A graduate seminar on decision-theoretic questions related to small probabilities of extremely good or bad outcomes. Topics include puzzles arising from unbounded utilities (like the St. Petersburg game), puzzles arising from infinite utilities (like Pascal's Wager), various forms of "Nicolausian discounting" (ignoring small probabilities), and applications to real-world choices like climate policy and meat consumption. (syllabus)
A graduate seminar, co-taught with Will MacAskill, exploring philosophical questions related to altruistic cause prioritization (what causes to focus on in order to do the most good with scarce resources), with a particular focus on debates over the moral importance of the long-term future. Topics include person-affecting and non-consequentialist approaches to the ethics of future generations, the comparative importance of ensuring the survival of humanity vs ensuring a better future conditional on survival, long-term forecasting and the problem of "cluelessness", and worries about "expected value fanaticism", among others. (syllabus)
This course is part of Terp Young Scholars, a three week summer program in which academically ambitious high school students live on campus at the University of Maryland and take one intensive, college-level course of their choosing. The Art of Thinking is a critical thinking course. The first week covers basic logical concepts like soundness and validity, practices regimenting arguments into premises and conclusion and applying informal tests for validity, and introduces a tiny bit of formal logic (mainly truth tables). The second week covers heuristics and biases, based mainly on readings from Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. During the third week, the students choose one topic of public controversy for each day, do some advance research on that topic, and then engage in an extended debate/discussion in which we aim to apply the ideas from the last two weeks to the arguments on either side of the controversy. (syllabus)
This course surveys some of the central problems in political philosophy, including the basis of the state’s authority to govern, the comparative legitimacy of rival forms of government like democracy and autocracy, and the demands of justice with respect to the ownership and distribution of wealth, opportunities, etc. We will engage with these questions through a mix of classic philosophical texts and contemporary sources, both philosophical and non-philosophical, with the aim of seeing how perennial philosophical debates connect with contemporary concerns regarding criminal justice, inequality, free speech and more. (syllabus)
This is a course about morality. But unlike a course in moral theory, its primary focus is not on the content of morality—what actions are morally right or wrong. Rather, it concerns questions that philosophers group loosely under the heading of “metaethics”: What does it mean to say that an action is right or wrong? Can judgments of rightness and wrongness be true or false, and if so, how “objective” is their truth/falsity? What features of the world make moral judgments true and false, and how can we discover those features? Finally, what is the practical significance of morality—that is, what reason do we have, if any, to act morally? Along the way the course also examines some issues in moral psychology, in particular the competing roles of reason and emotion in explaining people’s moral judgments and attitudes. (syllabus)
This course explores a few of the questions that have puzzled philosophers over the centuries. For instance: How can we know that we are not systematically deceived about the world around us, like brains in a vat? Is our conscious experience anything more than a complicated interaction of elementary particles? What is free will, and can it exist in a world where our choices and basic character often seem to be governed by forces outside our control? Is it morally permissible to harm, even kill, an innocent person to protect a greater number of innocent people? What justifies the authority of governments, and how should they balance values like the general good, social equality, and individual rights? (syllabus)
This course provides a general introduction to the philosophy of time. It covers a range of topics including the relationship between time and change, whether time objectively “flows” or “passes,” the special status of the present, the possibility of time travel, and asymmetries between past and future including our asymmetric preferences with respect to past and future experiences. (syllabus)
As its name suggests, this course investigates metaphysical issues related to the nature of the mind. Most of the course will be spent exploring the mind-body problem and how mental states relate to the physical world. In the process, we’ll briefly touch on the topic of artificial intelligence and whether minds can be instantiated on computers. In the second half of the course, we’ll turn our attention to a cluster of problems centered around personal identity: in what sense (if any) our mental states are united into a single mind or self, in what way and under what conditions that self persists through time, and whether the extinction of the self is inevitable. (syllabus)