Venue: Institute for Futures Studies, Holländargatan 13 in Stockholm, or online Welcome to a seminar arranged in collaboration with two visiting researchers from the Hague University of Applied Science,

Utilitas Abstract According to positive egalitarianism, not only do relations of inequality have negative value, as negative egalitarians claim, but relations of equality also have positive value. The eg

Is it possible to study emotions using mathematical models? Frank Schweizer is one of the resesarchers who have tried and he finds for example that we are quite nice to each other online. He came to te

The importance of socio-economic background will become increasingly important for school success. But segregation in the school area is steadily growing and inequality is increasing, a development tha

Nature Human Behavior Abstract Liberals and conservatives often take opposing positions on moral issues. But what makes a moral position liberal or conservative? Why does public opinion tend to become m

Calls for 2 PhD positions in a new research program Transformative Partnerships for Sustainable Development: Assessing synergies, effectiveness and legitimacy of United Nations Multi-stakeholder Partne.

The Paris Institute for Advanced Study and the 2100 Fondation in partnership with the Institute for Futures Studiesare launching the first Positive Future competition in order to encourage the elaboration

Adina Preda: Can there be positive human rights?

Research seminar with Adina Preda, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. Abstract This paper aims to establish that there can be human rights to socio-economic goods or services

Research seminar with Adina Preda, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin.AbstractThis paper aims to establish that there can be human rights to socio-economic goods or services, ; the worry is that positive rights cannot have correlative duties assignable to everyone in the world. I then clarify the notion of correlativity and raise doubts about this claim. The paper concludes that there is no conceptual reason why positive rights cannot be general although they would probably look different from the socio-economic rights currently enshrined in international legal documents; the paper does not, however, argue that there are such moral rights. 

Philosophical Studies Abstract In her ground-breaking and highly influential book Transformative Experience, L.A. Paul makes two claims: (1) one cannot evaluate and compare certain experiential outcomes  evaluate and compare certain intuitively horrible outcomes (e.g. being eaten alive by sharks) as bad and worse than certain other outcomes even if one cannot grasp what these intuitively horrible outcomes are like. We argue that the conjunction of these two claims leads to an implausible discontinuity in the evaluability of outcomes. One implication of positing such a discontinuity is that evaluative comparisons of outcomes will not be proportionally sensitive to variation in the underlying features of these outcomes. This puts pressure on Paul to abandon either (1) or (2). But (1) is central to her view and (2) is very hard to deny. We call this the Shark Problem.