Category Archives: Uncategorized

God: Impossible or merely Improbable?

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God: Impossible or merely Improbable?
A symposium on Colin Howson’s, Objecting to God

Moderator: Donald Ainslie, Toronto

Logic: Colin Howson, Toronto
Medieval: Peter King, Toronto
Political: Joseph Heath, Toronto
Epistemology: Jonathan Weisberg, Toronto

Thursday, Feb. 7, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Room 200, Larkin Building
15 Devonshire Place

Ethics at Noon this Wednesday

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Justifying a Positive Social Discount Rate

Speaker: Joseph Heath
Director, Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Wednesday, January 23
Room 200, 15 Devonshire Place

Abstract: Recent debates over the economics of climate change have made it clear that the choice of a social discount rate has enormous consequences for the type of policies that will be recommended. The social discount rate determines how future costs are to be compared to (and traded off against) present costs. Since most economists acknowledge this to be a “moral” problem, one might think that moral philosophers could be of some use in at least exploring the issue. Unfortunately, the specific proposal that philosophers have been inclined to make, with respect to the social discount rate, is so far outside the ballpark of what economists and policy-makers have been considering, that it has resulted in them being largely sidelined in the discussion. This is because almost all philosophers who have written on this topic believe that the only acceptable social rate of time preference is zero, a view that, when taken literally, has absurd implications. As a result, philosophers have made very little contribution to the ongoing debates over climate policy. My first goal in this paper is to show that many philosophers have moved too quickly from the idea that the goodness or badness of a beneficial or harmful event is independent of when it occurs, to the conclusion that temporal discounting of benefits and harms in the present is impermissible. My second goal is to explore several different avenues of argument that could be adopted, in order to show that temporal discounting of welfare may be permissible.

Tonight at 8:00 pm, on TVO’s The Agenda – Joseph Heath

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Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Between Rich and Poor

The economic downturn has focused greater attention on the “rich” and the “poor.” The Agenda examines the modern notion of “rich” and “poor”.

Wealth is in the Eye of the Beholder

Most of us would consider an individual earning $250k wealthy. But what if that person doesn’t “feel” rich? Since the beginning of the economic downturn, we’ve seen an increased use of the words “rich” and “poor,” but what do those definitions really mean? Is the precise definition of the words as important as the ideals prescribed to the notion of “rich” and “poor”?

http://theagenda.tvo.org/episode/187012/between-rich-and-poor

If you miss it, you can watch it here tomorrow:

http://theagenda.tvo.org/episode/187012/between-rich-and-poor

or, download it as a podcast tomorrow morning:

http://theagenda.tvo.org/podcasts

David Moss on Regulatory Capture

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“Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit it”

David A. Moss
John G. McLean Professor of Business Administration
Harvard Business School

January 14, 2013
Please note time change: 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Room 200, Larkin Building
15 Devonshire Place

Abstract:  When markets or regulations fall short of our expectations, observers often point to regulatory capture as a culprit. Unfortunately, regulatory capture is very commonly misdiagnosed and mistreated. Misdiagnosed because the study of regulatory capture, in both academic and policy circles, has grown stale and ever more detached from practice. All too often, observers are quick to see capture as the explanation for almost any regulatory problem, making large-scale inferences about agencies and their cultures without a careful look at the evidence. At the same time, there appears to be a great deal of fatalism – some of it strategic, no doubt – about the impossibility of ameliorating or preventing capture, virtually ensuring that the ailment is mistreated in many cases. Some or even much of this may be the product of highly simplified models – models in which the complete capture of regulators by incumbent firms is all but inevitable. We aspire to improve our understanding of capture, making it more rigorous, more thorough, and more practically useful to those who want to prevent capture. Capture is real and a genuine threat to regulation, we recognize, but regulation is also a fact of modern life, and undoubtedly necessary in some circumstances to protect the public and stave off catastrophe. The critical question is whether capture, where it exists, can be mitigated or prevented. We believe the evidence strongly suggests that the answer is yes, and that better study of regulation and special interest influence can show us how to limit capture and make regulatory governance a more useful tool for accomplishing public ends.