Geoffrey Rose's ‘prevention paradox’ occurs when a population‐based preventative health measure that brings large benefits to the community – such as compulsory seatbelts, a ‘fat tax’, or mass immunisation – offers little to each participating individual. Although the prevention paradox is not obviously a paradox in the sense in which philosophers understand the term, it does raise important normative ...

The book describes and interprets the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume’s theory of the basis of a society’s development from barbarism to civilization and for the maintenance of a civilized society. An analysis of the development and maintenance of civilization should, according to Hume, be conducted along three dimensions, a political, an economic and one concerning civil society. ...

Denne artikkelen gir en kort gjennomgang av arbeidsmarkedet for norske filosofer og vektlegger noen av de største problemene filosofer i dag står overfor innen akademia og arbeidslivet for øvrig. Jeg relaterer problemene på arbeidsmarkedet (for kandidater på høyere og lavere akademisk nivå) til svakheter innen utdanningssystemet og akademisk publisering. Avslutningsvis tar jeg til orde for en ...

«Hva er det vi egentlig mener når vi sier, mennesket er dødelig?» spør Woody Allen i boken The Insanity Defence. Han legger til: «Det er åpenbart ikke et kompliment.»1 Jeg tror Woody tar feil her. Vår dødelighet er et kompliment – eller i det minste av det gode – siden livet uten døden ville være katastrofalt. Udødelige liv fører til dyp kjedsomhet, eksistensiell angst og en radikal form for ...

This paper is a response to a paper by Marcus Giaquinto in which he argues that lexical meaning is moderately indeterminate and that this poses a problem for the linguistic view of a priori knowledge. I argue that accepting the moderate indeterminacy thesis as he presents it is perfectly compatible with both the linguistic view in general and the specific suggestion that some <i>a priori</i> knowledge ...

According to Paul Boghossian, some truths are knowable a priori because they are expressed by epistemically analytic sentences. In such cases, understanding the sentence is meant to suffice for justified belief in the proposition it expresses. One alleged route from understanding to justification goes via what Boghossian calls 'the synonymy model'. This article presents a dilemma for this model and ...

In this paper, I propose a critique of the naturalist version of the Desire-Based Reasons Model. I first set the scene by spelling out the connection between naturalism and the Model. After this, I introduce Christine Korsgaard’s circularity argument against what she calls the instrumental principle. Since Korsgaard’s targets, officially, were non-naturalist advocates of the principle, I show why ...

The present paper identifies a challenge for a certain view of practical reasons, according to which practical reasons (both normative and motivating) are states of affairs. The problem is that those who endorse such a view seem forced to maintain both a) that the contents of beliefs are states of affairs and b) that the conception according to which the contents of beliefs are states of affairs is ...

This paper has a twofold aim in determining who should be granted electoral rights at the state level, one negative and another positive. The negative part deconstructs the link between state-level political membership and citizenship and contests naturalization procedures. This approach argues that naturalization procedures, when coercively used as a necessary condition for accessing electoral ...

There are two main ways of understanding the function of surrogate decision making in a legal context: the Best Interests Standard and the Substituted Judgment Standard. First, we will argue that the Best Interests Standard is difficult to apply to unconscious patients. Application is difficult regardless of whether they have ever been conscious. Second, we will argue that if we accept the least ...