Christoph Schmidt-Petri

• BSc Philosophy & Economics; PhD Philosophy (LSE)
• Lecturer at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

IntroductionAccording to John Stuart Mill’s version of utilitarianism, “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”See U II 2, 55/210. References are by chapter and paragraph of Utilitarianism, the page numbers refer to the edition by Roger Crisp first (Roger Crisp, ed....

A well known paragraph in Mill's ‘Utilitarianism’ has standardly been misread. Mill does not claim that if some pleasure is of ‘higher quality’, then it will be (or ought to be) chosen over the pleasure of lower quality regardless of their respective quantities. Instead he says that if some pleasure will be chosen over another available in larger q...

I present a game-theoretic way to understand the situation describing Newcomb’s Problem (NP) which helps to explain the intuition of both one-boxers and two-boxers. David Lewis has shown that the NP may be modelled as a Prisoners Dilemma game (PD) in which ‘cooperating’ corresponds to ‘taking one box’. Adopting relevant results from game theory, th...

This paper is a reply to Jonathan Riley’s criticism of my reading of Mill(both published in the Philosophical Quarterly 2003). I show that Riley’s interpretation has no textual support in Mill’s writing by putting the supposedly supporting quotations in their proper context. Secondly it is demonstrated how my reading is not incompatible with hedoni...

Background: Adequate immunity to COVID-19 apparently cannot be attained in Germany by voluntary vaccination alone, and therefore the introduction of mandatory COVID-19 vaccination is still under consideration. We present findings on the potential acceptance of such a requirement by the German population, and we report on the reasons given for acce...

Background According to a recent paper by Gelfand et al., COVID-19 infection and case mortality rates are closely connected to the strength of social norms: “Tighter” cultures that abide by strict social norms are more successful in combating the pandemic than “looser” cultures that are more permissive. However, countries with similar levels of cul...

It is well known that John Stuart Mill (JSM) repeatedly acknowledges Harriet Taylor Mill's (HTM) substantial contribution to On Liberty . After her death, however, he decides to publish the book under his name only. Are we justified in continuing this practice, initiated by JSM, of refusing unequivocal co-authorship status to HTM? Drawing on stylom...

Several vaccines against COVID-19 have now been developed and are already being rolled out around the world. The decision whether or not to get vaccinated has so far been left to the individual citizens. However, there are good reasons, both in theory as well as in practice, to believe that the willingness to get vaccinated might not be sufficientl...

Researching the evolution of the concepts represented by words, like "peace" or "freedom", named conceptual history, is an important discipline in the humanities, but still a laborious task. It normally consists of reading and interpreting a large number of carefully selected texts, without however always having a comprehensive knowledge of all the...

There are two seemingly radical ways of resolving the problem of the shortage of organs available for transplantation. One is to create a (heavily regulated, to be sure) market for organs, in which people receive a financial or other incentive to increase the supply of organs, the hope being that given the right level of incentive, more organs will...

Zusammenfassung Der Artikel erörtert, nach welchen Grundzügen ein glücksegalitaristisches Gesundheitswesen organisiert sein müsste. Eine Implikation des Glücksegalitarismus ist, dass grundsätzlich nur für durch ‚reines Pech' erlittene Nachteile ein Anspruch auf Wiedergutmachung bestehen sollte. Im gesundheitlichen Kontext bedeutet dies, dass Behand...

The idea that belief comes in degrees is based on the observation that we are more certain of some things than of others. Various theories try to give accounts of how measures of this confidence do or ought to behave, both as far as the internal mental consistency of the agent as well as his betting, or other, behaviour is concerned. This anthology...

In this paper I discuss to what extent Nancy Cartwright's appeal to John Stuart Mill's use of 'tendencies' to defend or motivate her central notion of 'capacity' is justified. My observations are meant to shed some light on the relation between these two concepts rather than to criticize or defend either. I shall argue that the differences between...

In this short commentary on Ken Binmore’s Natural Justice I primarily examine the relationship between mainstream egalitarian theories and Binmore’s approach. I argue that Binmore uses key concepts in non-standard ways. As a result, he doesn’t engage enough with the views he criticises.

This paper is a reply to Jonathan Riley’s criticism of my reading of Mill (both published in the Philosophical Quarterly 2003). I show that Riley’s interpretation has no textual support in Mill’s writing by putting the supposedly supporting quotations in their proper context. Secondly it is demonstrated how my reading is not incompatible with hedon...

The 'Gettier counterexamples' (Gettier 19631) to the tripartite account of propositional knowledge are generally taken to show that not every instance of justified true belief constitutes knowledge. I argue that Gettier's famous first example fails to establish this conclusion. I claim to show that the example violates the belief condition of the t...