Alexander Pruss's Blog

On Thomistic accounts of transsubstantiation, the accidents of bread and wine continue to exist even when the substance no longer does (havi...

Here is an odd thesis: Whenever you gain a true belief, you gain a false belief. This follows from: Whenever you gain a belief, you ga...

The paper has just come out online in Synthese . Abstract: Scoring rules measure the accuracy or epistemic utility of a credence assignment...

My usual story about how to reconcile libertarianism with the Principle of Sufficient Reason is that when we choose, we choose on the basis ...

I like to illustrate the evidential force of simplicity by noting that for about two hundred years people justifiably believed that the forc...

Ought implies can. Most people can’t do Bayesian reasoning correctly. So Bayesian reasoning is not how they ought to reason. In particular, ...

Suppose a trolley is heading towards five people, and you can redirect it towards one. But the trolley needs to go up a hill before it can r...

In discussions of maximization of expected value, the Law of Large Numbers is sometimes invoked, at times—especially by me—off-handedly. Acc...

Here’s an odd phenomenon. Someone tells you something. You know it’s false, but their telling it to you raises the probability of it. For i...

Suppose Alice deserves a punishment of degree d , and Bob and Carl each impose on her a different punishment of degree d . Who unjustly puni...

Suppose that I uniformly randomly choose a number x between 0, inclusive, and 1, exclusive. I then look at the bits b 1 ,  b 2 , ... after...

Suppose every day for eternity you will be offered a gamble, where on day n  ≥ 1 you can choose to pay half a unit of utility to get a chanc...

Generally people think that if a trolley is heading for a bunch of people, it’s wrong to push an innocent bystander in front of the trolley ...

One strategy for accounting for deontology while allowing the tools of decision theory to be used is to set such a high disvalue on violatio...

On “exemplar” theories of salvation, Christ’s work of the cross saves us by providing a deeply inspiring example of love, sacrifice, or the ...