PEA Soup

May 2012 Books Received

Authors and/or their presses kindly sent at least one of the editors the following books.

 

Philosophy of Happiness: The Video

Philosophers have long debated the nature of happiness, with some saying that happiness is just a certain kind of psychological state and others claiming that true happiness is not just a matter of having certain feelings but also requires genuine virtue.

The new field of experimental philosophy may not be able to help us arrive at a definitive resolution of this age-old debate, but at the very least, it does seem to have inspired a very funny interactive video!

(Note: To go through this interactive video, you have to click at the end of each segment to begin the next one.)

 

 

 

Options, Actions, and Indeterminism

It is fairly common to give a conditional analysis of an option, e.g.:

(CAO) Performing an act X at a future time t1 is an option for a subject S at the present time t0 if and only if S would perform X at t1 if S were to intend (to try, to decide, or to choose) at t0 to perform X at t1.

I know that there are a host of problems with such conditional analyses, but let’s set those aside for the moment, for I want to address what seems to be an unappreciated worry concerning the possibility of indeterminism.

Welcome to Coons and Faraci!

It's my pleasure to welcome Christian Coons and David Faraci (individually, not as a tag team) to PEA Soup.  Christian is an assistant professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University, doing really interesting work in moral philosophy (metaethics, value theory, normative ethics and more).  David Faraci is ABD at Bowling Green and starts a job as a VAP in philosophy at Virginia Tech this fall.  David's dissertation is on the nature of normativity, and he and I have also published (or are soon to publish) a few papers on experimental philosophy and moral responsibility.  David has also been a longtime commenter on PEA Soup.  It's great to have you both aboard!

Updates to PEA Soup

In light of feedback some of you have sent to the editors over the past several months, we have finally been able to make a few improvements to PEA Soup.  You've likely already noticed the most important ones, but just to make it "official," a brief description is below the fold:

Purdue Conference on Challenges to Religious and Moral Belief

On September 6-8, 2012, Purdue University will host an interdisciplinary conference entitled "Challenges to Religious and Moral Belief: Disagreement and Evolution".

The conference will focus on three main challenges to religious and moral beliefs:

1. Widespread interpersonal disagreement among intellectual peers on religious and on moral topics provides reason to doubt these beliefs;
2. Belief-source disagreement on moral issues between commonsense moral intuitions and religious belief sources raises doubts about both methods of belief formation;
3. Evolutionary accounts of the origins of our religious and moral beliefs creates doubts about these beliefs by undermining our confidence in the reliability of their sources.

Conference Participants:

Intentions and permissibility

At a recent symposium on Victor Tadros's book The Ends of Harm, Victor and I were debating whether the Means Principle (MP) is best thought of on a subjective interpretation (for A to use B as a means, A has to intend that B play some role in bringing about a good) or an objective, causal-role-based interpretation (for A to use B as a means, B has to serve as a causal means in bringing about some good that might be offered to justify A doing what she does). Victor argues for the subjective interpretation; I argue not exactly for the objective, but for the relevance of causal roles in a principle that has more or less the same range of application as the means principle.

This led to our discussing whether the critics of the subjective view--principally JJ Thomson, Frances Kamm, and Tim Scanlon—have ever offered any good reasons for their views (no, says Victor) or whether they have, or at least whether their arguments provide a good starting point for building an argument that the subjective interpretation faces an uphill battle (yes, say I). Victor then suggested that I post this as a topic for debate on Pea Soup. So here we are.

Attributability and Daddy Issues

(Also posted on Flickers of Freedom.)

I am a fan of attributability as a conception of responsibility.  The trick, as we all know, is to get clear on just what that means.  Even if you don't think attributability is a conception of responsibility, it is surely necessary for responsibility, so getting clear on what it consists in is in everyone's interest.  One popular theory of attributability is a kind of evaluative judgment view: an action or attitude is properly attributable to me just in case it is ultimately dependent on my evaluative judgments.  I'm wondering, though, about the following possible counterexample to this view.

Blog Symposium on Libertarianism and Land

Over at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, we're running a symposium this week on the topic of "Libertarianism and Land," featuring essays by Eric Mack, Hillel Steiner, Fred Foldvary, Kevin Carson, and David Schmidtz.

The first essay went up this morning: "Natural Rights and Natural Stuff," by Eric Mack. The other essays will go up one per morning for the rest of the week.

CFA: MANCEPT Workshop on Well-being and Public Policy

MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory - Ninth Annual Conference
Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT), University of Manchester
5th - 7th September 2012

Workshop on Well-being and Public Policy: Call for Abstracts