Allan Gibbard
University of Michigan, Philosophy, Faculty Member
What is an empiricist to say about causality? Experience seems to teach us much about causal influences in the world. Statisticians warn us that correlation is not causation, but controlled experiments set their worries to rest. With a... more
What is an empiricist to say about causality? Experience seems to teach us much about causal influences in the world. Statisticians warn us that correlation is not causation, but controlled experiments set their worries to rest. With a well controlled experiment, we learn how much one factor tends to influence another; and as numbers become large, we learn it beyond any serious doubt. Controlled experiments look empirical if anything does, and we need to ask: How do they reveal the causes that lie hidden behind the veil of experience? Causation was Hume’s central worry, or one of them, and notoriously he gave three distinct characterizations of a cause—characterizations that do not, on their face, look equivalent. Hume’s three strategies are still the obvious contenders. First, we can try to reduce causality in the world to non-causal features of the world. Hume proposed that causality is constant conjunction. A second strategy too is reductionistic, but in a more roundabout and sur...
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INTRODUCTIONWe look to rights for protection. The hope of advocates of “human rights” has been that certain protections might be accorded to allof humanity. Even in a world only a minority of whose inhabitants live under liberal... more
INTRODUCTIONWe look to rights for protection. The hope of advocates of “human rights” has been that certain protections might be accorded to allof humanity. Even in a world only a minority of whose inhabitants live under liberal democratic regimes, the hope is, certain standards accepted in the liberal democracies will gain universal recognition and respect. These include liberty of persons as opposed to enslavement, freedom from cruelty, freedom from arbitrary execution, from arbitrary imprisonment, and from arbitrary deprivation of property or livelihood, freedom of religion, and freedom of inquiry and expression.Philosophers, of course, concern themselves with the theory of rights, and that is partly because of the ways questions of rights bear on fundamental normative theory. By far the most highly developed general normative theory has been utilitarianism. Now many opponents of utilitarianism argue that considerations of rights discredit utilitarianism, that utilitarianism yiel...
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"Morality is made for man, not man for morality."' I interpret this aphorism as suggesting that questions of morality can most fundamentally be ad-dressed by considering human benefits and human harms -those benefits and... more
"Morality is made for man, not man for morality."' I interpret this aphorism as suggesting that questions of morality can most fundamentally be ad-dressed by considering human benefits and human harms -those benefits and harms to which our accepting various alternative moral ...
Research Interests: Economics, Ethics, Human Rights, Health Care, Social Justice, and 15 moreRisk, Resource Allocation, Ethical Theory, Risk assessment, Biomedical Technology, Social Responsibility, Humans, Philosophy and Religious Studies, Health Care Rationing, Risk Assessment, Public Policy, Reference standards, Delivery of Health Care, Law and Legal Studies, and Ethical Analysis
In Edward McClennen's rich paper, I want chiefly to talk about neutral equilibria: situations in which each person's strategy -- usually mixed -- is a best response to the other's, but not the only best response. In many... more
In Edward McClennen's rich paper, I want chiefly to talk about neutral equilibria: situations in which each person's strategy -- usually mixed -- is a best response to the other's, but not the only best response. In many games (in the game-theoretic sense), a neutral equilibrium with ...