In 2009, at the ANU, Mike Titelbaum organized a small workshop on the Sleeping Beauty problem. I gave a talk in which I argued that the answer to the problem depends on whether we accept genuinely diachronic norms on rational belief: if yes, halfing is the most plausible answer; if no, we get thirding. A successor of this talk is now forthcoming in Noûs. Here's a PDF. In this post, I want to discuss a surprisingly hard question Kenny Easwaran raised in the Q&A after my talk:
How confident should Beauty be on Wednesday that the coin has landed heads?
A strange aspect of the literature on metaethics is that most of it sees morality as a local phenomenon, located in specific acts or events (or people or outcomes). I guess this goes back to G.E. Moore, who asked what it means to call something 'good'.
That's not how I think of morality. The basic moral facts are global. They don't pertain to specific acts or events.
Here, morality contrasts with, say, phenomenal consciousness. Some creatures (in some states) are phenomenally conscious, others are not. Intuitively, this is a basic fact about the relevant creatures. Hence it makes sense to wonder whether one creature is conscious and another isn't, even if we know that they are alike in other respects. With moral properties, this doesn't make sense. If two events are alike descriptively, they must be alike morally.
Some ability statements sound wrong when affirmed but also when denied. Santorio (2024) proposes a new semantics that's built around this observation.
Suppose Ava is a mediocre dart player, and it's her turn. In this context, people often reject (1):
(1)Ava is able to hit the bullseye [on her next throw].
It's obviously possible that Ava gets lucky and hits the bullseye. But ability seems to require more than mere possibility of success. A common idea, which Santorio endorses, is that ability comes with a no-luck condition, something like this: