I held a philosophical café today in Stjärnsund, the second one this month. Rather small groups, good discussions. What I do is I let people propose questions, we discuss them for a while, then vote for one question to investigate more thoroughly. Last time the winner was “What is a good life”, today “What is liberty?” and “What is responsibility?” (the group thought these two were close enough to be combined).

The main philosophy event this month was a Workshop on Climate Change in Uppsala, where I presented some new ideas on the value of population size in the future. Many of us have a strong intuition that the world is neither better nor worse for having more people around, disregarding their effects on others and on nature. However, this intuition seems inconsistent with the strong intuition that it is better to get an addition of happy people than to get an addition of less happy people. If status quo is equally good as addition A and equally good as addition B, it would seem addition A and addition B must be equally good. I get around this problem by making the value of the existence of future people relative to the context they exist in. It might be a good idea, I will give it some more time.

It is already March but the snow is deeper than ever in Stjärnsund. When it is sunny it is a true wonderland. I cannot agree with all those who claim to be tired of it. I am still officially on parental leave and try to spend more time with my wonderful baby boy Maui this semester. In February, I took him, and his mother, to see his grandfather and extra grandmother in Spain for a week. A pleasant trip which included a short swim in the Mediterranean, a tour through blossoming almond tree country and introducing our hosts to the awesome game Ticket to Ride. Philosophywise, I submitted four applications for postdoc funding this month (it’s getting tiresome), finished an article on alcohol interlocks in cars for Swedish journal Socialmedicinsk tidskrift with my co-author Jessica Fahlquist, wrote a report on ethics for my friend Jan Aronsson‘s project on a new value policy for the Swedish National Heritage Board, and pondered some old and some new ideas. I was also invited to a training workshop for doctoral students in Manchester and held a 90 min workshop on conceptual analysis in applied ethics.