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Risk attitudes when choosing for others (Analysis, 2025)
with Yonathan Fiat
This paper provides a defense of the principle ‘avoid risk for others:’ when a person’s risk-attitudes are unknown, it is wrong to take, on their behalf, some of the risks that they could rationally choose to take.
(open access)
A contractualist approach to threshold deontology: the case of ex-post regulatory changes (Economics and Philosophy, 2025)
with Noam Nisan and Udi Nisan
Common sense morality follows – in many cases – the prescriptions of threshold deontology. Governments, for example, are expected to follow their own rules, but in the face of an extreme price increase, public opinion has often supported changing the rules ex post to increase tax revenues. Such moral license in extreme situations is puzzling from a philosophical and an economic point of view. We present a simple contractualist solution to this puzzle using a game-theoretic model. We argue that allowing for deviations from the social contract in extreme circumstances is a necessary condition for the stability of any social contract.
(open access)
Wanting to know whether (Analysis, 2025)
It is argued that that the desire attributed to an agent, X, in sentences of the form ‘X wants to know whether P’, is not X’s overall desire for ‘X knows that P or X knows that “not P”’, but rather X’s expected conditional desire for knowing the truth about P, given the truth. An implication of this account for distributive justice is discussed.
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Triangulation, incommensurability, and conditionalization (Philosophy of Science, 2024)
with Amir Liron
We present a new justification for methodological triangulation (MT), the practice of using different methods to support the same scientific claim. Unlike existing accounts, our account captures cases in which the different methods in question are associated with, and rely on, incommensurable theories. Using a nonstandard Bayesian model, we show that even in such cases, a commitment to the minimal form of epistemic conservatism, captured by the rigidity condition that stands at the basis of Jeffrey’s conditionalization, supports the practice of MT.
(open access)
Libertarian Paternalism And Susan Hurley's political philosophy (Inquiry, 2025)
As the use of nudges by governmental agencies becomes more common, the need for normative guidelines regarding the processes by which decisions about the implementation of specific nudges are taken becomes more acute. In order to find a justified set of such guidelines one must meet several theoretical challenges to Libertarian Paternalism that arise at the foundational level. In this paper, I identify three central challenges to Libertarian Paternalism, and suggest that Susan Hurley's political philosophy as presented in her Natural Reasons (1989) can be viewed as offering powerful responses to them.
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Empirical evidence for moral Bayesianism (Philosophical Psychology, 2024)
with Haim Cohen and Anat Maril
Many philosophers in the field of meta-ethics believe that rational degrees of confidence in moral judgments should have a probabilistic structure, in the same way as do rational degrees of belief. The current paper examines this position, termed “moral Bayesianism,” from an empirical point of view. To this end, we assessed the extent to which degrees of moral judgments obey the third axiom of the probability calculus, ifPA∩B=0thenPA∪B=PA+PB, known as finite additivity, as compared to degrees of beliefs on the one hand and degrees of desires on the other. Results generally converged to show that degrees of moral judgment are more similar to degrees of belief than to degrees of desire in this respect. This supports the adoption of a Bayesian approach to the study of moral judgments. To further support moral Bayesianism, we also demonstrated its predictive power. Finally, we discuss the relevancy of our results to the meta-ethical debate between moral cognitivists and moral non-cognitivists.
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Attitudes toward risk are complicated: experimental evidence for the re-individuation approach to risk-attitudes. (Philosophical Studies, 2022)
with Anat Maril, Haim Cohen and Sun Bleicher
We present experimental evidence that supports the thesis (advanced recently by Stefánsson and Bradley in Philos Sci 82(4):602–625, 2015, Br J Philos Sci 70(1):77–102, 2019; Bradley in Decisions theory with a human face, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017; Goldschmidt and Nissan-Rozen in Synthese 198:7553–7575, 2021) that people might positively or negatively desire risky prospects conditional on only some of the prospects’ outcomes obtaining. We argue that this evidence has important normative implications for the central debate in normative decision theory between two general approaches on how to rationalize several common patterns of preference, which are ruled out as irrational by orthodox decision theory, namely the re-individuation approach and the non-expected utility approach.
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Weighing and aggregating reasons under uncertainty: a trilemma. (Philosophical Studies, 2021)
I discuss the trilemma that consists of the following three principles being inconsistent:
1.
The Common Principle: if one distribution, A, necessarily brings a higher total sum of personal value that is distributed in a more egalitarian way than another distribution, B, A is more valuable than B.
2.
(Weak) ex-ante Pareto: if one uncertain distribution, A, is more valuable than another uncertain distribution, B, for each patient, A is more valuable than B.
3.
Pluralism about attitudes to risk (Pluralism): the personal value of a prospect is a weighted sum of the values of the prospect’s outcomes, but the weight each outcome gets might be different from the probability the prospect assigns to the outcome.
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The intrinsic value of risky prospects. (Synthese, 2021)
with Zeev Goldschmidt
We study the representation of attitudes to risk in Jeffrey’s (The logic of decision, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1965) decision-theoretic framework suggested by Stefánsson and Bradley (Philos Sci 82(4):602–625, 2015; Br J Philos Sci 70(1):77–102, 2017) and Bradley (Econ Philos 32(2):231–248, 2016; Decisions theory with a human face, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017). We show that on this representation, the value of any prospect may be expressed as a sum of two components, the prospect’s instrumental value (the value the prospect has only in virtue of the outcomes it might lead to) and the prospect’s intrinsic value (the value the prospect has only in virtue of the way it assigns different probabilities to the different outcomes). Both components have an expectational form. We also make a distinction between a prospect’s overall intrinsic value and a prospect’s conditional intrinsic value given each one of its possible outcomes and argue that this distinction has great explanatory power. We explore the relation between these two types of intrinsic values and show that they are determined at the level of preferences. Finally, we explore the relation between the intrinsic values of different prospects and point to a strong restriction on this relation that is implicit in Jeffrey’s axioms. We suggest a natural interpretation to this restriction.
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a puzzle about experts, evidential screening-off and conditionalization. (Episteme, 2020)
I present a puzzle about the epistemic role beliefs about experts' beliefs play in a rational agent's system of beliefs. It is shown that accepting the claim that an expert's degree of belief in a proposition, A, screens off the evidential support another proposition, B, gives to A in case the expert knows and is certain about whether B is true, leads in some cases to highly unintuitive conclusions. I suggest a solution to the puzzle according to which evidential screening off is rejected, but show that the price of this solution is either giving up on the mere idea of deferring to expert's opinion or giving up on Bayesian conditionalization.
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A pragmatic argument against equal weighting. (Synthese, 2019)
with Levi Spectre
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, i, assigns an equal or higher weight to another agent, j, (i.e. if i takes j to be as epistemically competent as him or epistemically superior to him), he must be willing—in exchange for a positive and certain payment—to accept an offer to let a completely rational and sympathetic j choose for him whether to accept a bet with positive expected utility. If i assigns a lower weight to j than to himself, he must not be willing to pay any positive price for letting j choose for him. Respecting the constraint entails, we show, that the impact of disagreement on one’s degree of belief is not independent of what the disagreement is discovered to be (i.e. not independent of j’s degree of belief).
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The value of chance and the satisfaction of claims. (The Journal of Philosophy, 2019)
This paper suggests a new explanation for the fairness of lot-
teries as distributional devices. The explanation draws on ele-
ments of two existing accounts—those of John Broome and
Richard Bradley—but manages to overcome some difficulties associ-
ated with each of them.
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Nudging in the clinic: the ethical implications of differences in doctors’ and patients’ point of view. (Journal of Medical Ethics, 2019)
with David Avitzour, Rani Barnea, Eliana Avitzour and Haim Cohen.
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.
(open access)
On the inadmissibility of some historical information. (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2018)
I argue—from a Humean perspective—for the falsity of what I call the “Admissibility of Historical Information Thesis” (AHIT). According to the AHIT, propositions that describe past events are always admissible with respect to propositions that describe future events. I first demonstrate that this thesis has some counter-intuitive implications and argue that a Humean can explain the intuitive attractiveness of the AHIT by arguing that it results from a wrong understanding of the concept of chance. I then demonstrate how a Humean “best system” analysis of chance predicts the existence of inadmissible historical information and discuss the implications of this conclusion to the debate between Humeans and non-Humeans.
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Is Value under Hypothesis Value? (Ergo, 2018)
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.
(open access)
Newcomb meets Gettier. (Synthese, 2017)
I show that accepting Moss’s (Philos Rev 122:1–43, 2013) claim that features of a rational agent’s credence function can constitute knowledge, together with the claim (put forward by several philosophers) that a rational agent should only act on the basis of reasons that he knows, predicts and explains evidential decision theory’s failure to recommend the right choice for the Newcomb problem. The Newcomb problem can be seen, in light of Moss’s suggestion, as a manifestation of a Gettier case in the domain of choice. This serves as strong evidence for both Moss’s claim and the knowledge-based action approach.
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Reasoning with comparative moral judgements: An argument for Moral Bayesianism. (in Applications of Formal Philosophy: The Road Less Travelled, 2017)
The paper discusses the notion of reasoning with comparative moral judgements (i.e. judgements of the form “act a is morally superior to act b”) from the point of view of several meta-ethical positions. Using a simple formal result, it is argued that only a version of moral cognitivism that is committed to the claim that moral beliefs come in degrees can give a normatively plausible account of such reasoning. Some implications of accepting such a version of moral cognitivism are discussed.
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How to be an ex-post egalitarian and an ex-ante Paretian. (Analysis, 2017)
It is well known that there is a conflict between three intuitive principles for the evaluation of risky prospects in distributional contexts, Ex-Post Egalitarianism, Ex-Ante Pareto and Dominance. In this paper, I return to Peter Diamond’s (1967) suggestion that we reject Dominance as a principle of rationality in distributional contexts and present a new argument in support of this position. The argument is based on an observation regarding the right way for a distributor to weigh reasons for actions. In some cases, I argue, reasons for action (for the distributor) that are grounded in the interests of one of the patients (i.e. the people who are the subjects of the distribution) ought to be disregarded by the distributor. These cases share the following property: it is in the patient’s overall interest that the distributor disregards them. I show that Dominance does not permit distributors to disregard such reasons and use this observation to argue against the claim that Dominance is a principle of rationality in distributional contexts.
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Against moral hedging. (Economics and Philosophy, 2015)
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 agent's 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.
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A triviality result for the “Desire by Necessity” thesis. (Synthese, 2015)
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.
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Jeffrey conditionalization, the principal principle, the desire as belief thesis, and adams’s thesis. (The British Journal of Philosophy of Science, 2013)
I show that David Lewis’s principal principle is not preserved under Jeffrey conditionalization. Using this observation, I argue that Lewis’s reason for rejecting the desire as belief thesis and Adams’s thesis applies also to his own principal principle.
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Doing the best one can: A new justification for the use of lotteries. (Erasmus Journal of Philosophy and Economcis, 2012)
In some cases in which rational and moral agents experience moral uncertainty, they are unable to assign exact degrees of moral value—in a non-arbitrary way—to some of the different acts available to them, and so are unable to choose with certainty the best act. This article presents a new justification for the use of lotteries in this kind of situation. It is argued that sometimes the only rational thing for a morally motivated agent to do here is to use a lottery.
(open access)
Dissertation: Doing the best one can (while trying to do better) (2011)
The thesis explores the question of how should a rational moral agent reason and make choices when he finds himself accepting inconsistent moral judgments. It is argued that it is both conceptually and psychologically justified to describe such an agent as suffering from uncertainty. Such uncertainty, however, is not uncertainty regarding the truth of some descriptive claim, but rather uncertainty regarding the truth of a normative claim. Specifically it is uncertainty regarding the truth of a moral judgement. In the literature this is sometimes called “moral uncertainty”. Two different lines of philosophical literatures that explore the idea of moral uncertainty are discussed. The first line – the one that originated from David Lewis‟ argument against the “Desire as Belief Thesis” – explores the mere possibility of moral uncertainty, while the second line explores the question how ought a rational moral agent choose in face of moral uncertainty. The discussion of these two lines of research leads to the conclusion that a consistent account of moral decision making under conditions of moral uncertainty that will be applicable to the kind of cases that the thesis explores, must make use of degrees of beliefs in comparative moral judgements (i.e. judgements of the form “act a is morally superior to act b”) and of them alone. Specifically, no references to degrees of moral value should be made. An attempt to present such an account in the framework of an extension of Leonard Savage‟s model for decision making is carried out. This attempt leads to a problematic result. Several implications of the result to ethic and meta-ethics are discussed as well as possible ways to avoid it. The conclusion is partly positive and partly negative: While a plausible account of moral decision making under conditions of moral uncertainty is presented, an account of moral reasoning that aims at finding a complete moral theory (i.e. a moral theory that gives a prescription to every possible moral choice) is shown to be a very difficult – if not impossible - aim to achieve.
(open access)
Discussion Paper: Can an irrational agent reason himself to rationality? (2010)
When an agent that accepts transitivity of preferences as a principle of rationality finds himself expressing intransitive preferences, he has to change some of his expressed preferences so that transitivity will be restored. When such an agent also believes in the existence of some independent betterness relation among the alternatives over which he forms his preferences, it is reasonable to demand that the way he changes his intransitive expressed preferences will be sensitive to his beliefs regarding this betterness relation. It is shown that under two natural conditions for such sensitivity, in case there are infinitely many alternatives, the agent must end up being indifferent between all alternatives except two. Some implications of this result for ethics are discussed.
(open access)
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