Martin Sjöberg (LU) will give a self-contained presentation of his work

Contractualism and Social Risk: Ex Ante or Ex Post? 

at the Higher seminar in practical philosophy

Abstract: We often engage in behaviors that, although they are generally beneficial, carry with them small risks of terrible outcomes, such as driving a car to work. When repeated over time these behaviors are certain to produce such terrible outcomes on at least some occasions. Yet, many such behaviors seem completely permissible. Within contractualism there is a divide over how we should understand the individual complaints that can be raised towards such behaviors. Ex post contractualist claim that complaints should be based in the full magnitude of the outcomes (e.g., the full magnitude of the harm of a certain injury) when those are actualized. Ex ante contractualists on the other hand claim that complaints should be discounted by the unlikelihood of a certain individual. Ex post is generally taken to have unintuitive consequences in cases where each individual has a high chance of substantial benefits at the cost of a small risk of being seriously burdened. Ex ante is generally considered to perform better in such cases. In this talk, I aim to show that, while ex ante contractualism solves some of ex post contractualism’s issues, it is in conflict with central contractualist claims where ex post is not. Further, I suggest that ex ante relies on unintuitive assumptions in other cases, and that ex post does not make those mistakes. As a result, ex post contractualism turns out to be more intuitive than often thought. 

Welcome!