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No one could call the BBC a bastion of philosophical thought, but just recently they’ve gone “deep”. In a few short days, they’ve exemplified Thomas Kuhn’s “change of subject” across a paradigm shift, embraced Tolstoy’s view of history, and applied something like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to whole new realm of supposed indeterminacy. This is not…

The British public have been remarkably reluctant to adopt heat pumps as a means of home heating. Some take this as a sign of British arrogance — they think everyone should take the experts’ word for it. But I think the widespread scepticism is a reassuring reflection of British scientific common sense. I too am…

I wish climate scientists would concentrate on the baleful effects of climate change instead of dishonestly cranking up their certainty that these effects will occur. It’s a discredit to anyone’s epistemic judgement to act out Pascal’s wager like that. Take the following example from today’s World at One: BBC: “It used to be said at…

[I’ve succumbed to the urge to use italics in this, although my original aim was to express these thoughts as a thread of Tweets. — Jeremy] 1There is a variety of different kinds of ought. For example, rationally, “anyone who believes that p and that p implies q ought to believe that q”. Prudentially, “we…

Christus natus est! the cock Christ is born Carols on the morning dark. Quando? croaks the raven stiff When? Freezing on the broken cliff. Hoc nocte, replies the crow This night Beating high above the snow. Ubi? Ubi? booms the ox Where? From its cavern in the rocks. Bethlehem, then bleats the sheep Huddled on…

The traditional understanding of knowledge as “justified true belief” is internalist. That is to say, for a belief to count as an item of knowledge, it must actually be believed, and it must actually be true, and it must satisfy a third condition of being “justified”, which is understood as a state of mind. Justification…

Most things of value in life depend on luck. But what is it, exactly, to be lucky? I think an agent is lucky when he wants something (i.e. he has a goal) and then passes through a sort of “trial” in which getting what he wants is statistically unlikely, or at least not guaranteed. If…

It’s remarkable how individualism has come to be identified with right-wing politics. By “individualism” I mean: love of individuality; high regard for the freedom and welfare of individuals; respect for the interests of sentient beings rather than for non-sentient political abstractions; and the expectation that we can understand society by looking at how its constituent…

Preference utilitarianism differs from traditional utilitarianism in that it doesn’t enjoin us to maximize any sort of commodity such as pleasure or happiness. The rather murky concept of “utility” has no place in preference utilitarianism. Instead, as Peter Singer lucidly put it, preference utilitarianism is the “minimum moral position”. To act morally, an agent should…