I only log in to my Academia account sporadically. Hence, this site is rather outdated. For more updated information about myself, please visit my personal webpage at: http://hunchung.com Supervisors: Nicholas Sturgeon (Cornell), John Duggan (Rochester), and Jim Johnson (Rochester)
In this paper, we reexamine the axiomatic foundation of prioritarianism – a distributive ethical ... more In this paper, we reexamine the axiomatic foundation of prioritarianism – a distributive ethical view originating from Derek Parfit (1991) that claims that “[b]enefiting people matters more the worse off these people are” (Parfit 1991: 19). In previous work, prioritarianism has been characterized by the following five axioms: Pigou-Dalton, Separability, Anonymity, Pareto, and Continuity. Among these axioms, many scholars have regarded Pigou-Dalton (along with Separability) as the key defining feature that distinguishes prioritarianism from other continuous welfarist views. We disagree: not because we think the Pigou-Dalton principle is incompatible with prioritarianism (it is), but because the Pigou-Dalton principle fails to distinguish prioritarianism from telic egalitarianism, which is what motivated Parfit to present prioritarianism as an alternative view of distributive ethics in the first place. Instead, we propose a new axiom, which we call “Priority,” which clearly expresses Parfit’s original prioritarian idea, as the main defining property of prioritarianism, and offer a new axiomatic characterization of prioritarianism in terms of this new axiom. We then analyze the precise logical relationships between Priority and the other axioms. Finally, we explore the important issue of measurability and interpersonal comparison of well-being in relation to prioritarianism. There have criticisms that the prioritarian social welfare function may not satisfy some information invariance property with respect to measurability and interpersonal comparability of well-being. It turns out that, compared to other social welfare orderings (such as utilitarianism, maximin, leximin, the general Gini ordering, etc.), prioritarianism may require a stronger well-being measure (viz., a translation-scale or a ratio-scale) than a cardinal measure with full interpersonal comparability to retain its normative and theoretical significance. From such observations, we specify the class of prioritarian social welfare functions free from this criticism.
In his 2017 paper, "Prospect Utilitarianism: A Better Alternative to Sufficientarianism," Hun Chu... more In his 2017 paper, "Prospect Utilitarianism: A Better Alternative to Sufficientarianism," Hun Chung proposed a theory of distributive justice called 'Prospect Utilitarianism (PU).' According to Chung, PU retains all the major attractions of sufficientarianism, while avoiding two major problems. The two problems are: (a) sufficientarianism fails to prescribe the right distribution under conditions of scarcity (i.e., 'lifeboat' situations), and (b) sufficientarianism fails to provide continuous ethical evaluations. Recently, Ben Davies (2022) and Lasse Nielsen (2019; 2023) have provided a defense of sufficientarianism from these two charges. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the shortcomings in Davies's and to a lesser degree Nielsen's defenses of sufficientarianism. Our paper will highlight that both Davies's and Nielsen's defenses of sufficientarianism stem from fundamental misunderstandings related to the concepts of continuity, welfarism, value satiability, and their interconnectedness with sufficientarianism. In the end, we will argue that Prospect Utilitarianism (PU) is a superior alternative to sufficientarianism.
There is now a growing consensus among democratic theorists that we should incorporate both ‘demo... more There is now a growing consensus among democratic theorists that we should incorporate both ‘democratic deliberation’ and ‘aggregative voting’ into our democratic processes, where democratic deliberation precedes aggregating people’s votes. But how should the two democratic mechanisms of deliberation and voting interact? The question we wish to ask in this paper is which social choice rules are consistent with successful deliberation once it has occurred. For this purpose, we introduce a new axiom, which we call “Non-Negative Response toward Successful Deliberation (NNRD).” The basic idea is that if some individuals change their preferences toward other individuals’ preferences through successful deliberation, then the social choice rule should not make everybody who has successfully persuaded others through reasoned deliberation worse-off than what s/he would have achieved without deliberation. We prove an impossibilty theorem that shows that there exists no aggregation rule that can simultaneously satisfy (NNRD) along with other mild axioms that reflect deliberative democracy’s core committment to unanimous consensus and democratic equality. We offer potential escape routes: however, it is shown that each escape route can succeed only by compromising some core value of deliberative democracy.
When modeling the state of nature, Hobbes and Locke pose different challenges. For Hobbes, the pr... more When modeling the state of nature, Hobbes and Locke pose different challenges. For Hobbes, the primary challenge is to show that the state of nature will necessarily dissolve into a state of universal and perpetual war when there exists a small number of nasty aggressors. For Locke, the challenge is to show that the state of nature dissolves into a state of war at least sometimes even when there exist no such aggressors and everybody is morally motivated to follow the law of nature that prescribes not to harm others. The standard interpretation of Locke identifies three main causes of war in the state of nature: the lack of a common judge, moral disagreement over the law of nature, and self-love. In this paper, I argue that the combination of these three factors are incapable of generating war in Locke's state of nature no matter how infrequent. Instead, in order for war to occur at least sometimes in Locke's state of nature, there has to be some sort of epistemic deficit. In this paper, I show via the tools of modern game theory, how Locke's state of nature may occasionally generate war by two kinds of epistemic problems: (a) disagreements in subjective probabilities, and (b) uncertainty.
In a recently published paper (“The Difference Principle Would Not Be Chosen behind the Veil of I... more In a recently published paper (“The Difference Principle Would Not Be Chosen behind the Veil of Ignorance”. The Journal of Philosophy 115 (11): 588-604), Johan E. Gustafsson argues that “the parties [in Rawls’s original position] would not choose the Difference Principle.” (589) Gustafsson’s main strategy was to show that Rawls’s difference principle in both of its ex post and ex ante versions imply counterintuitive distributional prescriptions in a few contrived examples. The purpose of this paper is to precisely demonstrate exactly how Gustafsson’s arguments have failed to show that the difference principle would not be chosen behind the veil of ignorance.
Inspired by impossibility theorems of social choice theory, many democratic theorists have argued... more Inspired by impossibility theorems of social choice theory, many democratic theorists have argued that aggregative forms of democracy cannot lend full democratic justification for the collective decisions reached. Hence, democratic theorists have turned their attention to deliberative democracy, according to which "outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if they could be the object of a free and reasoned agreement among equals" (Cohen 1997a, 73). However, relatively little work has been done to offer a formal theory of democratic deliberation. This article helps fill that gap by offering a formal theory of three different modes of democratic deliberation: myopic discussion, constructive discussion, and debate. We show that myopic discussion suffers from indeterminacy of long run outcomes, while constructive discussion and debate are conclusive. Finally, unlike the other two modes of deliberation, debate is path independent and converges to a unique compromise position, irrespective of the initial status quo.
A well-ordered society faces a crisis whenever a sufficient number of noncompliers enter into the... more A well-ordered society faces a crisis whenever a sufficient number of noncompliers enter into the political system. This has the potential to destabilize liberal democratic political order. This article provides a formal analysis of two competing solutions to the problem of political stability offered in the public reason liberalism literature-namely, using public reason or using convergence discourse to restore liberal democratic political order in the well-ordered society. The formal analyses offered in this article show that using public reason fails completely, and using convergent discourse, although doing better, has its own critical limitations that have not been previously recognized properly.
One of John Rawls's major aims, when he wrote A Theory of Justice, was to present a superior alte... more One of John Rawls's major aims, when he wrote A Theory of Justice, was to present a superior alternative to utilitarianism. Rawls's worry was that utilitarianism may fail to protect the fundamental rights and liberties of persons in its attempt to maximize total social welfare. Rawls's main argument against utilitarianism was that, for such reasons, the representative parties in the original position will not choose util-itarianism, but will rather choose his justice as fairness, which he believed would securely protect the worth of everybody's basic rights and liberties. In this paper, I will argue that, under close formal examination, Rawls's argument against utilitari-anism is self-defeating. That is, I will argue that Rawls's own reasons, assumptions, and the many theoretical devices he employs demonstrably imply that the representative parties in the original position will choose utilitarianism instead of justice as fairness.
A defining characteristic of a liberal democratic society is the assignment of basic rights and l... more A defining characteristic of a liberal democratic society is the assignment of basic rights and liberties that protect each person’s private sphere. Hence, social choice made in a liberal democratic society must at the very least be consistent with the exercise of each person’s basic rights. However, even when everybody agrees to this basic principle, there could still remain irreconcilable social conflict and disagreement when it comes to the specific assignment of basic rights. This is especially so in a pluralistic society where there is a clash among radically different and incompatible world views. Philosophers have now started to focus on this issue, which now goes by the name “perspectival diversity.” This paper extends the basic social choice theoretic framework of liberal rights by extending the domain to include individual perspectives alongside individual preferences. In this new framework, different individuals are able to see or perceive the same social alternative differently based on their own unique perspectives. The formal results of the paper imply that generating a viable social choice that is consistent with the assignment of basic rights can quickly break down once we start to increase the level of perspectival diversity in society.
John Rawls's most mature notion of political order is "stability for the right reasons." Stabilit... more John Rawls's most mature notion of political order is "stability for the right reasons." Stability for the right reasons is the kind of political order that Rawls hoped a well-ordered society could ideally achieve. In this paper, I demonstrate through the tools of modern game theory, the instability of "stability for the right reasons." Specically, I will show that a well-ordered society can completely destabilize by the introduction of an arbitrarily small number of non-compliers whenever individuals fail to achieve full common knowledge ever so slightly.
Public reason liberalism takes as its starting point the deep and irreconcilable diversity we fin... more Public reason liberalism takes as its starting point the deep and irreconcilable diversity we find characterizing liberal societies. This deep and irreconcilable diversity creates problems for social order. One method for adjudicating these conflicts is through the use of rights. This paper is about the ability of such rights to adjudicate disputes when perspectival disagreements – or disagreements over how to categorize objects in the world – obtain. We present both formal possibility and impossibility results for rights structures under varying degrees of perspectival diversity. We show that though perspectival diversity appears to be a troubling problem for the prospect of stable social order, if rights are defined properly then disagreements can likely be resolved in a consistent manner, achieving social cooperation rather than conflict.
Ever since the publication of Harry Frankfurt’s “Equality as a Moral Ideal” (1987), the doctrine ... more Ever since the publication of Harry Frankfurt’s “Equality as a Moral Ideal” (1987), the doctrine of sufficiency has attracted great attention among both ethical theorists and political philosophers. The doctrine of sufficiency (or sufficientarianism) consists of two main theses: the positive thesis states that it is morally important for people to have enough; and the negative thesis states that once everybody has enough relative inequality has absolutely no moral importance. Many political philosophers have presented different versions of sufficientarianism that retain the general spirit of what Frankfurt had proposed in his seminal work. However, all of these different versions of sufficientarianism suffer from two critical problems: (a) they fail to give right answers to lifeboat situations, and (b) they fail to provide continuous ethical judgments. In this paper, I show a version of utilitarianism that solves these problems while retaining the major attractions of sufficientarianism. I call it “prospect utilitarianism.” In addition, I show that prospect utilitarianism can avoid standard objections to utilitarianism and has aspects that can appeal to both prioritarians and egalitarians as well.
In his article, “Equality as a Moral Ideal”, Harry Frankfurt argues against economic egalitariani... more In his article, “Equality as a Moral Ideal”, Harry Frankfurt argues against economic egalitarianism and presents what he calls the “doctrine of sufficiency.” According to the doctrine of sufficiency, what is morally important is not relative economic equality, but rather, whether somebody has enough, where “having enough” is a non-comparative standard of reasonable contentment that may differ from person to person given his/her aims and circumstances. The purpose of this paper is to show that Frankfurt’s original arguments in support for his doctrine of sufficiency have critical problems that Frankfurt himself does not properly recognize. In the end, I will argue that in order to solve these problems the doctrine of sufficiency cannot help but to incorporate certain prioritarian commitments – commitments which many would view as implying economic egalitarianism. This is embarrassing for a doctrine whose raison d'être was mainly to defeat economic egalitarianism.
In Book 1 of Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus contends two major claims: (1) justice is the advanta... more In Book 1 of Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus contends two major claims: (1) justice is the advantage of the stronger, and (2) justice is the good of the other, while injustice is to one’s own profit and advantage. In the beginning of Book II, Glaucon self-proclaims that he will be representing Thrasymachus’ claims in a better way, and provides a story of how justice has originated from a state of nature situation. However, Glaucon’s story of the origin of justice has an implication that justice is the advantage of the weak rather than the stronger. This is inconsistent with Thrasymachus’ first claim which states that justice is the advantage of the stronger. This is a problem for Glaucon since Glaucon is supposed to be representing Thrasymachus’ original claims in a better way. In this paper, I provide two solutions to this puzzle with the help of elementary game theory.
Hobbes’s own justification for the existence of governments relies on the assumption that, withou... more Hobbes’s own justification for the existence of governments relies on the assumption that, without a government, our lives in the state of nature would result in a state of war of every man against every man. Many contemporary scholars have tried to explain why universal war is unavoidable in Hobbes’s state of nature by utilizing modern game theory. However, most game-theoretic models that have been presented so far does not accurately capture what Hobbes deems to be the primary cause of conflict in the state of nature – which is uncertainty, rather than people’s egoistic psychology. Any game-theoretic model that does not incorporate uncertainty into the picture is, therefore, I claim, the wrong model. In this paper, I use Bayesian game-theory to show how universal conflict can break-out in the state of nature - even when the majority of the population would strictly prefer to cooperate and seek peace with other people - due to uncertainty about the other person’s type. Along the way, I show that the valuation of one’s own
life is one of the central mechanisms that drives Hobbes’s pessimistic conclusion.
The Korean Journal for Philosophy of Science <과학철학>, Vol. 17, No. 3, Nov 2014
There seems to be critics who think that game theory can provide very little insights in doing em... more There seems to be critics who think that game theory can provide very little insights in doing empirical social scientific research or normative political theory/political philosophy. This is because these people tend to think that game theory is committed to some highly contestable theory of human psychology; namely, that human beings either are or should be primarily motivated by their own exclusive self-interest. From this, critics tend to think that game theory is defective both as a normative theory of action as well as a descriptive theory of action. After explaining the basics of game theory, I will try to show that such criticisms are mostly based on a general misunderstanding of game theory. In the end, I will argue that game theory is simply a mathematical tool that could be used to model any strategic interaction for many different purposes, and is not committed to any substantial theories of human nature.
Filozofia 69, 2014, No. 8, pp. 687-696 (indexed in A&HCI), Oct 2014
Many commentators think that Hobbes was committed to an instrumental view of ra-tionality which f... more Many commentators think that Hobbes was committed to an instrumental view of ra-tionality which foreshadows that of David Hume. The Humean conception of in-strumental rationality is a conjunction of the following two claims: (a) no preferences or desires can properly be said to be irrational in themselves, and (b) the role of reason or rationality can only be confined to informing the agent with true beliefs about the world, and revealing the most effective means that could satisfy the agent’s current ends whatever they happen to be. In this paper, I argue that, unlike what many people think, a careful reading of Hobbes shows that he was committed to neither of these claims.
Chul Hak Sa Sang <철학사상> (Journal of Philosophical Ideas), Vol. 52, May, 2014 (indexed in KCI)
A notable feature of Rawls’ theory of international justice, which he presented in The Laws of Pe... more A notable feature of Rawls’ theory of international justice, which he presented in The Laws of Peoples, is his insistence on the toleration of non-liberal states provided that they are decent. Many political philosophers have criticized Rawls for being too generous towards non-liberal states. These critics feared that Rawls’ theory would safeguard non-liberal states to perform many forms of domestic injustices. In this paper, I make an entirely opposite objection. I claim that the real problem with Rawls’ theory of international justice is not of its being too generous, but rather of its being too stringent. Specifically, I will argue that when The Law of Peoples is correctly interpreted, it turns out that “the decent non-liberal societies” that the theory so emphatically proclaims to tolerate are not really non-liberal societies, but rather are more than sufficiently liberal societies.
<철학사상> 제48호 (Chul Hak Sa Sang, The Journal of Philosophical Ideas, Institute of Philosophy, Seoul National University, Vol. 48 (indexed in KCI), May 30, 2013
In this paper, we reexamine the axiomatic foundation of prioritarianism – a distributive ethical ... more In this paper, we reexamine the axiomatic foundation of prioritarianism – a distributive ethical view originating from Derek Parfit (1991) that claims that “[b]enefiting people matters more the worse off these people are” (Parfit 1991: 19). In previous work, prioritarianism has been characterized by the following five axioms: Pigou-Dalton, Separability, Anonymity, Pareto, and Continuity. Among these axioms, many scholars have regarded Pigou-Dalton (along with Separability) as the key defining feature that distinguishes prioritarianism from other continuous welfarist views. We disagree: not because we think the Pigou-Dalton principle is incompatible with prioritarianism (it is), but because the Pigou-Dalton principle fails to distinguish prioritarianism from telic egalitarianism, which is what motivated Parfit to present prioritarianism as an alternative view of distributive ethics in the first place. Instead, we propose a new axiom, which we call “Priority,” which clearly expresses Parfit’s original prioritarian idea, as the main defining property of prioritarianism, and offer a new axiomatic characterization of prioritarianism in terms of this new axiom. We then analyze the precise logical relationships between Priority and the other axioms. Finally, we explore the important issue of measurability and interpersonal comparison of well-being in relation to prioritarianism. There have criticisms that the prioritarian social welfare function may not satisfy some information invariance property with respect to measurability and interpersonal comparability of well-being. It turns out that, compared to other social welfare orderings (such as utilitarianism, maximin, leximin, the general Gini ordering, etc.), prioritarianism may require a stronger well-being measure (viz., a translation-scale or a ratio-scale) than a cardinal measure with full interpersonal comparability to retain its normative and theoretical significance. From such observations, we specify the class of prioritarian social welfare functions free from this criticism.
In his 2017 paper, "Prospect Utilitarianism: A Better Alternative to Sufficientarianism," Hun Chu... more In his 2017 paper, "Prospect Utilitarianism: A Better Alternative to Sufficientarianism," Hun Chung proposed a theory of distributive justice called 'Prospect Utilitarianism (PU).' According to Chung, PU retains all the major attractions of sufficientarianism, while avoiding two major problems. The two problems are: (a) sufficientarianism fails to prescribe the right distribution under conditions of scarcity (i.e., 'lifeboat' situations), and (b) sufficientarianism fails to provide continuous ethical evaluations. Recently, Ben Davies (2022) and Lasse Nielsen (2019; 2023) have provided a defense of sufficientarianism from these two charges. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the shortcomings in Davies's and to a lesser degree Nielsen's defenses of sufficientarianism. Our paper will highlight that both Davies's and Nielsen's defenses of sufficientarianism stem from fundamental misunderstandings related to the concepts of continuity, welfarism, value satiability, and their interconnectedness with sufficientarianism. In the end, we will argue that Prospect Utilitarianism (PU) is a superior alternative to sufficientarianism.
There is now a growing consensus among democratic theorists that we should incorporate both ‘demo... more There is now a growing consensus among democratic theorists that we should incorporate both ‘democratic deliberation’ and ‘aggregative voting’ into our democratic processes, where democratic deliberation precedes aggregating people’s votes. But how should the two democratic mechanisms of deliberation and voting interact? The question we wish to ask in this paper is which social choice rules are consistent with successful deliberation once it has occurred. For this purpose, we introduce a new axiom, which we call “Non-Negative Response toward Successful Deliberation (NNRD).” The basic idea is that if some individuals change their preferences toward other individuals’ preferences through successful deliberation, then the social choice rule should not make everybody who has successfully persuaded others through reasoned deliberation worse-off than what s/he would have achieved without deliberation. We prove an impossibilty theorem that shows that there exists no aggregation rule that can simultaneously satisfy (NNRD) along with other mild axioms that reflect deliberative democracy’s core committment to unanimous consensus and democratic equality. We offer potential escape routes: however, it is shown that each escape route can succeed only by compromising some core value of deliberative democracy.
When modeling the state of nature, Hobbes and Locke pose different challenges. For Hobbes, the pr... more When modeling the state of nature, Hobbes and Locke pose different challenges. For Hobbes, the primary challenge is to show that the state of nature will necessarily dissolve into a state of universal and perpetual war when there exists a small number of nasty aggressors. For Locke, the challenge is to show that the state of nature dissolves into a state of war at least sometimes even when there exist no such aggressors and everybody is morally motivated to follow the law of nature that prescribes not to harm others. The standard interpretation of Locke identifies three main causes of war in the state of nature: the lack of a common judge, moral disagreement over the law of nature, and self-love. In this paper, I argue that the combination of these three factors are incapable of generating war in Locke's state of nature no matter how infrequent. Instead, in order for war to occur at least sometimes in Locke's state of nature, there has to be some sort of epistemic deficit. In this paper, I show via the tools of modern game theory, how Locke's state of nature may occasionally generate war by two kinds of epistemic problems: (a) disagreements in subjective probabilities, and (b) uncertainty.
In a recently published paper (“The Difference Principle Would Not Be Chosen behind the Veil of I... more In a recently published paper (“The Difference Principle Would Not Be Chosen behind the Veil of Ignorance”. The Journal of Philosophy 115 (11): 588-604), Johan E. Gustafsson argues that “the parties [in Rawls’s original position] would not choose the Difference Principle.” (589) Gustafsson’s main strategy was to show that Rawls’s difference principle in both of its ex post and ex ante versions imply counterintuitive distributional prescriptions in a few contrived examples. The purpose of this paper is to precisely demonstrate exactly how Gustafsson’s arguments have failed to show that the difference principle would not be chosen behind the veil of ignorance.
Inspired by impossibility theorems of social choice theory, many democratic theorists have argued... more Inspired by impossibility theorems of social choice theory, many democratic theorists have argued that aggregative forms of democracy cannot lend full democratic justification for the collective decisions reached. Hence, democratic theorists have turned their attention to deliberative democracy, according to which "outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if they could be the object of a free and reasoned agreement among equals" (Cohen 1997a, 73). However, relatively little work has been done to offer a formal theory of democratic deliberation. This article helps fill that gap by offering a formal theory of three different modes of democratic deliberation: myopic discussion, constructive discussion, and debate. We show that myopic discussion suffers from indeterminacy of long run outcomes, while constructive discussion and debate are conclusive. Finally, unlike the other two modes of deliberation, debate is path independent and converges to a unique compromise position, irrespective of the initial status quo.
A well-ordered society faces a crisis whenever a sufficient number of noncompliers enter into the... more A well-ordered society faces a crisis whenever a sufficient number of noncompliers enter into the political system. This has the potential to destabilize liberal democratic political order. This article provides a formal analysis of two competing solutions to the problem of political stability offered in the public reason liberalism literature-namely, using public reason or using convergence discourse to restore liberal democratic political order in the well-ordered society. The formal analyses offered in this article show that using public reason fails completely, and using convergent discourse, although doing better, has its own critical limitations that have not been previously recognized properly.
One of John Rawls's major aims, when he wrote A Theory of Justice, was to present a superior alte... more One of John Rawls's major aims, when he wrote A Theory of Justice, was to present a superior alternative to utilitarianism. Rawls's worry was that utilitarianism may fail to protect the fundamental rights and liberties of persons in its attempt to maximize total social welfare. Rawls's main argument against utilitarianism was that, for such reasons, the representative parties in the original position will not choose util-itarianism, but will rather choose his justice as fairness, which he believed would securely protect the worth of everybody's basic rights and liberties. In this paper, I will argue that, under close formal examination, Rawls's argument against utilitari-anism is self-defeating. That is, I will argue that Rawls's own reasons, assumptions, and the many theoretical devices he employs demonstrably imply that the representative parties in the original position will choose utilitarianism instead of justice as fairness.
A defining characteristic of a liberal democratic society is the assignment of basic rights and l... more A defining characteristic of a liberal democratic society is the assignment of basic rights and liberties that protect each person’s private sphere. Hence, social choice made in a liberal democratic society must at the very least be consistent with the exercise of each person’s basic rights. However, even when everybody agrees to this basic principle, there could still remain irreconcilable social conflict and disagreement when it comes to the specific assignment of basic rights. This is especially so in a pluralistic society where there is a clash among radically different and incompatible world views. Philosophers have now started to focus on this issue, which now goes by the name “perspectival diversity.” This paper extends the basic social choice theoretic framework of liberal rights by extending the domain to include individual perspectives alongside individual preferences. In this new framework, different individuals are able to see or perceive the same social alternative differently based on their own unique perspectives. The formal results of the paper imply that generating a viable social choice that is consistent with the assignment of basic rights can quickly break down once we start to increase the level of perspectival diversity in society.
John Rawls's most mature notion of political order is "stability for the right reasons." Stabilit... more John Rawls's most mature notion of political order is "stability for the right reasons." Stability for the right reasons is the kind of political order that Rawls hoped a well-ordered society could ideally achieve. In this paper, I demonstrate through the tools of modern game theory, the instability of "stability for the right reasons." Specically, I will show that a well-ordered society can completely destabilize by the introduction of an arbitrarily small number of non-compliers whenever individuals fail to achieve full common knowledge ever so slightly.
Public reason liberalism takes as its starting point the deep and irreconcilable diversity we fin... more Public reason liberalism takes as its starting point the deep and irreconcilable diversity we find characterizing liberal societies. This deep and irreconcilable diversity creates problems for social order. One method for adjudicating these conflicts is through the use of rights. This paper is about the ability of such rights to adjudicate disputes when perspectival disagreements – or disagreements over how to categorize objects in the world – obtain. We present both formal possibility and impossibility results for rights structures under varying degrees of perspectival diversity. We show that though perspectival diversity appears to be a troubling problem for the prospect of stable social order, if rights are defined properly then disagreements can likely be resolved in a consistent manner, achieving social cooperation rather than conflict.
Ever since the publication of Harry Frankfurt’s “Equality as a Moral Ideal” (1987), the doctrine ... more Ever since the publication of Harry Frankfurt’s “Equality as a Moral Ideal” (1987), the doctrine of sufficiency has attracted great attention among both ethical theorists and political philosophers. The doctrine of sufficiency (or sufficientarianism) consists of two main theses: the positive thesis states that it is morally important for people to have enough; and the negative thesis states that once everybody has enough relative inequality has absolutely no moral importance. Many political philosophers have presented different versions of sufficientarianism that retain the general spirit of what Frankfurt had proposed in his seminal work. However, all of these different versions of sufficientarianism suffer from two critical problems: (a) they fail to give right answers to lifeboat situations, and (b) they fail to provide continuous ethical judgments. In this paper, I show a version of utilitarianism that solves these problems while retaining the major attractions of sufficientarianism. I call it “prospect utilitarianism.” In addition, I show that prospect utilitarianism can avoid standard objections to utilitarianism and has aspects that can appeal to both prioritarians and egalitarians as well.
In his article, “Equality as a Moral Ideal”, Harry Frankfurt argues against economic egalitariani... more In his article, “Equality as a Moral Ideal”, Harry Frankfurt argues against economic egalitarianism and presents what he calls the “doctrine of sufficiency.” According to the doctrine of sufficiency, what is morally important is not relative economic equality, but rather, whether somebody has enough, where “having enough” is a non-comparative standard of reasonable contentment that may differ from person to person given his/her aims and circumstances. The purpose of this paper is to show that Frankfurt’s original arguments in support for his doctrine of sufficiency have critical problems that Frankfurt himself does not properly recognize. In the end, I will argue that in order to solve these problems the doctrine of sufficiency cannot help but to incorporate certain prioritarian commitments – commitments which many would view as implying economic egalitarianism. This is embarrassing for a doctrine whose raison d'être was mainly to defeat economic egalitarianism.
In Book 1 of Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus contends two major claims: (1) justice is the advanta... more In Book 1 of Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus contends two major claims: (1) justice is the advantage of the stronger, and (2) justice is the good of the other, while injustice is to one’s own profit and advantage. In the beginning of Book II, Glaucon self-proclaims that he will be representing Thrasymachus’ claims in a better way, and provides a story of how justice has originated from a state of nature situation. However, Glaucon’s story of the origin of justice has an implication that justice is the advantage of the weak rather than the stronger. This is inconsistent with Thrasymachus’ first claim which states that justice is the advantage of the stronger. This is a problem for Glaucon since Glaucon is supposed to be representing Thrasymachus’ original claims in a better way. In this paper, I provide two solutions to this puzzle with the help of elementary game theory.
Hobbes’s own justification for the existence of governments relies on the assumption that, withou... more Hobbes’s own justification for the existence of governments relies on the assumption that, without a government, our lives in the state of nature would result in a state of war of every man against every man. Many contemporary scholars have tried to explain why universal war is unavoidable in Hobbes’s state of nature by utilizing modern game theory. However, most game-theoretic models that have been presented so far does not accurately capture what Hobbes deems to be the primary cause of conflict in the state of nature – which is uncertainty, rather than people’s egoistic psychology. Any game-theoretic model that does not incorporate uncertainty into the picture is, therefore, I claim, the wrong model. In this paper, I use Bayesian game-theory to show how universal conflict can break-out in the state of nature - even when the majority of the population would strictly prefer to cooperate and seek peace with other people - due to uncertainty about the other person’s type. Along the way, I show that the valuation of one’s own
life is one of the central mechanisms that drives Hobbes’s pessimistic conclusion.
The Korean Journal for Philosophy of Science <과학철학>, Vol. 17, No. 3, Nov 2014
There seems to be critics who think that game theory can provide very little insights in doing em... more There seems to be critics who think that game theory can provide very little insights in doing empirical social scientific research or normative political theory/political philosophy. This is because these people tend to think that game theory is committed to some highly contestable theory of human psychology; namely, that human beings either are or should be primarily motivated by their own exclusive self-interest. From this, critics tend to think that game theory is defective both as a normative theory of action as well as a descriptive theory of action. After explaining the basics of game theory, I will try to show that such criticisms are mostly based on a general misunderstanding of game theory. In the end, I will argue that game theory is simply a mathematical tool that could be used to model any strategic interaction for many different purposes, and is not committed to any substantial theories of human nature.
Filozofia 69, 2014, No. 8, pp. 687-696 (indexed in A&HCI), Oct 2014
Many commentators think that Hobbes was committed to an instrumental view of ra-tionality which f... more Many commentators think that Hobbes was committed to an instrumental view of ra-tionality which foreshadows that of David Hume. The Humean conception of in-strumental rationality is a conjunction of the following two claims: (a) no preferences or desires can properly be said to be irrational in themselves, and (b) the role of reason or rationality can only be confined to informing the agent with true beliefs about the world, and revealing the most effective means that could satisfy the agent’s current ends whatever they happen to be. In this paper, I argue that, unlike what many people think, a careful reading of Hobbes shows that he was committed to neither of these claims.
Chul Hak Sa Sang <철학사상> (Journal of Philosophical Ideas), Vol. 52, May, 2014 (indexed in KCI)
A notable feature of Rawls’ theory of international justice, which he presented in The Laws of Pe... more A notable feature of Rawls’ theory of international justice, which he presented in The Laws of Peoples, is his insistence on the toleration of non-liberal states provided that they are decent. Many political philosophers have criticized Rawls for being too generous towards non-liberal states. These critics feared that Rawls’ theory would safeguard non-liberal states to perform many forms of domestic injustices. In this paper, I make an entirely opposite objection. I claim that the real problem with Rawls’ theory of international justice is not of its being too generous, but rather of its being too stringent. Specifically, I will argue that when The Law of Peoples is correctly interpreted, it turns out that “the decent non-liberal societies” that the theory so emphatically proclaims to tolerate are not really non-liberal societies, but rather are more than sufficiently liberal societies.
<철학사상> 제48호 (Chul Hak Sa Sang, The Journal of Philosophical Ideas, Institute of Philosophy, Seoul National University, Vol. 48 (indexed in KCI), May 30, 2013
This is the syllabus for the PPEL Capstone Seminar which I am teaching Fall 2015 at the Universit... more This is the syllabus for the PPEL Capstone Seminar which I am teaching Fall 2015 at the University of Arizona. This is a required course for all seniors majoring in the undergraduate major PPEL (Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and Law) at the University of Arizona.
존경하는 한국분석철학회・한국과학철학회 회원 여러분,
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양 학회가 공동 주최하는 2016년 학술대회에 여러분을 초대합니다.
이번 학술대회의 주제는 ‘사회의 미래... more 존경하는 한국분석철학회・한국과학철학회 회원 여러분,
안녕하십니까? 양 학회가 공동 주최하는 2016년 학술대회에 여러분을 초대합니다.
이번 학술대회의 주제는 ‘사회의 미래, 철학의 미래—모어의 『유토피아』 출간 500주년’입니다. 잘 아시다시피 『유토피아』는 사회 문화적 격동기를 살아가는 지성인의 역할을 잘 보여주는 책으로서 당대 사회에 대한 비판과 새로운 전망을 담고 있습니다. 『유토피아』 출간 500주년을 기념하는 이번 학술대회는 ‘알파고’로 대표되는 21세기 정보사회에서 지성인의 역할을 반성하고 사회와 세계에 대한 새로운 철학적 성찰을 표출하는 자리가 될 것입니다.
이번 학술대회는 전체 세션과 과학과 형이상학, 과학-언어-방법론, 과학과 심리철학을 주제로 하는 분과 세션, 대학원생 자유 발표와 포스터 발표, 북심포지움 등 다양한 프로그램을 준비하고 있습니다.
이번 학술대회가 철학적 분석이라는 방법론을 정신을 공유하는 분석철학과 과학철학의 활발한 교류의 장이 될 수 있도록 회원 여러분의 적극적인 관심과 참여를 부탁드립니다.
Suppose we assume that the parties in the original position took Kahneman and Tversky's prosp... more Suppose we assume that the parties in the original position took Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory as constituting their general knowledge of human psychology that survives through the veil of ignorance. How would this change the choice situation of the original position? In this paper, I present what I call ‘prospect utilitarianism’. Prospect utilitarianism combines the utilitarian social welfare function with individual utility functions characterized by Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory. I will argue that, once prospect utilitarianism is on the table, Rawls's original arguments in support of justice as fairness as well as his arguments against utilitarianism are, at best, inconclusive. This shows that how implausible a choice for utilitarianism in the original position is heavily depends on what one assumes to be general knowledge of human psychology that the original contracting parties know.
The original position together with the veil of ignorance have served as one of the main methodol... more The original position together with the veil of ignorance have served as one of the main methodological devices to justify principles of distributive justice. Most approaches to this topic have primarily focused on the single person decision-theoretic aspect of the original position. This paper, in contrast, will directly model the basic structure and the economic agents therein to project the economic consequences and social outcomes generated either by utilitarianism or Rawls’s two principles of justice. It will be shown that when the differences in people’s productive abilities are sufficiently great, utilitarianism dominates Rawls’s two principles of justice by providing a higher level of overall well-being to every member of society. Whenever this is the case, the parties can rely on the Principle of Dominance (which is a direct implication of instrumental rationality) to choose utilitarianism over Rawls’s two principles of justice. Furthermore, when this is so, utilitarianism ...
When modeling the state of nature, Hobbes and Locke pose different challenges. For Hobbes, the pr... more When modeling the state of nature, Hobbes and Locke pose different challenges. For Hobbes, the primary challenge is to show that the state of nature will necessarily dissolve into a state of universal and perpetual war when there exists a small number of nasty aggressors. For Locke, the challenge is to show that the state of nature dissolves into a state of war at least sometimes even when there exist no such aggressors and everybody is morally motivated to follow the law of nature that prescribes not to harm others. The standard interpretation of Locke identifies three main causes of war in the state of nature: the lack of a common judge, moral disagreement over the law of nature, and self-love. In this paper, I argue that the combination of these three factors are incapable of generating war in Locke&#39;s state of nature no matter how infrequent. Instead, in order for war to occur at least sometimes in Locke&#39;s state of nature, there has to be some sort of epistemic deficit. In this paper, I show via the tools of modern game theory, how Locke&#39;s state of nature may occasionally generate war by two kinds of epistemic problems: (a) disagreements in subjective probabilities, and (b) uncertainty.
There is now a growing consensus among democratic theorists that we should incorporate both ‘demo... more There is now a growing consensus among democratic theorists that we should incorporate both ‘democratic deliberation’ and ‘aggregative voting’ into our democratic processes, where democratic deliberation precedes aggregating people’s votes. But how should the two democratic mechanisms of deliberation and voting interact? The question we wish to ask in this paper is which social choice rules are consistent with successful deliberation once it has occurred. For this purpose, we introduce a new axiom, which we call “Non-Negative Response toward Successful Deliberation (NNRD).” The basic idea is that if some individuals change their preferences toward other individuals’ preferences through successful deliberation, then the social choice rule should not make everybody who has successfully persuaded others through reasoned deliberation worse-off than what s/he would have achieved without deliberation. We prove an impossibilty theorem that shows that there exists no aggregation rule that can simultaneously satisfy (NNRD) along with other mild axioms that reflect deliberative democracy’s core committment to unanimous consensus and democratic equality. We offer potential escape routes: however, it is shown that each escape route can succeed only by compromising some core value of deliberative democracy.
In a recently published paper entitled, “The Difference Principle Would Not Be Chosen behind the ... more In a recently published paper entitled, “The Difference Principle Would Not Be Chosen behind the Veil of Ignorance”, Johan E. Gustafsson attempts to demonstrate that the parties in Rawls’s original position would not choose the difference principle. Gustafsson’s main strategy was to show that Rawls’s difference principle in both of its ex post and ex ante versions imply counterintuitive distributional prescriptions in a few contrived examples. The purpose of this paper is to precisely demonstrate exactly how Gustafsson’s arguments have failed to show that the difference principle would not be chosen behind the veil of ignorance.
1. The Motivation behind Attributing Psychological Egoism to Hobbes. There are three commonly hel... more 1. The Motivation behind Attributing Psychological Egoism to Hobbes. There are three commonly held interpretations of Thomas Hobbes: (a) that he held a desire (or preference) satisfaction theory of the good; (b) that he held a purely instrumental view of rationality; and (c) that he was committed to psychological egoism. There are now quite a few scholars that reject interpretation (b); namely, that Hobbes held a purely instrumental view of rationality. 1 In this paper, I will show that there are good reasons to reject interpretation (c); namely, that Hobbes was a psychological egoist. 2 And, as an intermediate step, I will also briefly show that there are good reasons to reject interpretation (a) – namely, that Hobbes held a desire-satisfaction theory of the good, as well. Psychological egoism is a view that claims that all human actions are motivated, at bottom, exclusively by one’s self-interest; it claims that everybody, in the end, is an egoists. This is a very strong claim. It...
Many commentators think that Hobbes was committed to an instrumental view of rationality which fo... more Many commentators think that Hobbes was committed to an instrumental view of rationality which foreshadows that of David Hume. The Humean conception of instrumental rationality is a conjunction of the following two claims: (a) no preferences or desires can properly be said to be irrational in themselves, and (b) the role of reason or rationality can only be confined to informing the agent with true beliefs about the world, and revealing the most effective means that could satisfy the agent’s current ends whatever they happen to be. In this paper, I argue that, unlike what many people think, a careful reading of Hobbes shows that he was committed to neither of these claims.
In his article, “Equality as a Moral Ideal”, Harry Frankfurt argues against economic egalitariani... more In his article, “Equality as a Moral Ideal”, Harry Frankfurt argues against economic egalitarianism and presents what he calls the “doctrine of sufficiency.” According to the doctrine of sufficiency, what is morally important is not relative economic equality, but rather, whether somebody has enough, where “having enough” is a non-comparative standard of reasonable contentment that may differ from person to person given his/her aims and circumstances. The purpose of this paper is to show that Frankfurt’s original arguments in support for his doctrine of sufficiency have critical problems that Frankfurt himself does not properly recognize. In the end, I will argue that in order to solve these problems the doctrine of sufficiency cannot help but to incorporate certain prioritarian commitments – commitments which many would view as implying economic egalitarianism. This is embarrassing for a doctrine whose raison d’être was mainly to defeat economic egalitarianism.
Inspired by impossibility theorems of social choice theory, many democratic theorists have argued... more Inspired by impossibility theorems of social choice theory, many democratic theorists have argued that aggregative forms of democracy cannot lend full democratic justification for the collective decisions reached. Hence, democratic theorists have turned their attention to deliberative democracy, according to which “outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if they could be the object of a free and reasoned agreement among equals” (Cohen 1997a, 73). However, relatively little work has been done to offer a formal theory of democratic deliberation. This article helps fill that gap by offering a formal theory of three different modes of democratic deliberation: myopic discussion, constructive discussion, and debate. We show that myopic discussion suffers from indeterminacy of long run outcomes, while constructive discussion and debate are conclusive. Finally, unlike the other two modes of deliberation, debate is path independent and converges to a unique compromise position, ir...
We propose the solution concept of directional equilibrium for the multidimensional model of voti... more We propose the solution concept of directional equilibrium for the multidimensional model of voting with general spatial preferences. This concept isolates alternatives that are stable with respect to forces applied by all voters in the directions of their gradients, and it extends a known concept from statistics for Euclidean preferences. We establish connections to the majority core, Pareto optimality, and existence and closed graph, and we provide non-cooperative foundations in terms of a local contest game played by voters.
Public reason liberalism takes as its starting point the deep and irreconcilable diversity we fin... more Public reason liberalism takes as its starting point the deep and irreconcilable diversity we find characterizing liberal societies. This deep and irreconcilable diversity creates problems for social order. One method for adjudicating these conflicts is through the use of rights. This paper is about the ability of such rights to adjudicate disputes when perspectival disagreements —or disagreements over how to categorize objects in the world—obtain. We present both formal possibility and impossibility results for rights structures under varying degrees of perspectival diversity. We show that though perspectival diversity appears to be a troubling problem for the prospect of stable social order, if rights are defined properly then disagreements can likely be resolved in a consistent manner, achieving social cooperation rather than conflict.
One of John Rawls’s major aims, when he wrote A Theory of Justice, was to present a superior alte... more One of John Rawls’s major aims, when he wrote A Theory of Justice, was to present a superior alternative to utilitarianism. Rawls’s worry was that utilitarianism may fail to protect the fundamental rights and liberties of persons in its attempt to maximize total social welfare. Rawls’s main argument against utilitarianism was that, for such reasons, the representative parties in the original position will not choose utilitarianism, but will rather choose his justice as fairness, which he believed would securely protect the worth of everybody’s basic rights and liberties. In this paper, I will argue that, under close formal examination, Rawls’s argument against utilitarianism is self-defeating. That is, I will argue that Rawls’s own reasons, assumptions, and the many theoretical devices he employs demonstrably imply that the representative parties in the original position will choose utilitarianism instead of justice as fairness.
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only by compromising some core value of deliberative democracy.
Selected Publications by Hun Chung
life is one of the central mechanisms that drives Hobbes’s pessimistic conclusion.
only by compromising some core value of deliberative democracy.
life is one of the central mechanisms that drives Hobbes’s pessimistic conclusion.
안녕하십니까?
양 학회가 공동 주최하는 2016년 학술대회에 여러분을 초대합니다.
이번 학술대회의 주제는 ‘사회의 미래, 철학의 미래—모어의 『유토피아』 출간 500주년’입니다. 잘 아시다시피 『유토피아』는 사회 문화적 격동기를 살아가는 지성인의 역할을 잘 보여주는 책으로서 당대 사회에 대한 비판과 새로운 전망을 담고 있습니다. 『유토피아』 출간 500주년을 기념하는 이번 학술대회는 ‘알파고’로 대표되는 21세기 정보사회에서 지성인의 역할을 반성하고 사회와 세계에 대한 새로운 철학적 성찰을 표출하는 자리가 될 것입니다.
이번 학술대회는 전체 세션과 과학과 형이상학, 과학-언어-방법론, 과학과 심리철학을 주제로 하는 분과 세션, 대학원생 자유 발표와 포스터 발표, 북심포지움 등 다양한 프로그램을 준비하고 있습니다.
이번 학술대회가 철학적 분석이라는 방법론을 정신을 공유하는 분석철학과 과학철학의 활발한 교류의 장이 될 수 있도록 회원 여러분의 적극적인 관심과 참여를 부탁드립니다.
2016년 6월
한국과학철학회 회장 이영의
한국분석철학회 회장 박우석