two parts. First, despite the perhaps unfamiliar terminology, modelling already happens in ethics. We identify it, and argue that its practice could be improved by recognising that it is model…
Quasi-realism and normative certitude
Just as we can be more or less certain that there is extraterrestrial life or that Goldbach’s conjecture is correct, we can be more or less certain about normative matters, such as whether euthanasia is permissible or whether utilitarianism is true. However, accommodating the phenomenon of degrees of normative certitude is a difficult challenge for non-cognitivist and expressivist views, according to which normative judgements are desire-like att…
Moral uncertainty
What should we do when we are not certain about what we morally should do? There is a long history of theorizing about decision-making under empirical uncertainty, but surprisingly little has been written about the moral uncertainty expressed by this question. Only very recently have philosophers started to systematically address the nature of such uncertainty and its impacts on decision-making. This paper addresses the main problems raised by mo…
Utilitarian deontologies? On preference utilitarianism and agent‐relative value
All Time Preferences
Sumner On Desires and Well-Being
A person's welfare or well-being concerns what is good for him, what makes his life worth living. It therefore depends crucially on facts about the person and his life. As William James once remarked, whether a life is worth living depends on the liver. How this dependency should be spelled out is a controversial question. Desire theorists, or as I shall call them well-being preferentialists, claim that a person's well-being depends on his desire…
The Moral Relevance of Past Preferences
Normative Supervenience and Consequentialism
Act-consequentialism is usually taken to be the view that we ought to perform the act that will have the best consequences. But this definition ignores the possibility of various non-maximizing forms of act-consequentialism, e.g. satisficing theories that tell us to perform the act whose consequences will be good enough. What seems crucial to act-consequentialism is not that we ought to maximize value but that the normative status of alternative …
Prudence for Changing Selves
What is the prudentially right thing to do in situations in which our actions will shape our preferences? Suppose, for instance, that you are considering getting married, and that you know that if you get married, you will prefer being unmarried, and that if you stay unmarried, you will prefer being married. This is the problem I will deal with in this article. I will begin by explaining why preferences matter to prudence. I will then go on to di…
Violations of normative invariance
It seems paradoxical to say that an action's normative status ‐ whether it is right, wrong, or obligatory ‐ depends on whether or not it is performed. In this paper, I shall argue that in itself this dependency is not paradoxical. I shall argue that we should not reject a normative theory just because it implies this kind of dependency. Not all dependencies of this kind are bad, or at least not bad enough to warrant wholesale rejection. Instead, …
Expressivism and Moral Certitude
Michael Smith has recently argued that non‐cognitivists are unable to accommodate crucial structural features of moral belief, and in particular that non‐cognitivists have trouble accounting for subjects' certitude with respect to their moral beliefs. James Lenman and Michael Ridge have independently constructed ‘ecumenical’ versions of non‐cognitivism, intended to block this objection. We argue that these responses do not work. If ecumenical non…
Happiness, Ethics, and Politics
John Broome, Weighing Lives (Oxford
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Can Unstable Preferences Provide a Stable Standard of Well-Being
How do we determine the well-being of a person when her preferences are not stable across worlds? Suppose, for instance, that you are considering getting married, and that you know that if you get married, you will prefer being unmarried, and that if you stay unmarried, you will prefer being married. The general problem is to find a stable standard of well-being when the standard is set by preferences that are not stable. In this paper, I shall s…
Against the Being For Account of Normative Certitude
Just as we can be more or less certain about empirical matters, we can be more or less certain about normative matters. Recently, it has been argued that this is a challenge for noncognitivism about normativity. Michael Smith presented the challenge in a 2002 paper and James Lenman and Michael Ridge responded independently. Andrew Sepielli has now joined the rescue operation. His basic idea is that noncognitivists should employ the notion of bein…
The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism, the approach to ethics based on the maximization of overall well-being, continues to have great traction in moral philosophy and political thought. This Companion offers a systematic exploration of its history, themes, and applications. First, it traces the origins and development of utilitarianism via the work of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and others. The volume then explores issues in the formulation of ut…
Moral uncertainty
What should we do when we are not certain about what we morally should do? There is a long history of theorizing about decision-making under empirical uncertainty, but surprisingly little has been written about the moral uncertainty expressed by this question. Only very recently have philosophers started to systematically address the nature of such uncertainty and its impacts on decision-making. This paper addresses the main problems raised by mo…
Comments on Broome’s ‘Rationality versus Normativity’
Broome’s target in his paper is the popular claim that rationality consists in responding correctly to reasons. He takes this to be the reductive claim that rationality reduces to responding correctly to reasons, which in turn he takes to entail that the property of rationality is identical to the property of responding correctly to reasons. It is this identity claim that Broome attempts to refute by showing that the properties that are supposed …
Consequentialism, Ignorance, and Uncertainty
Act consequentialism provides an answer to the question of what one ought to do, no matter which situation one is in. The problem, however, is that this answer is rarely if ever known by the agent herself. Ordinary agents do not know all the consequences of their actions, nor do they know how to assess all possible consequences. This lack of both empirical and evaluative knowledge means that ordinary agents often, or always, do not know what act …
Moral Uncertainty
Very often, we’re uncertain about what we ought, morally, to do. We don’t know how to weigh the interests of animals against humans, or how strong our duties are to improve the lives of distant strangers, or how to think about the ethics of bringing new people into existence. But we still need to act. So how should we make decisions in the face of such uncertainty? Though economists and philosophers have extensively studied the issue of decision-…
Persson's Merely Possible Persons
All else being equal, creating a miserable person makes the world worse, and creating an ecstatic person makes it better. Such claims are easily justified if it can be better, or worse, for a person to exist than not to exist. But that seems to require that things can be better, or worse, for a person even in a world in which she does not exist. Ingmar Persson defends this seemingly paradoxical claim in his latest book, Inclusive Ethics . He argu…
Governing for Future Generations
Policy decisions, and public preferences about them, often entail judgements about costs people should be willing to pay for the benefit of future generations. Economic analyses discount policies’ future benefits based on expectations about increasing standards of living, while empirical studies in psychology have found future-oriented people are more motivated to protect the environment. In this article, using original surveys and survey experim…
Quasi-realism and normative certitude
Just as we can be more or less certain that there is extraterrestrial life or that Goldbach’s conjecture is correct, we can be more or less certain about normative matters, such as whether euthanasia is permissible or whether utilitarianism is true. However, accommodating the phenomenon of degrees of normative certitude is a difficult challenge for non-cognitivist and expressivist views, according to which normative judgements are desire-like att…
Taking values seriously
Recently, there has been a revival in taking empirical magnitudes seriously. Weights, heights, velocities and the like have been accepted as abstract entities in their own right rather than just equivalence classes of objects. The aim of my paper is to show that this revival should include value magnitudes. If we posit such magnitudes, important value comparisons (cross-world, cross-time, mind to world, cross-theory, cross-polarity, ratio) can be…
Evaluative Uncertainty and Population Ethics
In the debate about population ethics, it is often assumed that we need to decide on one principle of population ethics, and then apply it to real world problems. One obvious problem with this approach is that we are not certain which principle to apply. Indeed, the many paradoxes of population ethics show that there is nothing resembling a consensus on which intuitive principle should be dropped to avoid contradictions. One possible way forward …
The Oxford Handbook of Population Ethics
This handbook presents up-to-date theoretical analyses of problems associated with the moral standing of future people in current decision-making. Future people pose an especially hard problem for our current decision-making, since their number and their identities are not fixed but depend on the choices the present generation makes. Do we make the world better by creating more people with good lives? What do we owe future generations in terms of…
Cullity's system‐building
Cullity has written a splendid and extremely ambitious book, full of novel ideas and interesting arguments. It offers nothing less than a complete foundation of almost the whole of morality, and from this foundation Cullity derives crucial norms and values that have many illuminating applications. The number of issues covered is breath-taking, and the knowledge of the field extremely impressive. What sticks out in particular is the combination of…
Oxford Handbook of Population Ethics
Epistemology (22 obras) · Philosophy (20 obras) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (15 obras) · Sociology (14 obras) · Psychology (12 obras) · Economics (11 obras) · Computer Science (10 obras) · Political science (9 obras) · Free Will and Agency (8 obras) · Law (8 obras)