Kadish Workshop in Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory: Lara Buchak, Princeton University

A Faithful Response to Disagreement

Sometimes you encounter someone who is your intellectual equal and has roughly the same evidence you have, but who has come to a very different conclusion on the basis of that evidence. This is the setting for the peer disagreement debate. The question is how this encounter should change your opinion. Three intuitively attractive claims seem to conflict: there is disagreement among peers on many important matters; peer disagreement is a serious challenge to one’s own opinion; and yet one should be able to maintain one’s opinion on important matters. However, these claims only conflict if we accept an assumption about how one’s opinion should be related to the evidence one has at a time. Although this assumption seems so obvious that it goes unquestioned in the debate, I will show that it can be rejected, and rejected precisely in the case of peer disagreement about important matters. This opens up a promising response to the problem of peer disagreement. Peer disagreement does give you evidence against the claim which is the object of disagreement, but you should nonetheless retain your initial belief.

Lara Buchak, Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University

Lara Buchak is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Princeton University.

Her research interests include decision theory, social choice theory, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Her book Risk and Rationality (2013) concerns how an individual ought to take risk into account when making decisions. It vindicates the ordinary decision-maker from the point of view of even ideal rationality. A significant upshot of her view is that individuals with different attitudes towards risk—considered as different ways to weight worse scenarios against better ones—can all be rational.

Her research following the book has focused on applications of her view to ethics, arguing that we ought to defer to individuals’ risk-attitudes in biomedical research; that we ought to weight worse scenarios very heavily in setting climate policy; and that we ought to care a great deal about the interests of the worse-off when acting ethically.

Another ongoing project is on the nature and rationality of faith, both in the religious and mundane sense. She argues that faith requires stopping one’s search for evidence and making a commitment–and maintaining one’s commitment in the face of counterevidence. She details when such faith is rational, and how it is beneficial to human life.

Other topics she has written on include group decision-making; the relationship between assigning probability to a hypothesis and believing that hypothesis outright; and the nature of free will. 

Buchak received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2009.  She spent 12 years in the Philosophy Department at UC Berkeley (Go Bears!) before returning to Princeton.

About the Workshop:

A workshop for presenting and discussing work in progress in moral, political, and legal theory. The central aim is to provide an opportunity for students to engage with philosophers, political theorists, and legal scholars working on normative questions. Another aim is to bring together people from different disciplines who have strong normative interests or who speak to issues of potential interest to philosophers and political theorists.  

The theme for the Fall 2024 workshop is “Disagreement.”

This semester the workshop is co-taught by Josh Cohen and Véronique Munoz-Dardé.