Philosophical Foundations of Probability and Decision Theory

Should defendants be convicted based on merely statistical evidence? To what extent are individuals responsible for group harms? Can voting in a non-swing state be justified? Are cosmological theories more plausible when they posit the existence of many observers? How much should we spend on existential risk mitigation? How valuable are miniscule benefits for enormous numbers of people? How does the possibility of cascading failure affect the value of preserving political norms? We will use probability and decision theory to investigate these and other questions in epistemology, ethics, philosophy of science, and the law.