I. INTRODUCTION A. THE GOALS OF SENTENCING REFORM The sentencing reforms of the past twenty-five years have had several goals, including "truth in sentencing," control of prison populations, and reduction of unwarranted disparity. The first goal was easily achieved when parole was abolished and the sentence imposed became the sentence served. Control of prison populations proved more difficult, and careful evaluation is needed to determine whether sentencing reform helped to check, or may have accelerated, the steady rise in prison in
Our aim is to clarify the conceptual foundations of the philosophical research program variously referred to by the names 'epistemic decision theory' and 'epistemic consequentialism'. This has been done before, 1 but we think there's profit in doing it again. In particular, we will argue that there are in fact two different projects rather than one, and only confusion can come from conflating them.We'll show that the nearly universally held norm we'll call Propriety cannot be true, at least not as a part of epistemic decision theory as we think that project ought to be understood. Since so many results in this burgeoning literature depend on that norm, our aim is unfortunately also destructive.As we'll argue, though, we should have been suspicious all along of the high-powered results that allegedly purely (epistemic) decision-theoretic principles have seemed to deliver. In addition to conceptual clarity, we think that this investigation will also illuminate the substantive normative foundations of any project like epistemic decision theory.We'll first introduce the essential terminology and conceptual apparatus we and others use. Then we'll examine the main argument in the literature for a requirement related to Propriety, which we'll † Equal contribution; listed alphabetically. 1 We will mention a few directly as we go, but see also, e.g., Carr (forthcoming) and Schoenfield (2015) for further discussion.
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