This week we will discuss Joseph Heath's chapter 'Positive Social Time Preference', from his book Philosophical Foundations of Climate Policy Change. The chapter's a bit long, but readers can comfortably skip sections 6.2-6.5 and the equations. Location: Edgecliffe G03 and Teams Contact: [email protected]
Location: Edgecliffe G03 Title: Positive interest rates block green transitions, and there is no compelling reason not to fix the interest rate at zero Commentator: Carl Mildenberger (Zurich)
This week we will be discussing Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve's article,'Equality Versus Priority' Location: Edgecliffe G03 and Teams Contact: [email protected]
Title: Chance Prioritarianism Location: Teams (online only), and streamed from Edgecliffe G03 Abstract: I will defend what we could call survival chance prioritarianism, according to which the moral value of improving someone’s chance of surviving (some period) is greater the more likely the person was to die before the improvement. I motivate this view by ... Read more
This week will be a work-in-progress session, discussing a draft paper by our very own Bradley Hillier-Smith, on 'Rights, Duties and Inviolability'. Here is the abstract: Rights entail corresponding negative duties not to violate those rights. On this, all rights-theorists agree. Yet there is disagreement on whether rights also entail positive duties to protect and ... Read more
This week we will be discussing Jacob Blumenfeld's article 'Climate Barbarism: Adapting to a Wrong World' Location: Edgecliffe G03 and Teams Contact: [email protected]
Title: Risk, Ambiguity, and Ethical Decision-Making Abstract: I argue that it can be rational to defer to an authority about what to believe or what to do even when doing so goes against one’s own reasoning. Indeed, such deference is rational in typical cases in which individuals treat others as authorities: for example, experts in ... Read more
This week we will be discussing Jacob Blumenfeld's article 'Climate Barbarism: Adapting to a Wrong World' Location: Edgecliffe G03 and Teams Contact: [email protected]
Location: Edgecliffe G03 Title: Green Bioethics: Environmental Sustainability and Health Care Commentator: Joseph Millum (St Andrews) Abstract: Health care is ubiquitous in the industrialized world. Yet, every medical development, technique, and procedure impacts the environment. By 2017, the National Health Service’s Health, and Social Care sectors had a carbon output (CO2) of 27.1 million tons. Carbon ... Read more
This week we will discuss Guy Kahane's article 'Our Cosmic Insignificance' Location: Edgecliffe G03 and Teams Contact: [email protected]