Ittay Nissan-Rozen

AGAINST MORAL HEDGING

It has been argued by several philosophers that a morally motivated rational agent who has to make decisions under conditions of moral uncertainty ought to maximize expected moral value in his choices, where the expectation is calculated relative to the agents moral uncertainty. I present a counter-example to this thesis and to a larger family of decision rules for choice under conditions of moral uncertainty. Based on this counter-example, I argue against the thesis and suggest a reason for its failure – that it is based on the false assumption that inter-theoretical comparisons of moral value are meaningful.

A triviality result for the “Desire by Necessity” thesis

A triviality result for what Lewis (Mind 105: 303–313, 1996) called “the Desire by Necessity Thesis” and Broome (Mind 100(2): 265–267, 1991) called “the Desire as Expectation Thesis” is presented. The result shows that this thesis and three other reasonable conditions can be jointly satisfied only in trivial cases. Some meta-ethical implications of the result are discussed. The discussion also highlights several issues regarding Lewis’ original triviality result for “the Desire as Belief Thesis” that have not been properly understood in the literature.

Is Value under Hypothesis Value

In the context of two recent yet distinct philosophical debates— over choice under conditions of moral uncertainty and over transformative choices— several philosophers have implicitly adopted a thesis about how to evaluate alternatives of uncertain value. The thesis says that the value a rational agent ought to attach to an alternative under the hypothesis that the value of this alternative is x, ought to be x. I argue that while in some contexts this thesis trivially holds, in the context of the two debates in which the thesis has been adopted, it does not. I also discuss several implications of this failure.

Nudging in the clinic: the ethical implications of differences in doctors’ and patients’ point of view

There is an extensive ethical debate regarding the justifiability of doctors nudging towards healthy behaviour and better health-related choices. One line of argument in favour of nudging is based on empirical findings, according to which a healthy majority among the public support nudges. In this paper, we show, based on an experiment we conducted, that, in health-related choices, people’s ethical attitudes to nudging are strongly affected by the point of view from which the nudge is considered. Significant differences have been found between doctors’ ethical attitude to clinical nudging and that of patients. We show how these differences weaken the argument for nudging from public support. Moreover, our findings raise concerns regarding doctors’ ability to nudge ethically according to their own standards, as they may underestimate the degree of harm medical nudges can cause to informed consent, doctor–patient trust and other important ethically relevant features of health-related choices.

A pragmatic argument against equal weighting

We present a minimal pragmatic restriction on the interpretation of the weights in the “Equal Weight View” (and, more generally, in the “Linear Pooling” view) regarding peer disagreement and show that the view cannot respect it. Based on this result we argue against the view. The restriction is the following one: if an agent,

Reasoning with Comparative Moral Judgements: An Argument for Moral Bayesianism

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On the Inadmissibility of Some Historical Information

i, assigns an equal or higher weight to another agent,