Alexander Pruss's Blog

A standard thing that theists have long said is that some difficult situations are “trials” where you have right and wrong options, and wher...

Here’s a way that an atheist could undercut the consensus gentium argument (the argument for theism based on how much belief in God or gods...

Assume Molinism. Suppose T is a set of character traits that makes one be equipoised between freely taking and refusing a $5000 bribe for ...

Suppose I am sluggish mentally in the morning and function fast mentally in the afternoons. I find myself in a dark room with no information...

Here is an initially plausible thesis about deliberation that I've long felt is right: Normally, when choosing between options, you ar...

Yesterday, I offered a Toy Model of how God could give infinite chances to someone and they could still reject him. The crucial assumption o...

In the case of non-epistemic goods, it’s an obvious feature of life that someone there is a choice to be made by an individual between their...

Assume that in fact all ravens are black. Suppose you are sequentiallly observing ravens, and noting each one to be black. After observing n...

Consider a choice between two wagers on a fair coin: W 1 : on heads, you get $1 if you are perfectly rational and $3 if you are not W 2 :...

Recently, I found myself puzzled by the difficulty in applying “classical” evidential decision theory to a perfectly rational agent. The pr...

Suppose a positive integer N is generated by a fair lottery. Then, a random integer K is chosen between 1 and N (inclusive). What infor...

In the previous post , I proved that we get a proper scoring rule if we compute epistemic utilities as follows. We start with our current cr...

An accuracy scoring rule assigns a score to a probability function representing an agent’s credences, ostensibly measuring how close that pr...

You might observe: Most of the people I know are more social than me. And then you might beat up on yourself, concluding: I am less so...

Suppose infinitely many people independently roll a fair die. Before they get to see the result, they will need to guess whether the die sho...

Suppose that causation across temporal gaps is possible: that an object x can have a direct effect in a future time, with no intermediate c...

We like being more confident. We enjoy having credences closer to 0 or 1 . Even if the proposition we are confident in is one that is such t...

Suppose infinitely many blindfolded people, including yourself, are uniformly randomly arranged on positions one meter apart numbered 1, 2, ...

In order to assign non-zero probabilities to such things as a lottery ticket in an infinite fair lottery or hitting a specific point on a ta...

Suppose we have a backwards-infinite sequence of asexually reproducing chickens, ...,  c −3 ,  c −2 ,  c −1 ,  c 0 with c n having a chanc...