Paul Forrester
Research
Published Papers
Forrester, P. The Desire Machine. Analysis, 84(2), 249-257. 2024
The experience machine poses the most important problem for hedonist theories of well-being. I argue that desire satisfactionism about well-being faces a similar problem: the desire machine. Upon entering this machine, your desires are altered through some minor neurosurgery. In particular, the machine causes you to desire everything that actually happens. The experience machine constructs a simulated world that matches your preexisting desires. The desire machine reconstructs your conative state to match the preexisting world. Desire satisfactionism recommends entering the desire machine because you will then have more satisfied desires, but this seems wrong. In this paper, I consider how desire satisfactionists might avoid the result that entering the desire machine increases one’s well-being. First, I further motivate why this problem arises. Second, I consider coherence-based norms of rational desire change. Finally, I argue that introducing a substantive account of fitting desire is the only plausible solution, but that this response requires abandoning pure subjectivism about well-being.
Forrester, P. A New Argument for Uniqueness about Evidential Support. Episteme, 1-22. 2023.
In this paper I offer an argument for the view that every body of evidence rationalizes exactly one doxastic attitude to each proposition. This is the uniqueness thesis. I do this by identifying a family of explanatory demands facing permissivists, those who deny the uniqueness thesis. Permissivists have traditionally motivated their view by attempting to identify counterexamples to the uniqueness thesis. But they have not developed a more general account of when permissive cases arise, and why. Permissivists cannot explain why permissive cases are permissive, or how permissive they are. The paper contains three sections. First, I identify the explanatory demands facing the permissivist. Second, I survey a few existing proposals in the literature for how these explanatory demands might be answered, and argue that they fail. In the third section, I consider how permissivists might “soften” these explanatory demands, by holding that the permissible range of attitudes has vague borders, or that we do not know where its borders lie. I argue against both options. To do this, I present a general argument that there cannot be vague deontic facts, by appealing to a dominance principle and basic principles of deontic logic. If there are no deontic facts, then the permissible range of attitudes could not have vague borders, so the explanatory demands facing the permissivist remain unanswered.
Forrester, P. Concurrent Awareness Desire Satisfactionism. Utilitas, 35(3), 198-217. 2023.
Desire satisfactionists are united by their belief that what makes someone well-off is the satisfaction of their desires. But this commitment obscures a number of underlying differences, since there are several theoretical choice points on the way to making this commitment precise. This article is about two of the most important choice points. The first concerns an epistemic requirement on well-being. Suppose that one's desire that P is satisfied. Must one also know (or believe, or justifiably believe) that one's desire that P is satisfied in order to benefit from P? If so, there is an epistemic requirement on well-being. The second concerns the time at which one benefits. Well-being is a temporal phenomenon: given that one benefits from the satisfaction of one's desire that P, when does one benefit? Perhaps one benefits at the times at which one desires P, or the times at which P obtains, or both. I defend a view I call “concurrent awareness desire satisfactionism”: one benefits only at times at which both one desires P and P obtains (concurrence) and one benefits only if one is aware that one's desire is satisfied (awareness). I motivate this view by showing how it gives us solutions to many of the canonical problems facing desire satisfactionism. Then I put the two parts of the view together and explore some of its further implications. Ultimately, I conclude that well-being is an organic unity composed of a desiderative component, an epistemic component, and a worldly component, none of which are valuable on their own, but which are valuable when they are related in the right way.
Forrester, P. Epistemicism and commensurability. Inquiry, 1-31. 2022
The topic for this paper is the phenomenon of apparent value incommensurability—two goods are apparently incommensurable when it appears that neither is better than the other nor are they equally good. I shall consider three theories of this phenomenon. Indeterminists like Broome (1997) hold that the phenomenon is due to vagueness: when two goods appear to be incommensurable, this owes to the fact that “better than” is vague. Incommensurabilists like Chang (2002) hold that some goods appear to be incommensurable because they genuinely are, because it is determinately the case than neither is better than the other, nor are they equally good. I defend epistemicism, the view that the appearance of value incommensurability is due only to our ignorance of how goods compare. In reality, all goods are commensurable. I offer two arguments for epistemicism and against other views. First, epistemicists are committed to less unexplained axiological structure than are non-epistemicists, who must explain the extra structure that they posit. Second, only epistemicists have an adequate explanation of some facts about the scope of apparent incommensurability. Finally, I identify a class of putative counterexamples to the epistemicist’s analysis, and argue that these counterexamples do not succeed. If my arguments are sound, then, we have very good reason to think that for any two things that are good, either one is (determinately) better than the other, or they are (determinately) equally good.
Manuscripts in Progress
Locke and George on Original Acquisition
Natural resources, especially land, play an important role in many economic problems society faces today, including the climate crisis, housing shortages and severe inequality. Yet, land has been either entirely neglected or seriously misunderstood by contemporary theorists of distributive justice. I aim to correct that in this paper. In his theory of original acquisition, Locke did not carefully distinguish between the value of natural resources and the value that we add by laboring upon them. This oversight led him to the mistaken conclusion that labor mixing gives the laborer an entitlement to both the improvement and the resource. I explain how Locke's false belief that the proviso was satisfied in his time was the fundamental cause of this error. Instead, we should think, following Henry George, that the community is entitled to the economic value of natural resources, because the community created the value of resources, not the individual improver. I discuss an argument from George's "Progress and Poverty" that selfownership is actually inconsistent with (rather than the ground for, as Locke thought) private appropriation of natural resources. I present George's argument that private appropriation of natural resources is akin to forced labor, which is remarkably similar to Nozick's infamous argument that taxation is akin to forced labor. I then develop my own view of original acquisition, inspired by George. The selfownership of improvers gives them an entitlement to improvements that they generate. But the self-ownership of everyone else precludes an entitlement to natural resources value. Natural resource rents should not be enjoyed only by those who improve the resource, but rather, by all community members in proportion to the share of demand for natural resources they are responsible for. In the last section, I consider and refute an objection from the luck egalitarian claiming that natural talents are relevantly similar to land.
Two Just Taxes: Progressive Consumption Tax and Land Value Tax
Practical rationality is the art of acting so as to allocate one’s scarce resources among competing ends. If one’s ends do not exceed the resources available to satisfy them, then questions of rationality do not arise at all. Hume made a similar observation concerning the virtue of justice, which does not arise in an Edenic state in which everyone’s ends are jointly satisfiable. Justice and rationality are both virtues that arise only under conditions of scarcity: they concern how to best allocate scarce resources to competing ends, in the social and individual cases.
There are two kinds of scarcity: contingent and necessary. A set of preferences is contingently unsatisfiable when there are not enough resources to satisfy all of the preferences, though all of the preferences could be satisfied if there were more resources. We are perpetually faced with this kind of scarcity because we have a limited amount of money and a virtually unlimited number of valuable things we could spend it on. A set of preferences is necessarily unsatisfiable when satisfying all of the preferences is logically impossible.
Incoherent sets of preferences are always bad for the people who have them. When all preferences in a necessarily unsatisfiable set of preferences are had by a single individual at a single time, this is a paradigm of irrationality. One cannot act rationally if the ends that guide one’s actions are inconsistent, and someone with inconsistent ends could not be made better-off, since the satisfaction of one of her ends entails the dissatisfaction of another. Necessarily unsatisfiable preferences present even more interesting and deep problems when the incompatible ends are possessed by different individuals. When our ends are collectively incoherent, there is a ceiling on the amount of well-being that can be achieved. We cannot cooperate with one another, as we can when our ends are unsatisfiable because we lack sufficient resources.
Unfortunately, the collective incoherence of our ends is a ubiquitous social phenomenon. After discussing the nature of individual and collective incoherence in the first section, I introduce Veblen’s (1899) account of conspicuous consumption in the second section. One of the main sources of collective incoherence is the fact that everyone desires positional goods: goods whose value to the person who consumes them is determined not by intrinsic features but rather by whether the good is better or worse than the goods consumed by others. When we all strive for positional goods, we are collectively irrational and waste resources. In the third section, I identify a striking parallel between Veblen’s account of positional goods and his contemporary Henry George’s (1879) account of land. Unlike labor and capital, human beings cannot increase the supply of land. As such, our desires to use land are collectively incoherent, and competition to use land generates waste and precludes cooperation. George proposed a land value tax to end this destructive competition. A progressive consumption tax would have the same effect on our pursuit of positional goods. Since both taxes are laid on features with fixed supply, they are efficient and do not generate waste like other taxes do. Rather, they reclaim waste by preventing us from engaging in destructive competition over a fixed stock of resources. In other words, these taxes penalize people who have and act on ends that are inconsistent with the ends of others, so they can replace collective irrationality and destructive competition with cooperation. The final section discusses how these taxes have the potential to make us all better-off by reconciling our collectively incoherent ends.
The Economic State of Nature
The idea of a state of nature has had enduring importance in liberal political philosophy since Hobbes. Hobbes conceptualized the problem of political philosophy like this: the state of nature is so horrible that we must figure out how to keep people from killing each other and stealing their things. In a war of all against all, there is no justice and each person can claim a right to the entire material universe. To exit the state of nature, Hobbes insisted that each person rationally ought to give up their claims to everything else other than themselves, transferring these to the sovereign. An ultimately powerful sovereign ends the violence that makes life “nasty, brutish and short.”
How a state might legitimately arise is an important question, to be sure, but it is only one aspect of the general question which we should be more interested in. The central question is this: how do we develop systems of cooperation that make everyone better-off, and how should we distribute the gains from these systems of cooperation? The distinctively political mode of cooperation involves introducing a system for the governance of violence. We cooperate with one another when we live at peace. But there are other modes of cooperation that are far more important for improving the welfare of human beings.
In this essay, I will discuss what I regard as the most important form of cooperation that human beings have yet devised, and will develop a theory of justice that is fitting to this kind of cooperation. That mode of cooperation is market exchange, and the division of labor and specialization of production that it enables. To see how this mode of cooperation emerges and to understand the norms that ought to govern it, I will rely throughout on a thought experiment I call “the economic state of nature.” In the political state of nature, everyone is constantly killing other people and taking their things, and for this reason, everyone lives in terror and misery. In the economic state of nature, every person is an economic island, producing everything that they consume, and having no economic interactions with any other person. For this reason, everyone lives in a state of crushing poverty unimaginable to anyone living in a developed country.
Like Hobbes’s political state of nature, the economic state of nature is not best understood as a historical account of the development of human society. Rather, it is best understood as a logical device that allows us to see the essential structure and normative contours of a system of cooperation. The logical points made in this essay and by Hobbes, however, also illuminate the causal structure of historical progress. There was no identifiable time when the people in a certain area convened and decided to empower a Leviathan, and there was no identifiable time when people convened and decided to start trading and dividing labor among themselves. Rather, political authority and structures of economic interdependence emerged gradually over the course of thousands of years.
After I give a detailed account of how economic society emerges from the economic state of nature in the first section, I will discuss the nature of the norms that structure economic interaction in the second section. This will give us a theory of economic justice: a complete account of how the cooperative surplus generated by economic activity ought to be distributed among participants in the economy. In the third section, I will explain why this domain of justice is distinct from the political domain, and more importantly, why we can have no general, domain-independent theory of justice for society as a whole. There is no single thing—society—in which we all participate and whose burdens and benefits political philosophers must determine how to justly distribute. Rather, there are many loci of cooperation between and among individuals, and each locus of cooperation generates its own standards of justice for how benefits and burdens of that form of cooperation ought to be distributed. I conclude by noting some practical upshots of my view of economic justice, by identifying a ways that our present economic institutions fall short of the ideals that regulate market interactions.
Emissions Rights and Environmental Justice
Climate change is one of the most important problems of our time. One of the most important aspects of this problem is determining who should bear its costs. Climate change is, among other things, a problem of distributive justice. My aim in this essay is to develop a view about how to distribute the costs of climate change. This approach will consist of two claims: one analytical and the other normative. The analytical claim is that we should think about the atmosphere—specifically, its ability to absorb greenhouse gasses—as a scarce natural resource that commands an economic rent. The normative claim is that we should use Georgist rather than Lockean principles to distribute this economic rent. John Locke held that the person who first improves a natural resource can claim ownership of the resource. Henry George, by contrast, held that improvers only obtain an entitlement to the value of their improvement, but not to the value of the resource that they improve.
In his magnum opus, George wrote: “The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air—it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world and others no right.” Following George, I will argue that everyone has an equal right to use the atmosphere, and that this entails that rights to emit should be allocated on an egalitarian basis to everyone in the world. The Lockean view, by contrast, holds that citizens of nations that have been emitting for a long time—rich Western nations—should be accorded more emissions rights. First, I will argue for my core analytical claim: that the atmosphere is (now) a scarce resource that commands an economic rent. Second, I will argue for my core normative claim: that the economic rents generated by the atmosphere, like all scarce natural resource rents, should be distributed on an egalitarian basis.
ESG and Asset Manager Capitalism
This paper provides an examination of some problems caused by the concentration of influence in the capital markets of developed countries. In particular, I argue that large asset managers exercise quasi-political power that is not democratically legitimate. In section two, I will examine the economic driver behind the size and power of the big asset managers: the passive investing revolution. I will discuss several respects in which this revolution has fundamentally changed capital markets, most notably by making a large share of investors universal owners. In the third section, I argue for my central analytical conjecture: asset managers exercise quasi-political power. They use their influence to shape the rules of the game in public capital markets in order to implement social and environmental policies that have traditionally been the exclusive purview of states. “Asset manager capitalism” is a recent term coined to refer to the contemporary system of corporate governance that succeeded the Berle and Means corporation with its dispersed ownership; the argument of this section is that asset manager capitalism is also a new political-economic regime. In the fourth section I defend my central normative claim: asset manager capitalism is an untenable and illegitimate political-economic arrangement, for at least two reasons. First, the power of asset managers is not checked by any institutional constraints, and is not rendered legitimate by any democratic process. More fundamental than this procedural critique is an argument that the interests of asset managers could not be aligned with the public interest, given the fact that the distribution of capital is highly unequal. I conclude by discussing several proposals to reform asset manager capitalism.
Natural Assest Companies and the Financialization of Nature
Natural asset companies (NACs) are novel financial instruments that have recently been proposed to address the biodiversity and climate crises, while providing returns to investors. These companies will obtain leases to “ecological performance rights” from landowners, and will aggregate and sell these rights to corporations and institutional investors to offset environmentally harmful activities. These are rights to the financial value of the ecosystem services generated by land. Under an ecological accounting framework proposed to the SEC, NACs would value nature in financial terms: the natural assets owned by the NACs pay a stream of dividends in the form of ecosystem services, and are valued on the basis of these dividends. NACs were in the approval process for trading on the New York Stock Exchange until, earlier this year, a group of state attorneys general wrote a letter to the SEC challenging the proposal’s validity under the major questions doctrine. Though their public issuance is on hold, NACs continue to operate in private markets.
After a critical exposition of core concepts from ecological economics and a study of the business model of NACs in the first two sections, I develop a normative critique of NACs in the third section. I argue that NAC’s create a new kind of property right. They allow landowners to internalize positive externalities generated naturally by their land when it is left in its undeveloped state. In theory, internalizing externalities puts resources to their best use, but this occurs in practice only if the ecological accounting framework can accurately value ecosystem services.
More importantly, the creation of such a property right would unjustly benefit landowners and unjustly burden those who do not own ecologically productive land. Creating private property rights in ecosystem services would constitute a new enclosure of the ecological commons. Everyone on Earth currently benefits from free access to this commons, by breathing clean air, drinking fresh water, emitting greenhouse gasses, and numerous other activities. No landowner could become entitled to collect payments for the ecosystem services generated by their land, because the value of these services is prior to and independent of any person’s productive activity—which, as I shall argue, is the ultimate ground of all economic entitlements. Likewise, I show that no one can be legitimately deprived of free access to ecosystem services unless the revenue derived from such restrictions is used in ways that benefit everyone equally. The NAC model, if successful, will impose small additional costs on everyone who uses ecosystem services and reward immense benefits to those who control natural assets, violating both requirements.
Human over-exploitation has put the ecological commons under unprecedented stress. The solution is not to create a class of landlords who own nature, and a class of dispossessed tenants who must pay them for the use of ecosystem services. I conclude by proposing an alternative system that would both solve the over-exploitation problem and distribute natural resources on an egalitarian basis.
Two Moral Deficits of Modern Finance (with Kangyu Wang)
In this paper we examine some of the distributive implications of financial markets. Financial markets are the key institution for allocating capital in society, and whether they can do this efficiently is of the utmost importance. Importantly, financial markets determine both the level of investment that occurs in an economy, and which particular projects savings are allocated to. Some economies—most notably the UK—have seen chronic under-investment for decades, while other economies—most notably China—have seen over-investment in the same period. Sometimes, financial markets systematically allocate capital to non-productive or speculative assets. Bitcoin is the best contemporary example: at the time of writing over a trillion dollars of society’s wealth is tied up in this speculative object that does not contribute to economic productivity. At the same time, society has failed to allocate enough capital to socially important goals, like advancing the green transition.
That is the macro-perspective on capital allocation; next we examine the micro-perspective on asset allocation. Investing is the art of balancing risk and reward. Modern portfolio theory, the canonical theoretical approach in contemporary finance, conceives of risk as price volatility of assets, and further breaks this risk down into idiosyncratic and systemic risk. The prudent investor diversifies to eliminate her idiosyncratic risks, ultimately owning an index fund that allocates capital just as the market does because, according to the efficient market hypothesis, the market’s allocation of capital is optimal. The index fund revolution, we argue, has lead to a systemic overpricing of assets because diversified investors are willing to pay more for assets than are non-diversified investors, and because widespread common ownership of different corporations eliminates incentives for firms to compete with one another, increasing profits.
Now we can turn to the normative, distributive implications of capital allocation through financial markets. Systemic overpricing of assets benefits those who own assets already. In our society, older people own most of the assets. Asset owners can borrow against assets or sell them to fund consumption when asset prices are high. High asset prices not only benefit older people, but they harm younger people, because high asset prices today imply low expected returns for the future. Hence, asset prices are a key indicator of intergenerational inequality, and an important locus of distributive conflicts between the old and the young. In the United States, at least, asset prices are a more important locus of intergenerational distributive justice than government pension schemes.
Second, we develop a luck egalitarian critique of the manner in which the financial markets distribute valuable resources. Peoples’ ability to bear risk—and accordingly how much they can benefit from participating in financial markets—is usually not something that is under their control. It is determined by their age, their life situation and their attitudes to risk. Importantly, one’s ability to bear risk is proportional to the assets one has: poorer individuals cannot afford to bear risk and have larger liquidity requirements. It is important to remember that just over half of American adults participate in the stock market in the first place, so the wealth that it creates is not widely shared, particularly among individuals who do not participate in the stok market for reasons that are largely outside their control.
Emmigration, Inter-Generational Reciprocity and State Legitimacy (with Kate Yuan)
Mistakes and Rational Choice Theory (R&R Philosophy and the Social Sciences)
This paper concerns the concept of a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes, and each of us typically makes mistakes every day. Some of these mistakes are inconsequential; others are life-altering. We all do our best to learn from our mistakes and those of others so we do not repeat them in the future.
Yet, our best formal theories of choice do not have space for mistakes. According to rational choice theory, all behavior is interpreted as the agent’s maximizing a utility function. We do not have the tools to identify which behaviors are the result of maximizing a utility function and which are not. In order to provide a plausible theory of human action, rational choice theorists need to make room in their theories for the notion of a mistake, but it is unclear how they could say which actions are mistakes and which ones are not.
I will not assume that mistakes are a theoretically unified kind. They are unified by what they are not: they are not normally functioning instances of our decision-making capabilities. There are many reasons why we make mistakes, and many kinds of mistakes. But what makes something a mistake is that it is an instance where someone does something that they prudentially ought not have done.
The paper will proceed in two parts. The first part produces an account of mistakes that is internal to RCT. In other words, I identify several kinds of explanations for mistakes that are consistent with the rational choice perspective on human behavior. Specifically, I identify four different kinds of mistakes: those owing to factual ignorance, those owing to failures of self-knowledge, those owing to preference change, and those owing to normative ignorance. Then, in the second section, I examine some more fundamental issues in philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. Here, I try to make sense of mistakes using resources external to RCT. I show how mistakes should be expected on a certain theory of RCT: Quinean holism. Attributing preferences to people is fundamentally an exercise in radical interpretation. We attribute mental states like preferences to people in roughly the same way that we attribute linguistic meanings to speakers. Organizing the messy and perhaps contradictory data of choice into a clean and orderly utility function is a perilous task, similar to the problem of the indeterminacy of translation and the underdetermination of theory by evidence. On this view, mistakes are episodes where not all of the desiderata for constructing a theory of a person’s behavior are jointly satisfiable.
The Ethics and Epistemology of Digital Advertising
The Generalized Market Failures Approach
Practical Reasons for Pragmatism (R&R American Philosophical Quarterly)
The existing philosophical debate about the nature of reasons for belief between pragmatists and evidentialists has been substantially biased in favor of evidentialists. The literature has been focused on gathering and evaluating evidence pertaining to evidentialism and pragmatism, in the form of philosophical arguments for and against these two theses. But this way of proceeding simply presumes the truth of evidentialism, since it assumes that what we should be doing when evaluating pragmatism and evidentialism is collecting relevant evidence in order to determine which of them we should believe. Evidentialism recommends this way of proceeding, but pragmatism does not. Holding the debate on terms more favorable to the pragmatist would require also identifying and assessing the practical reasons in favor of belief in pragmatism and evidentialism. Ultimately, as I will argue in this paper, conducting the debate in a fair way will shed new light on the merits of pragmatism and the flaws of evidentialism. In the first section, I outline some terminological preliminaries and identify how the discussion is biased in favor of evidentialism. In the second section, I identify the practical reasons bearing on belief in pragmatism and evidentialism. I argue that there are structural reasons why almost everyone, almost all of the time, will have more than ample practical reason to be a pragmatist rather than an evidentialist. Then, in the third section, I examine the prospect that pragmatism and evidentialism could be self-defeating theories, and show that the self-defeat of evidentialism is both more likely and worse than the self-defeat of pragmatism. In the fourth section, I discuss how to rationally change or make up one’s mind about pragmatism and evidentialism, and how to determine what to believe under uncertainty about whether pragmatism or evidentialism is correct. Then, I conclude.
The Ontology of Events (R&R Erkenntnis)
Consider the most recent Yale-Harvard football game, an event which occurred on 11/20/21 in New Haven, lasting about three hours. This event, like many college football games before, was composed of four quarters, each of which was composed of possessions, each of which was composed of downs, each of which was composed of particular movements, tackles and decisions of the individual players. Each of these parts of the game was itself an event, occurring in a smaller region of space and time than the game itself. Each of these events involved material objects like players, helmets, jerseys, etc. Each had causes and effects, and each instantiated qualitative properties, such as being a kickoff or being a tackle. These are paradigmatic examples of events. Events are many and varied; some other examples include the melting of an ice cube, the birth of a horse, the supernova of a star, the presidential election campaign and a winter snowstorm. Each of these took place in a certain region of spacetime, had other events as parts, involved certain objects, had causes and effects, and instantiated properties. Objects and their properties are not the only furniture in the world. Events are a crucial part of our manifest and scientific pictures of the world. We go to football games, think about and participate in elections, eagerly anticipate the birth of a child, and quantify over and explain such things in our scientific theories. Yet, events have received insufficient attention from metaphysicians. Some philosophers have been skeptical of events, holding that talk of events can be paraphrased away, or that events can be reduced to objects and properties.1 When philosophers have accepted events, their motivations have usually been extrinsic—events are introduced in order to play a role in a larger philosophical system. This tendency has led philosophers to miss a number of interesting features of events. In this paper, I wish to reverse that trend by developing an ontology of events which is not an afterthought with respect to another philosophical project. In so doing, I will provide answers to substantive metaphysical questions about the relations in which events stand and their identity conditions. In the next section, I identify four basic relations in which events stand: parthood, involvement, causation and instantiation, focusing in particular on involvement. Then, I argue that events are individuated by their involvements, and criticize the identity conditions which have been offered by other philosophers, notably Quine, Davidson and Kim. I then conclude.