H Orri Stefánsson
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 986461 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | H Orri Stefánsson |
| NOMBRES | H Orri |
| APELLIDO | Stefánsson |
| FIRMA | STEFÁNSSON H O |
| AFILIACIONES | Stockholm University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8382-1802 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 25 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 35 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 25 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2014 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Does Global Justice Demand Solar Geoengineering
The ‘Global Justice Argument’ posits an obligation to research solar geoengineering on the grounds that climate change is unjust and solar geoengineering offers the most effective means to reduce harm befalling climate-disadvantaged people. But even if those claims hold, the argument contains an important gap. As solar geoengineering cannot restore pre-injustice conditions, it at best serves as compensation. Hence, a version of the argument sensi…
Ocean-Based Salmon Farming in advance
Ocean-based salmon farming, as presently practiced, is thought to pose an existential threat to what we today think of as wild salmon. This raises ethical questions about, first, the value of wild salmon, and, second, the value of wild salmon of the particular type that exists today. This essay uses the debate around ocean-based salmon farming as a case study of ‘irreversible damage,’ a concept that figures heavily in environmental laws and regul…
Population ethics under risk
Population axiology concerns how to rank populations by the relation “is socially preferred to”. So far, population ethicists have (with important exceptions) focused less on the question of how to rank population prospects, that is, alternatives that contain uncertainty as to which population they will bring about. Most public policy choices, however, are decisions under uncertainty, including policy choices that affect the size of a population …
Can the Normic de minimis Expected Utility Theory save the de minimis Principle
Recently, Martin Smith defended a view he called the “normic de minimis expected utility theory”. The basic idea is to integrate a ‘normic’ version of the de minimis principle into an expected utility-based decision theoretical framework. According to the de minimis principle some risks are so small (falling below a threshold) that they can be ignored. While this threshold standardly is defined in terms of some probability, the normic conception …
Fairness, ambiguity and dynamic consistency
Considerations of dynamic inconsistency have figured prominently in debates over the rationality of preferences that violate the separability conditions characteristic of expected utility theory. These debates have mostly focused on risk- and ambiguity averse preferences, but analogous considerations apply to preferences for fairness. We revisit these debates in the context of a specific hypothesis regarding the violations of separability by such…
What calibrating variable-value population ethics suggests
Variable-Value axiologies avoid Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion while satisfying some weak instances of the Mere Addition principle. We apply calibration methods to two leading members of the family of Variable-Value views conditional upon: first, a very weak instance of Mere Addition and, second, some plausible empirical assumptions about the size and welfare of the intertemporal world population. We find that such facts calibrate these two Variab…
A trilemma for the lexical utility model of the precautionary principle
Bartha and DesRoches (Synthese 199(3–4):8701–8740, 2021) and Steel and Bartha (Risk Analysis 43(2):260–268, 2023) argue that we should understand the precautionary principle as the injunction to maximise lexical utilities. They show that the lexical utility model has important pragmatic advantages. Moreover, the model has the theoretical advantage of satisfying all axioms of expected utility theory except continuity. In this paper I raise a trile…
Incommensurability, the sequence argument, and the Pareto principle
Parfit (Theoria 82:110–127, 2016) responded to the Sequence Argument for the Repugnant Conclusion by introducing imprecise equality. However, Parfit’s notion of imprecise equality lacked structure. Hájek and Rabinowicz (2022) improved on Parfit’s proposal in this regard, by introducing a notion of degrees of incommensurability . Although Hájek and Rabinowicz’s proposal is a step forward, and may help solve many paradoxes, it can only avoid the Re…
Identified person “bias” as decreasing marginal value of chances
Many philosophers think that we should use a lottery to decide who gets a good to which two persons have an equal claim but which only one person can get. Some philosophers think that we should save identified persons from harm even at the expense of saving a somewhat greater number of statistical persons from the same harm. I defend a principled way of justifying both judgements, namely, by appealing to the decreasing marginal moral value of sur…
Calibration dilemmas in the ethics of distribution
This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several ‘calibration dilemmas’, in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities. We first lay out a series of such dilemmas for prioritarian theories. We then consider a widely endorsed family of egalitarian…
The Tragedy of the Risk Averse
Those who are risk averse with respect to money, and thus turn down some gambles with positive monetary expectations, are nevertheless often willing to accept bundles involving multiple such gambles. Therefore, it might seem that such people should become more willing to accept a risky but favourable gamble if they put it in context with the collection of gambles that they predict they will be faced with in the future. However, it turns out that …
Fairness and risk attitudes
According to a common judgement, a social planner should often use a lottery to decide which of two people should receive a good. This judgement undermines one of the best-known arguments for utilitarianism, due to John C. Harsanyi, and more generally undermines axiomatic arguments for utilitarianism and similar views. In this paper we ask which combinations of views about (a) the social planner’s attitude to risk and inequality, and (b) the subj…
In Defence of Pigou–Dalton for Chances
I defend a weak version of the Pigou–Dalton principle for chances. The principle says that it is better to increase the survival chance of a person who is more likely to die rather than a person who is less likely to die, assuming that the two people do not differ in any other morally relevant respect. The principle justifies plausible moral judgements that standard ex post views, such as prioritarianism and rank-dependent egalitarianism, cannot …
Continuity and catastrophic risk
Suppose that a decision-maker’s aim, under certainty, is to maximize some continuous value, such as lifetime income or continuous social welfare. Can such a decision-maker rationally satisfy what has been called ‘continuity for easy cases’ while at the same time satisfying what seems to be a widespread intuition against the full-blown continuity axiom of expected utility theory? In this note I argue that the answer is ‘no’: given transitivity and…
Transformative Experience, Awareness Growth, and the Limits of Rational Planning
Laurie Paul argues that, when it comes to many of your most significant life-changing decisions, the principles of rational choice are silent. That is because, in these cases, you anticipate that one of your choice options would yield a transformative experience . We argue that such decisions are best seen as ones in which you anticipate awareness growth . You do not merely lack knowledge about which possible outcome will arise from a transformat…
What Should We Agree on about the Repugnant Conclusion
The Repugnant Conclusion is an implication of some approaches to population ethics. It states, in Derek Parfit's original formulation, For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living. (Parfit 1984: 388)
Ambiguity aversion behind the veil of ignorance
The veil of ignorance argument was used by John C. Harsanyi to defend Utilitarianism and by John Rawls to defend the absolute priority of the worst off. In a recent paper, Lara Buchak revives the veil of ignorance argument, and uses it to defend an intermediate position between Harsanyi’s and Rawls’ that she calls Relative Prioritarianism. None of these authors explore the implications of allowing that agent’s behind the veil are sensitive to amb…
Radical interpretation and decision theory
This paper takes issue with an influential interpretationist argument for physicalism about intentionality based on the possibility of radical interpretation. The interpretationist defends the physicalist thesis that the intentional truths supervene on the physical truths by arguing that it is possible for a radical interpreter, who knows all of the physical truths, to work out the intentional truths about what an arbitrary agent believes, desire…
Is risk aversion irrational? Examining the “fallacy” of large numbers
Catastrophic risk
Catastrophic risk raises questions that are not only of practical importance, but also of great philosophical interest, such as how to define 'catastrophe' and what distinguishes catastrophic outcomes from non-catastrophic ones. Catastrophic risk also raises questions about how to rationally respond to such risks. How to rationally respond arguably partly depends on the severity of the uncertainty, for instance, whether quantitative probabilistic…
What Is Risk Aversion
According to the orthodox treatment of risk preferences in decision theory, they are to be explained in terms of the agent’s desires about concrete outcomes. The orthodoxy has been criticized both for conflating two types of attitudes and for committing agents to attitudes that do not seem rationally required. To avoid these problems, it has been suggested that an agent’s attitudes to risk should be captured by a risk function that is independent…
Counterfactual Desirability
The desirability of what actually occurs is often influenced by what could have been. Preferences based on such value dependencies between actual and counterfactual outcomes generate a class of problems for orthodox decision theory, the best-known perhaps being the so-called Allais paradox. In this article we solve these problems by extending Richard Jeffrey's decision theory to counterfactual prospects, using a multidimensional possible-world se…
Desirability of conditionals
How Valuable Are Chances
Chance Neutrality is the thesis that, conditional on some proposition being true (or being false), its chance of being true should be a matter of practical indifference. The aim of this article is to examine whether Chance Neutrality is a requirement of rationality. We prove that given Chance Neutrality, the Principal Principle entails a thesis called Linearity; the centerpiece of von Neumann and Morgenstern’s expected utility theory. With this i…
Desires, beliefs and conditional desirability
What Is Risk Aversion
According to the orthodox treatment of risk preferences in decision theory, they are to be explained in terms of the agent’s desires about concrete outcomes. The orthodoxy has been criticized both for conflating two types of attitudes and for committing agents to attitudes that do not seem rationally required. To avoid these problems, it has been suggested that an agent’s attitudes to risk should be captured by a risk function that is independent…
How Valuable Are Chances
Chance Neutrality is the thesis that, conditional on some proposition being true (or being false), its chance of being true should be a matter of practical indifference. The aim of this article is to examine whether Chance Neutrality is a requirement of rationality. We prove that given Chance Neutrality, the Principal Principle entails a thesis called Linearity; the centerpiece of von Neumann and Morgenstern’s expected utility theory. With this i…
What Should We Agree on about the Repugnant Conclusion
The Repugnant Conclusion is an implication of some approaches to population ethics. It states, in Derek Parfit's original formulation, For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living. (Parfit 1984: 388)
Counterfactual Desirability
The desirability of what actually occurs is often influenced by what could have been. Preferences based on such value dependencies between actual and counterfactual outcomes generate a class of problems for orthodox decision theory, the best-known perhaps being the so-called Allais paradox. In this article we solve these problems by extending Richard Jeffrey's decision theory to counterfactual prospects, using a multidimensional possible-world se…
Ambiguity aversion behind the veil of ignorance
The veil of ignorance argument was used by John C. Harsanyi to defend Utilitarianism and by John Rawls to defend the absolute priority of the worst off. In a recent paper, Lara Buchak revives the veil of ignorance argument, and uses it to defend an intermediate position between Harsanyi’s and Rawls’ that she calls Relative Prioritarianism. None of these authors explore the implications of allowing that agent’s behind the veil are sensitive to amb…
Desires, beliefs and conditional desirability
In Defence of Pigou–Dalton for Chances
I defend a weak version of the Pigou–Dalton principle for chances. The principle says that it is better to increase the survival chance of a person who is more likely to die rather than a person who is less likely to die, assuming that the two people do not differ in any other morally relevant respect. The principle justifies plausible moral judgements that standard ex post views, such as prioritarianism and rank-dependent egalitarianism, cannot …
Transformative Experience, Awareness Growth, and the Limits of Rational Planning
Laurie Paul argues that, when it comes to many of your most significant life-changing decisions, the principles of rational choice are silent. That is because, in these cases, you anticipate that one of your choice options would yield a transformative experience . We argue that such decisions are best seen as ones in which you anticipate awareness growth . You do not merely lack knowledge about which possible outcome will arise from a transformat…
Catastrophic risk
Catastrophic risk raises questions that are not only of practical importance, but also of great philosophical interest, such as how to define 'catastrophe' and what distinguishes catastrophic outcomes from non-catastrophic ones. Catastrophic risk also raises questions about how to rationally respond to such risks. How to rationally respond arguably partly depends on the severity of the uncertainty, for instance, whether quantitative probabilistic…
Desirability of conditionals
Desires, beliefs and conditional desirability
How Valuable Are Chances
Chance Neutrality is the thesis that, conditional on some proposition being true (or being false), its chance of being true should be a matter of practical indifference. The aim of this article is to examine whether Chance Neutrality is a requirement of rationality. We prove that given Chance Neutrality, the Principal Principle entails a thesis called Linearity; the centerpiece of von Neumann and Morgenstern’s expected utility theory. With this i…
Desirability of conditionals
Counterfactual Desirability
The desirability of what actually occurs is often influenced by what could have been. Preferences based on such value dependencies between actual and counterfactual outcomes generate a class of problems for orthodox decision theory, the best-known perhaps being the so-called Allais paradox. In this article we solve these problems by extending Richard Jeffrey's decision theory to counterfactual prospects, using a multidimensional possible-world se…
What Is Risk Aversion
According to the orthodox treatment of risk preferences in decision theory, they are to be explained in terms of the agent’s desires about concrete outcomes. The orthodoxy has been criticized both for conflating two types of attitudes and for committing agents to attitudes that do not seem rationally required. To avoid these problems, it has been suggested that an agent’s attitudes to risk should be captured by a risk function that is independent…
Is risk aversion irrational? Examining the “fallacy” of large numbers
Catastrophic risk
Catastrophic risk raises questions that are not only of practical importance, but also of great philosophical interest, such as how to define 'catastrophe' and what distinguishes catastrophic outcomes from non-catastrophic ones. Catastrophic risk also raises questions about how to rationally respond to such risks. How to rationally respond arguably partly depends on the severity of the uncertainty, for instance, whether quantitative probabilistic…
What Should We Agree on about the Repugnant Conclusion
The Repugnant Conclusion is an implication of some approaches to population ethics. It states, in Derek Parfit's original formulation, For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living. (Parfit 1984: 388)
Ambiguity aversion behind the veil of ignorance
The veil of ignorance argument was used by John C. Harsanyi to defend Utilitarianism and by John Rawls to defend the absolute priority of the worst off. In a recent paper, Lara Buchak revives the veil of ignorance argument, and uses it to defend an intermediate position between Harsanyi’s and Rawls’ that she calls Relative Prioritarianism. None of these authors explore the implications of allowing that agent’s behind the veil are sensitive to amb…
Radical interpretation and decision theory
This paper takes issue with an influential interpretationist argument for physicalism about intentionality based on the possibility of radical interpretation. The interpretationist defends the physicalist thesis that the intentional truths supervene on the physical truths by arguing that it is possible for a radical interpreter, who knows all of the physical truths, to work out the intentional truths about what an arbitrary agent believes, desire…
Continuity and catastrophic risk
Suppose that a decision-maker’s aim, under certainty, is to maximize some continuous value, such as lifetime income or continuous social welfare. Can such a decision-maker rationally satisfy what has been called ‘continuity for easy cases’ while at the same time satisfying what seems to be a widespread intuition against the full-blown continuity axiom of expected utility theory? In this note I argue that the answer is ‘no’: given transitivity and…
Transformative Experience, Awareness Growth, and the Limits of Rational Planning
Laurie Paul argues that, when it comes to many of your most significant life-changing decisions, the principles of rational choice are silent. That is because, in these cases, you anticipate that one of your choice options would yield a transformative experience . We argue that such decisions are best seen as ones in which you anticipate awareness growth . You do not merely lack knowledge about which possible outcome will arise from a transformat…
Calibration dilemmas in the ethics of distribution
This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several ‘calibration dilemmas’, in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities. We first lay out a series of such dilemmas for prioritarian theories. We then consider a widely endorsed family of egalitarian…
The Tragedy of the Risk Averse
Those who are risk averse with respect to money, and thus turn down some gambles with positive monetary expectations, are nevertheless often willing to accept bundles involving multiple such gambles. Therefore, it might seem that such people should become more willing to accept a risky but favourable gamble if they put it in context with the collection of gambles that they predict they will be faced with in the future. However, it turns out that …
Fairness and risk attitudes
According to a common judgement, a social planner should often use a lottery to decide which of two people should receive a good. This judgement undermines one of the best-known arguments for utilitarianism, due to John C. Harsanyi, and more generally undermines axiomatic arguments for utilitarianism and similar views. In this paper we ask which combinations of views about (a) the social planner’s attitude to risk and inequality, and (b) the subj…
In Defence of Pigou–Dalton for Chances
I defend a weak version of the Pigou–Dalton principle for chances. The principle says that it is better to increase the survival chance of a person who is more likely to die rather than a person who is less likely to die, assuming that the two people do not differ in any other morally relevant respect. The principle justifies plausible moral judgements that standard ex post views, such as prioritarianism and rank-dependent egalitarianism, cannot …
What calibrating variable-value population ethics suggests
Variable-Value axiologies avoid Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion while satisfying some weak instances of the Mere Addition principle. We apply calibration methods to two leading members of the family of Variable-Value views conditional upon: first, a very weak instance of Mere Addition and, second, some plausible empirical assumptions about the size and welfare of the intertemporal world population. We find that such facts calibrate these two Variab…
A trilemma for the lexical utility model of the precautionary principle
Bartha and DesRoches (Synthese 199(3–4):8701–8740, 2021) and Steel and Bartha (Risk Analysis 43(2):260–268, 2023) argue that we should understand the precautionary principle as the injunction to maximise lexical utilities. They show that the lexical utility model has important pragmatic advantages. Moreover, the model has the theoretical advantage of satisfying all axioms of expected utility theory except continuity. In this paper I raise a trile…
Incommensurability, the sequence argument, and the Pareto principle
Parfit (Theoria 82:110–127, 2016) responded to the Sequence Argument for the Repugnant Conclusion by introducing imprecise equality. However, Parfit’s notion of imprecise equality lacked structure. Hájek and Rabinowicz (2022) improved on Parfit’s proposal in this regard, by introducing a notion of degrees of incommensurability . Although Hájek and Rabinowicz’s proposal is a step forward, and may help solve many paradoxes, it can only avoid the Re…
Identified person “bias” as decreasing marginal value of chances
Many philosophers think that we should use a lottery to decide who gets a good to which two persons have an equal claim but which only one person can get. Some philosophers think that we should save identified persons from harm even at the expense of saving a somewhat greater number of statistical persons from the same harm. I defend a principled way of justifying both judgements, namely, by appealing to the decreasing marginal moral value of sur…
Population ethics under risk
Population axiology concerns how to rank populations by the relation “is socially preferred to”. So far, population ethicists have (with important exceptions) focused less on the question of how to rank population prospects, that is, alternatives that contain uncertainty as to which population they will bring about. Most public policy choices, however, are decisions under uncertainty, including policy choices that affect the size of a population …
Can the Normic de minimis Expected Utility Theory save the de minimis Principle
Recently, Martin Smith defended a view he called the “normic de minimis expected utility theory”. The basic idea is to integrate a ‘normic’ version of the de minimis principle into an expected utility-based decision theoretical framework. According to the de minimis principle some risks are so small (falling below a threshold) that they can be ignored. While this threshold standardly is defined in terms of some probability, the normic conception …
Fairness, ambiguity and dynamic consistency
Considerations of dynamic inconsistency have figured prominently in debates over the rationality of preferences that violate the separability conditions characteristic of expected utility theory. These debates have mostly focused on risk- and ambiguity averse preferences, but analogous considerations apply to preferences for fairness. We revisit these debates in the context of a specific hypothesis regarding the violations of separability by such…
Does Global Justice Demand Solar Geoengineering
The ‘Global Justice Argument’ posits an obligation to research solar geoengineering on the grounds that climate change is unjust and solar geoengineering offers the most effective means to reduce harm befalling climate-disadvantaged people. But even if those claims hold, the argument contains an important gap. As solar geoengineering cannot restore pre-injustice conditions, it at best serves as compensation. Hence, a version of the argument sensi…
Ocean-Based Salmon Farming in advance
Ocean-based salmon farming, as presently practiced, is thought to pose an existential threat to what we today think of as wild salmon. This raises ethical questions about, first, the value of wild salmon, and, second, the value of wild salmon of the particular type that exists today. This essay uses the debate around ocean-based salmon farming as a case study of ‘irreversible damage,’ a concept that figures heavily in environmental laws and regul…
Economics (19 obras) · Epistemology (17 obras) · Philosophy (17 obras) · Mathematical economics (16 obras) · Mathematics (13 obras) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (12 obras) · Positive economics (11 obras) · Computer Science (8 obras) · Metaphysics (8 obras) · Microeconomics (7 obras)