Seminar

Normative pluralism and complex decisions

Held by Fredrik Nyseth, senior lecturer at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

– I will explore a possible worry for normative pluralism, understood along the lines of Sagdahl’s book. The worry is that when we ask whether a course of action is rationally eligible/permissible, the answer might depend, in certain cases, on seemingly arbitrary decisions about how choices are conceptualized and individuated. Investigating this worry will lead me to consider two further questions: 1) What can the pluralist say about how we ought to reason when we are faced with sequences of dependent choices? 2) What can the pluralist say about “decisions under risk”? An emerging theme, in these investigations, will be that it is somewhat difficult for the pluralist to resist the idea that there is a coherent third normative standpoint. Although this standpoint does not bring in any concerns in addition to those of prudence and morality, it yields verdicts that are distinct from both.