Włodek Rabinowicz
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3597554 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Włodek Rabinowicz |
| PRENOMES | Włodek |
| SOBRENOME | Rabinowicz |
| ASSINATURA | RABINOWICZ W |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Lund University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5910-0258 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 33 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 78 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 33 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1996 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Two intuitions about free will—Some afterthoughts
In 2014, Christian List and I published a paper that delineated our view regarding what it takes for an agent to act freely. We suggested that this requires the action to be endorsed by the agent and caused by this endorsement and yet not be necessitated. Free action requires indeterminism at the agential level—the kind of indeterminism that is compatible with physical determinism. I still think that our proposal was on the right track, but I bel…
Introduction to the Special Issue on The Many Faces of Compatibilism
Krister Segerberg in Memoriam (1936–2025)
Getting Personal
According to the Intuition of Neutrality, there is a range of well-being levels such that adding people with lives at these levels doesn’t make the world either better or worse. As lives in the neutral range can be good for those who live them, this intuition is in conflict with one of the main tenets of welfarism; it creates a disparity between what is good for a person and what is impersonally good. Adding a person with a good life needn’t make…
Can Parfit’s Appeal to Incommensurabilities in Value Block the Continuum Argument for the Repugnant Conclusion?
Parfit proposed blocking the Continuum Argument for the Repugnant Conclusion by letting incommensurabilities (“imprecise equalities” in his terminology) intervene at some points in the argument’s population sequence. It is an attractive option. But the relevant incommensurabilities need to be very thoroughgoing if the argument is to be blocked: they must persist even if the next population in the sequence is improved by making it arbitrarily larg…
Degrees of commensurability and the repugnant conclusion
Two objects of valuation are said to be incommensurable if neither is better than the other, nor are they equally good. This negative, coarse‐grained characterization fails to capture the nuanced structure of incommensurability. We argue that our evaluative resources are far richer than orthodoxy recognizes. We model value comparisons with the corresponding class of permissible preference orderings. Then, making use of our model, we introduce a p…
Sten Lindström in memoriam
Explaining value
Orsi and Garcia (Philos Stud, 2020, 10.1007/s11098-020-01471-6 ) argue that fitting-attitude analysis of value (FA-analysis, for short) is vulnerable to an explanatory objection. On FA-analysis, for an object to be valuable is for it to be a fitting target of an attitude—a pro-attitude if its value is positive and a con-attitude if it is negative. For different kinds of value different kinds of attitudes are fitting: desire for desirability, admi…
A Simpler, More Compelling Money Pump with Foresight
One might think that money pumps directed at agents with cyclic preferences can be avoided by foresight. This view was challenged two decades ago by the discovery of a money pump with foresight, which works against agents who use backward induction. But backward induction implausibly assumes that the agent would act rationally and retain her trust in her future rationality even at choice nodes that could only be reached if she were to act irratio…
Introduction to the special issue “Beliefs in Groups” of Theory and Decision
Are Institutions Rules in Equilibrium? Comments on Guala’s Understanding Institutions
In this comment on Francesco Guala’s Understanding Institutions, I express my admiration for the book but I also raise some critical criticisms: His general account of institutions as rules-in-equilibrium seems to get their ontology wrong by disregarding their material side - their concrete realizations. It also diregards social institutions whose rules are not (and are not meant to be) in equilibrium. Finally, his suggestion that institutional e…
McGee 's Counterexample to the Ramsey Test
Vann McGee has proposed a counterexample to the Ramsey Test. In the counterexample, a seemingly trustworthy source has testified that p and that if not‐ p , then q . If one subsequently learns not‐ p (and so learns that the source is wrong about p ), then one has reason to doubt the trustworthiness of the source (perhaps even the identity of the source) and so, the argument goes, one has reason to doubt the conditional asserted by the source. Sin…
From values to probabilities
D erek P arfit's Contributions to Philosophy
The Value of Existence
Can it be better or worse for a person to exist than not to exist at all? This old and challenging existential question has been raised anew in contemporary moral philosophy, mainly for two reasons. First, traditional “impersonal” ethical theories, such as utilitarianism, have counterintuitive implications in population ethics, for example, the repugnant conclusion. Second, it has seemed evident to many that an outcome can be better than another …
Two Intuitions About Free Will
Free will is widely thought to require (i) the possibility of acting otherwise and (ii) the intentional endorsement of one’s actions (“indeterministic picking is not enough”). According to (i), a necessary condition for free will is agential-level indeterminism: at some points in time, an agent’s prior history admits more than one possible continuation. According to (ii), however, a free action must be intentionally endorsed, and indeterminism ma…
The interference problem for the betting interpretation of degrees of belief
In memoriam
The puzzle of the hats
Preference Utilitarianism by Way of Preference Change
Value Relations
The paper provides a general account of value relations. It takes its departure in a special type of value relation, parity, which according to Ruth Chang is a form of evaluative comparability that differs from the three standard forms of comparability: betterness, worseness and equal goodness. Recently, Joshua Gert has suggested that the notion of parity can be accounted for if value comparisons are interpreted as normative assessments of prefer…
Democratic Answers to Complex Questions – An Epistemic Perspective
Buck-Passing and the Right Kind of Reasons
The 'buck-passing' account equates the value of an object with the existence of reasons to favour it. As we argued in an earlier paper, this analysis faces the 'wrong kind of reasons' problem: there may be reasons for pro-attitudes towards worthless objects, in particular if it is the pro-attitudes, rather than their objects, that are valuable. Jonas Olson has recently suggested how to resolve this difficulty: a reason to favour an object is of t…
A Distinction in Value
Millian Superiorities
Suppose one sets up a sequence of less and less valuable objects such that each object in the sequence is only marginally worse than its immediate predecessor. Could one in this way arrive at something that is dramatically inferior to the point of departure? It has been claimed that if there is a radical value difference between the objects at each end of the sequence, then at some point there must be a corresponding radical difference between th…
Value Based on Preferences
What distinguishes preference utilitarianism (PU) from other utilitarian positions is the axiological component: the view concerning what is intrinsically valuable. According to PU, intrinsic value is based on preferences. Intrinsically valuable states are connected to our preferences (wants, desires) being satisfied
Value Relations
The paper provides a general account of value relations. It takes its departure in a special type of value relation, parity, which according to Ruth Chang is a form of evaluative comparability that differs from the three standard forms of comparability: betterness, worseness and equal goodness. Recently, Joshua Gert has suggested that the notion of parity can be accounted for if value comparisons are interpreted as normative assessments of prefer…
Buck-Passing and the Right Kind of Reasons
The 'buck-passing' account equates the value of an object with the existence of reasons to favour it. As we argued in an earlier paper, this analysis faces the 'wrong kind of reasons' problem: there may be reasons for pro-attitudes towards worthless objects, in particular if it is the pro-attitudes, rather than their objects, that are valuable. Jonas Olson has recently suggested how to resolve this difficulty: a reason to favour an object is of t…
Democratic Answers to Complex Questions – An Epistemic Perspective
Prioritarianism for Prospects
The Interpersonal Addition Theorem, due to John Broome, states that, given certain seemingly innocuous assumptions, the overall utility of an uncertain prospect can be represented as the sum of its individual (expected) utilities. Given ‘Bernoulli's hypothesis’ according to which individual utility coincides with individual welfare, this result appears to be incompatible with the Priority View. On that view, due to Derek Parfit, the benefits to t…
The Value of Existence
Can it be better or worse for a person to exist than not to exist at all? This old and challenging existential question has been raised anew in contemporary moral philosophy, mainly for two reasons. First, traditional “impersonal” ethical theories, such as utilitarianism, have counterintuitive implications in population ethics, for example, the repugnant conclusion. Second, it has seemed evident to many that an outcome can be better than another …
Millian Superiorities
Suppose one sets up a sequence of less and less valuable objects such that each object in the sequence is only marginally worse than its immediate predecessor. Could one in this way arrive at something that is dramatically inferior to the point of departure? It has been claimed that if there is a radical value difference between the objects at each end of the sequence, then at some point there must be a corresponding radical difference between th…
Two Intuitions About Free Will
Free will is widely thought to require (i) the possibility of acting otherwise and (ii) the intentional endorsement of one’s actions (“indeterministic picking is not enough”). According to (i), a necessary condition for free will is agential-level indeterminism: at some points in time, an agent’s prior history admits more than one possible continuation. According to (ii), however, a free action must be intentionally endorsed, and indeterminism ma…
The interference problem for the betting interpretation of degrees of belief
The puzzle of the hats
Reconsidering the Foole's Rejoinder
What if I were in his shoes? On Hare's argument for preference utilitarianism
Value Based on Preferences
What distinguishes preference utilitarianism (PU) from other utilitarian positions is the axiological component: the view concerning what is intrinsically valuable. According to PU, intrinsic value is based on preferences. Intrinsically valuable states are connected to our preferences (wants, desires) being satisfied
A Distinction in Value
The paper argues that the final value of an object—i.e., its value for its own sake—need not be intrinsic. Extrinsic final value, which accrues to things (or persons) in virtue of their relational rather than internal features, cannot be traced back to the intrinsic value of states that involve these things together with their relations. On the contrary, such states, insofar as they are valuable at all, derive their value from the things involved…
Kotarbinski's Early Criticism of Utilitarianism
Apart from a short introduction, this contribution consists of a translation of Tadeusz Kotarbinski's ‘Utilitarianism and The Ethics of Pity’ (1914). In that concise and relatively unknown early note, written before he embarked on his long and influential career as a nominalist logician and philosopher of science, Kotarbinski formulates four astonishingly ‘modern’ objections to utilitarianism. Unlike Christian ‘ethics of pity’, utilitarian ethics…
Prioritarianism for Prospects
The Interpersonal Addition Theorem, due to John Broome, states that, given certain seemingly innocuous assumptions, the overall utility of an uncertain prospect can be represented as the sum of its individual (expected) utilities. Given ‘Bernoulli's hypothesis’ according to which individual utility coincides with individual welfare, this result appears to be incompatible with the Priority View. On that view, due to Derek Parfit, the benefits to t…
The Size of Inequality and Its Badness Some reflections around Temkin's Inequality
This paper puts forward the following claims: (i) The size of inequality in welfare should be distinguished from its badness. (ii) The size of a pairwise inequality between two individuals can be measured by the absolute or the relative welfare distance between their welfare levels, but it does not depend on the welfare levels of other individuals. (iii) The size of inequality in a social state may be understood either as the degree of pairwise i…
Reconsidering the Foole's Rejoinder
The Strike of the Demon
A Distinction in Value
Millian Superiorities
Suppose one sets up a sequence of less and less valuable objects such that each object in the sequence is only marginally worse than its immediate predecessor. Could one in this way arrive at something that is dramatically inferior to the point of departure? It has been claimed that if there is a radical value difference between the objects at each end of the sequence, then at some point there must be a corresponding radical difference between th…
Democratic Answers to Complex Questions – An Epistemic Perspective
Buck-Passing and the Right Kind of Reasons
The 'buck-passing' account equates the value of an object with the existence of reasons to favour it. As we argued in an earlier paper, this analysis faces the 'wrong kind of reasons' problem: there may be reasons for pro-attitudes towards worthless objects, in particular if it is the pro-attitudes, rather than their objects, that are valuable. Jonas Olson has recently suggested how to resolve this difficulty: a reason to favour an object is of t…
Value Relations
The paper provides a general account of value relations. It takes its departure in a special type of value relation, parity, which according to Ruth Chang is a form of evaluative comparability that differs from the three standard forms of comparability: betterness, worseness and equal goodness. Recently, Joshua Gert has suggested that the notion of parity can be accounted for if value comparisons are interpreted as normative assessments of prefer…
Preference Utilitarianism by Way of Preference Change
In memoriam
The puzzle of the hats
The interference problem for the betting interpretation of degrees of belief
Two Intuitions About Free Will
Free will is widely thought to require (i) the possibility of acting otherwise and (ii) the intentional endorsement of one’s actions (“indeterministic picking is not enough”). According to (i), a necessary condition for free will is agential-level indeterminism: at some points in time, an agent’s prior history admits more than one possible continuation. According to (ii), however, a free action must be intentionally endorsed, and indeterminism ma…
The Value of Existence
Can it be better or worse for a person to exist than not to exist at all? This old and challenging existential question has been raised anew in contemporary moral philosophy, mainly for two reasons. First, traditional “impersonal” ethical theories, such as utilitarianism, have counterintuitive implications in population ethics, for example, the repugnant conclusion. Second, it has seemed evident to many that an outcome can be better than another …
D erek P arfit's Contributions to Philosophy
McGee 's Counterexample to the Ramsey Test
Vann McGee has proposed a counterexample to the Ramsey Test. In the counterexample, a seemingly trustworthy source has testified that p and that if not‐ p , then q . If one subsequently learns not‐ p (and so learns that the source is wrong about p ), then one has reason to doubt the trustworthiness of the source (perhaps even the identity of the source) and so, the argument goes, one has reason to doubt the conditional asserted by the source. Sin…
From values to probabilities
Introduction to the special issue “Beliefs in Groups” of Theory and Decision
Are Institutions Rules in Equilibrium? Comments on Guala’s Understanding Institutions
In this comment on Francesco Guala’s Understanding Institutions, I express my admiration for the book but I also raise some critical criticisms: His general account of institutions as rules-in-equilibrium seems to get their ontology wrong by disregarding their material side - their concrete realizations. It also diregards social institutions whose rules are not (and are not meant to be) in equilibrium. Finally, his suggestion that institutional e…
A Simpler, More Compelling Money Pump with Foresight
One might think that money pumps directed at agents with cyclic preferences can be avoided by foresight. This view was challenged two decades ago by the discovery of a money pump with foresight, which works against agents who use backward induction. But backward induction implausibly assumes that the agent would act rationally and retain her trust in her future rationality even at choice nodes that could only be reached if she were to act irratio…
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