Epistemic Entitlement

de Peter J. Graham, Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen

"This is the first collective study of the thinking behind the effective altruism movement. This movement comprises a growing global community of people who organise significant parts of their lives around the two key concepts represented in its name. Altruism is the idea that if we use a significant portion of the resources in our possession--whether money, time, or talents--with a view to helping others then we can improve the world considerably. When we do put such resources to altruistic use, it is crucial to focus on how much good this or that intervention is reasonably expected to do per unit of resource expended (as a gage of effectiveness). We can try to rank various possible actions against each other to establish which will do the most good with the resources expended. Thus we could aim to rank various possible kinds of action to alleviate poverty against one another, or against actions aimed at very different types of outcome, focused perhaps on animal welfare or future generations. The scale and organisation of the effective altruism movement encourage careful dialogue on questions that have perhaps long been there, throwing them into new and sharper relief, and giving rise to previously unnoticed questions. In this volume a team of internationally recognised philosophers, economists, and political theorists present refined and in-depth explorations of issues that arise once one takes seriously the twin ideas of altruistic commitment and effectiveness."-- "For most of the twentieth century, philosophers have explored the nature and extent of our knowledge-especially our knowledge of the world grounded in sense-perceptual experience. Can we be sure that our experience of the world is enough to ground our knowledge of an external reality? Are our everyday beliefs about our world warranted well enough for knowledge? What if we're all in The Matrix? This volume collects cutting-edge essays, written by leading philosophers, which address these fundamental questions about our place in the world. Through sustained reflection on two kinds of warrants-entitlements and justifications-they all seek to understand the nature and extent of our knowledge. Even if we were not able to justify our knowledge of the external world,0we are nevertheless entitled to our view of external reality.