Supèr Wins Blaug Prize
Tessa Supèr, a PhD candidate at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam, is the winner of the 2025 Mark Blaug Prize in Philosophy and Economics.
The Mark Blaug Prize is a biannual prize intended to promote and reward the work of junior scholars in philosophy and economics. It is named in honor of Mark Blaug (1927–2011), a founder of the field of philosophy and economics, and is awarded by the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics.
Ms. Supèr was awarded the prize for her 2024 article, “Collective Doings in Progress and the Attribution Problem“. Here’s the abstract of the article:
We often encounter situations where a series of small, seemingly harmless actions add up to a significant problem. This is known as the “inefficacy problem”: even when we recognize that these patterns of action lead to harmful outcomes, it’s difficult to justify avoiding any single small action, since on its own, it appears to make no real difference. This paradox arises in two ways—over time (diachronically), when one person’s repeated trivial actions gradually lead to harm, and collectively, when many individuals each perform a trivial action that, when combined, results in an undesirable outcome.
Because these two cases share a structural similarity, some scholars have attempted to apply solutions to the inefficacy problem from one context to the other. This paper examines one such attempt by Chrisoula Andreou and argues that, despite the apparent parallel, there is a key difference that prevents a straightforward transfer of the proposed solution from the diachronic to the collective case.
The solution in question involves redescribing what is happening as each trivial action is performed—either as a diachronically or collectively extended “doing in progress”. However, as I argue, while the extended description can be attributed to the relevant agent in the diachronic case, it cannot be attributed to any individual in the collective case. This is what I refer to as the “attribution problem.” Because of this problem, the proposed solution—while it may work in the diachronic version—ultimately fails to resolve the inefficacy problem in collective cases.
The prize includes a cash sum of 500 Euros.
You can learn more about the prize and see its previous winners here.
First, congratulations to Ms. Supèr. Sounds like a great paper.
Secondly can’t an Andreou-like solution sometimes be transferred from the diachronic to the collective case? Example. Suppose the village has a ritual witch-burning ceremony in which each villager adds a handful of straw to the pyre. No single villager can be said to have built the pyre (since the the pyre would have been built absent any single person’s handful of straw) and no inhabitant of the village is individually responsible for the arrest, trial and detention of the alleged witch since this is the business of the local branch of the Inquisition. Isn’t nonetheless reasonable to say that each villager helped burn the witch because they were participating in a collective practice?