PEA Soup

Moral Rationalism and Blameworthiness

I’m sympathetic to the following view, which I call moral rationalism:

MR: If S is morally required to do x, then S has decisive reason (all things considered) to do x.

One popular argument for this view appeals to blameworthiness. This sort of argument is found both in Darwall (2006, 287-292) and in Skorupski (1999, 170) as well as in Shafer-Landau (2003, 190-193), although Shafer-Landau employs it to argue for only weak moral rationalism:

WMR: If S is morally required to do x, then S has a (pro tanto) reason to do x.

The following is my reconstruction of their argument.

Logic Help

Consider: 

(1) If x is morally wrong and S freely does x, then S is blameworthy for doing x.
(2) If x is rationally optimal, then S is not blameworthy for freely doing x.
(3) Therefore, if x is morally wrong, then x is not rationally optimal.

Skorupski (1999, 170) claims that we can derive (3) from (1) and (2). Intuitively, this seems right, but how exactly is the derivation supposed to go? My logic is a bit rusty.

Journalism Ethics bleg

I need to help develop an undergraduate course on ethics in journalism and the media, to be taken primarily by aspiring TV/film writers and producers.  Have any of our readers ever taught such a course?  Anyone willing to share syllabi, advice about texts, etc.?  Thanks!

Welcome, Simon Kirchin!

We are pleased to announce that Simon Kirchin has accepted our invitation to become a contributor here at PEA Soup.  Simon is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Director of Learning and Teaching for the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent. He is also the Treasurer of the British Society for Ethical Theory, which is the leading society in the UK for moral philosophy, and an Associate Editor of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. His research interests are mainly in metaethics and normative ethics, but also include aesthetics, metaphysics, epistemology, medical ethics, and political philosophy. It's great to have you aboard, Simon!

Frankfurt and Moral Requirements

I greatly admire the work of Harry Frankfurt. More recently, he has argued that love and caring, in the form of volitional necessities, are the sole source of our practical reasons. One corollary of this is that moral requirements are not important independently of our attitudes of love and caring. The argument to this conclusion is interesting. I have constructed it below from quotes from his 2006 book Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting it Right (pp. 22-3). I have some idea about where the argument goes wrong but this time I'm more interested in what others make of the argument.

Welcome, Simon Keller!

We are pleased to announce that Simon Keller has accepted our invitation to become a contributor here at PEA Soup.  Simon is presently a Senior Research Fellow at CAPPE at the University of Melbourne and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Boston University, and he is slated to join the Philosophy Program at Victoria University of Wellington as an Associate Professor.  His book, The Limits of Loyalty, has recently come out, and he works on such topics as patriotism, love, and welfare (among others).  It's great to have you aboard, Simon!

Ethics Encyclopedia Entries bleg

I'm an editor for Blackwell's International Encyclopedia of Ethics, and my current (and first) task is to help make sure the IEE will have the right entries, or headwords, for metaethics. Below the fold are the headwords that the über-editors and I came up with so far. What's missing?

Now YOU TOO Can Get Your Head Examined!

Thomas Nadelhoffer, et al. (from the Experimental Philosophy Blog) invite you to take a walk on the other side of experimental philosophy by being part of a survey that will compare/contrast the intuitions of philosophers and non-philosophers on a variety of topics.  Follow this link for the fun....

Mad Meta

The program for the Madison Metaethics workshop is up. There will be papers by four PEA Soupers: me (Jamie), Mark Schroeder, Jussi Suikkanen, and Stephen Finlay (that's in order of appearance). Also plenty of other people you love are on the program, and everybody else worth talking to will be in attendance, so you'd better book a room pronto.

The Too Demanding Objection

There are at least two possible ways we might conceive of the too demanding objection: (1) a moral theory is too demanding if it demands more of us than commonsense morality demands of us (that is, if its demands conflict with our commonsense moral intuitions) or (2) a moral theory is too demanding if it demands more of us than we have sufficient reason to give. When philosophers claim that act-utilitarianism is too demanding are they claiming that it is too demanding in sense (1), sense (2), or both? Which version of the objection is more powerful? Can you think of any instances in which commonsense morality seems too demanding? If so, that would speak in favor of (2). I’ve thought of perhaps two examples. First, commonsense morality seems to include the idea that we should (almost) never leave a man behind—that is, we should try to rescue someone even if the expected costs of our doing so far exceed the expected benefits. Think here of the movie Black Hawk Down. Second, commonsense morality seems to condemn Gauguin’s abandoning his family to live and paint in Tahiti. But I think that in both instances commonsense morality demands more from these agents than they have sufficient reason to give and is for that reason objectionable. I’m not entirely happy with these examples though. Can anyone else think of better examples?