Can We Explain Cost Growth in Major Defense Acquisition Programs?

This question asked in this article is whether the shared intellectual property of the acquisition community includes an adequate theory of cost growth in major defense acquisition programs (MDAPs). This question is given concrete form by cost growth data for 123 MDAPs. These data are grouped into categories, which range from very small—negative, in fact—cost growth to cost growth in excess of 100%. Potential explanations for this broad range of cost growth considered are: the conventional wisdom about cost growth; a recent RAND study that closely examined cases at both ends of the distribution, along with some possible extensions of that study; and a recent model of the root causes of cost growth. The author argues that each of these falls short; in particular, it seems that the defense acquisition community at large does not have a good explanation of cost growth in the broad range of 30% to 100%.

Dispensing with the Subjective Moral ‘Ought’

There are cases in which, intuitively, an agent’s action is both morally right in one sense and morally wrong in another sense. Such cases (along with other intuitions about blameless wrongdoing and action-guidance) support distinguishing between the objective moral ‘ought’ and the subjective moral ‘ought.’ This chapter argues against drawing this distinction on the grounds that the prescriptions delivered by an adequate objective moral theory must be sensitive to the mental states of agents. Specifically, an adequate theory of the objective moral ‘ought’ must respect a strong ought-implies-can principle—morally ought implies agentially can—in order to prescribe actions to real-life agents. An agent’s mental states determine what is agentially possible for that agent; thus, what an agent objectively morally ought to do is in part determined by the agent’s mental states. This chapter describes the structure of a compelling non-ideal moral theory that is both objective and mental state-sensitive. This non-ideal theory illuminates the shortcomings of extant objectivist and subjectivist moral theories and illustrates how we can dispense with the subjective moral ‘ought.’

What Is the Opposite of Well-Being?

Typically, discussions of the nature of well-being focus only on the positive elements—those things that directly constitute someone’s being well off or better off. But an adequate theory of well-being also needs to give an account of ill-being, the negative elements that directly constitute being badly off, or worse off. This chapter asks how to extend a particular nonstandard theory of well-being—according to which well-being consists in the enjoyment of objective goods—so as to cover ill-being as well. In effect, then, it tries to discover the opposite of well-being, according to this nonstandard theory. This chapter tries to answer the question: what is ill-being when well-being is enjoying the good? Graphs are used throughout to illustrate the alternative possibilities, and to help display the surprising complexity of the most plausible answers.

Toward a Theory of Offense: Should You Feel Offended?

The feeling of being offended, as a moral emotion, plays a key role in issues such as slurs, the offense principle, ethics of humor, etc. However, no adequate theory of offense has been developed in the literature, and it remains unclear what questions such a theory should answer. This paper attempts to fill the gap by performing two tasks. The first task is to clarify and summarize the questions of offense into two kinds, the descriptive questions (e.g., what features differentiate offense from similar moral states like anger?) and the normative questions (e.g., what are the conditions for taking offense to be apt?). The second task is to answer these questions by developing what I call ‘the violated norm theory of offense’. According to this theory, feeling offended entails that the norm one endorses is judged to be violated by the offender. Appealing to the violated norm enables this theory to answer the descriptive questions (e.g., taking offense differs from anger because of features like not requiring victims and the difficulty of animal offense) and the normative questions of offense (e.g., taking offense is apt only if the violated norm is universalizable).

Meaning and Value Across the Generations

This chapter argues that our relations to our successors are richer, more varied, and more complex than is sometimes recognized. Although we cannot in any straightforward sense interact or form personal relationships with people who will live long after we have died, future generations nevertheless matter greatly to us and in a variety of ways. These facts, which reflect our underappreciated historicist sensibility, must be taken into account in developing an adequate theory of intergenerational ethics. They are also facts of great motivational significance. To ensure the survival of humanity, sufficient numbers of people must be strongly and stably motivated to solve the problems that threaten future generations, and people’s sense of moral obligation may not, by itself, be sufficiently robust or reliable to provide all the necessary motivational support. So one challenge we face, in seeking to address problems like climate change and nuclear proliferation, is to overcome this potentially disabling motivational deficit. Yet once one appreciates the complexity of our attitudes toward future generations, one can see that we have a variety of reasons for caring about the fate of our successors. These reasons provide additional motivational resources that may complement and cooperate with our distinctively moral motivations for addressing threats to future generations.

Non-Boolean classical relevant logics II: Classicality through truth-constants

This paper gives an account of Anderson and Belnap’s selection criteria for an adequate theory of entailment. The criteria are grouped into three categories: criteria pertaining to modality, those pertaining to relevance, and those related to expressive strength. The leitmotif of both this paper and its prequel is the relevant legitimacy of disjunctive syllogism. Relevant logics are commonly held to be paraconsistent logics. It is shown in this paper, however, that both E and R can be extended to explosive logics which satisfy all of Anderson and Belnap’s selection criteria, provided the truth-constant known as the Ackermann constant is available. One of the selection criteria related to expressive strength is having an “enthymematic” conditional for which a deduction theorem holds. I argue that this allows for a new interpretation of Anderson and Belnap’s take on logical consequence, namely as committing them to pluralism about logical consequence.

The language in language and thinking

The relationship of language and thinking is starting to receive considerable attention in the field of SLA research under the name of Bilingual Cognition. This paper argues that it needs to be underpinned by a proper foundation in the language side of the relationship: it is dangerous to take language for granted. First it argues for researchers to clearly spell out what they mean by language, whether as the general property of human beings, in an abstract sense, as an external reality, as mental knowledge, as social community or as action, each of which has different implications for the relationship of language and cognition. Then it argues for the Language Commitment to an adequate theory and description of language as a basis for research, claiming that current emphasis is too much on isolate semantic categories rather than syntactic categories and on word-referent mapping rather than the full complexity of lexical meaning.

Regulating under Uncertainty about Rationality

Theories of choice, and their legal consequences, dramatically differ based on whether they are premised on rational or boundedly rational actors. This chapter describes the interactions between, and regulatory implications of, three types of uncertainties that the selection of an adequate theory of choice requires. First, it suggests that Knightian uncertainty concerning the distribution of degrees of rationality between regulatees obtains in many regulatory areas. More recently, this has been described as a ‘knowledge problem’ of behavioural law and economics. This chapter argues that the best regulatory response to the knowledge problem is to frame regulation as a problem of decision making under uncertainty. Second, with the rise of machine learning, it is arguably becoming ever more possible to estimate the level of bias, or even entire rationality quotients, of individual regulatees. This opens the potential for, but also the pitfalls of, personalised law. Third, even Big Data analytics generally only offers a snapshot of a distribution of rationality at one moment in time. Recent economic analyses have suggested behavioural heterogeneity can evolve over time in unpredicted ways that may lead to unforeseen consequences, leading to economic complexity. This calls for a greater role of standards, as opposed to rules, in regulating environments with dynamic behavioural heterogeneity. The chapter focuses on the normative implications of different types of uncertainty. In the end, theories of choice can aid more transparent normative trade-offs but they cannot replace the value judgments, and normative discourses, that balance the involved interests.

Theories of Choice

Choice is a key concept of our time. It is a foundational mechanism for every legal order in societies that are, politically, constituted as democracies and, economically, built on the market mechanism. Thus, choice can be understood as an atomic structure that grounds core societal processes. In recent years, however, the debate over the right way to theorise choice—for example, as a rational or a behavioural type of decision making—has intensified. This collection therefore provides an in-depth discussion of the promises and perils of specific types of theories of choice. It shows how the selection of a specific theory of choice can make a difference for concrete legal questions, in particularly in the regulation of the digital economy or in choosing between market, firm, or network. In its first part, the volume provides an accessible overview of the current debates about rational versus behavioural approaches to theories of choice. The remainder of the book structures the vast landscape of theories of choice along three main types: individual, collective, and organisational decision making. As theories of choice proliferate and become ever more sophisticated, however, the process of choosing an adequate theory of choice becomes increasingly intricate, too. This volume addresses this selection problem for the various legal arenas in which individual, organisational, and collective decisions matter. By drawing on economic, technological, political, and legal points of view, the volume shows which theories of choice are at the disposal of the legally relevant decision maker, and how they can be implemented for the solution of concrete legal problems.