A Puzzle About Proportionality

The Metric of Punishment Severity: A Puzzle about the Principle of Proportionality

The principle of proportionality, a cornerstone of retributive penal philosophy, seemingly requires that the severity of the punishments to be imposed to be a function of the seriousness of the crimes that are committed. This principle cannot be applied unless we have a metric or common denominator to assess whether two impositions of punishment are equal or unequal in severity. To do so, we mu...

A puzzle about withholding

This paper presents a puzzle about justification and withholding. The puzzle arises in a special case where experts advise us to not withhold judgment. My main thesis is simply that the puzzle is genuinely a puzzle, and so leads us to rethink some common assumptions in epistemology, specifically assumptions about the nature of justification and doxastic attitudes. Section 1 introduces the commo...

A puzzle about belief updating

In recent decades much literature has been produced on disagreement; the puzzling conclusion being that epistemic disagreement is, for the most part, either impossible (e.g. Aumann (Ann Stat 4(6):1236–1239, 1976)), or at least easily resolvable (e.g. Elga (Noûs 41(3):478–502, 2007)). In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, an equally puzzling result arises: that is, disagreement ca...

A Puzzle About Ontological Commitments

A Puzzle about Further Facts∗

In metaphysics, there are a number of distinct but related questions about the existence of “further facts”—facts that are contingent relative to the physical structure of the universe. These include further facts about qualia, personal identity, and time. In this article I provide a sequence of examples involving computer simulations, ranging from one in which the protagonist can clearly concl...