Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. You know we haven’t solved it. There’s nothing probabilistic there. It just seems to be another case where, when you stretch the limits far enough, nothing works, and that you have Pascal’s wager, the 51/49 gamble, the repugnant conclusion, many other paradoxes in moral philosophy — they all seem to kick in. In my view, that’s not an accident. There’s no reason to, ad hoc, try to address every one. We just need to downgrade where we think a certain kind of consequentialist reasoning could apply. Okay. I think these paradoxes show something much more thoroughgoing than an issue for consequentialism. Also, just briefly on the 51/49: Because of the pluralism that I talked about — although, again, it’s meta pluralism — of putting weight on many different model views, I would at least need the probabilities to be quite a bit wider in order to take the gamble because, again, the kind of best problem was —…

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