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Apropos our earlier conversation about price gouging, I've written up a full length paper on the topic. I got quite a bit out of the our discussion in the comments section even if, presumably, I didn't get what many of you wanted me to get out of it, viz., that price gouging is clearly immoral. :-)
You can access the paper here.
At a conference in Santa Barbara, California, that I went to recently, David Velleman gave a very interesting talk that focused on the following puzzle.
Suppose that Karen, a 14-year old girl, decides to conceive a child. Having a child at such a young age will make life very hard for Karen, and for her child as well: in general, Karen will have a much better life if she delays having a child for another 10 years or so; and the child whom she would have 10 years later would also have a much better life than any child whom she conceives today. So we might accept the statement that she ought not to have a child at her age.
But then Karen's child is born; she names him Max. Max is now a member of the community, and we are committed to treating him with concern and respect. So we are now most reluctant to accept the statement that Max ought not to have been brought into existence. But we know that if Karen had not had a child at the age of 14, Max would not have been brought into existence.
The puzzle is, Aren't our attitudes towards these two statements inconsistent? Yet surely they could both be the appropriate attitudes for us to have towards Karen's (and Max's) situation!
I shan't try to outline Velleman's intriguing solution to this puzzle here. Instead, I shall simply outline the solution that I'm inclined to favour (below the fold), in order to see what PEA Soup readers think of this.
Studies in the History of Ethics has announced calls for papers for two future symposia. Details follow.
Continue reading "Calls for Papers: Emotions, American ethical tradition" »
You are offered a choice between two experience machines.
Machine A is just like the ones you already know about. You'll be on the experience machine until you are 120 years old, getting lots of various sorts of pleasure.
Machine B offers exactly the same experiences as Machine A. However, the experiences are crammed into a much shorter period of time: just one day. The first 12 hours of this day seem to last 12 hours. The next 6 hours seem to last 12 hours. The next 3 hours seem to last 12 hours. And so on (as in Sorensen's "The Cheated God"). A fraction of a second before the 24 hours are up, the machine kills you painlessly. At that time it seems to you as if you have lived 120 highly pleasant years.
Which machine should you choose?
Dale Miller's recent post on Mill's theory of value (and subsequent discussion) was quite enlightening. And it set me thinkin' about qualitative hedonism and perfectionism, and in particular the relationship between them. During our previous discussion, we appeared to be treating "Mill is a hedonist" and "Mill is a perfectionist" as mutually exclusive (or, at least, I was). I wonder if this isn't a mistake. And I wonder if it isn't possible to read one of Mill's sentimentalist forbears, viz., David Hume, as a person who holds both views. (Sorry, this post might be a little long. And sorry also if it reads like a collection of notes scribbled on a napkin; basically, it is.)
I find Frank Jackson’s arguments against non-naturalist realism in his From Metaphysics to Ethics fascinating. So I think that, over a longer period of time, I would like to post a couple of things about them. Today, I am puzzled about the one that has received most attention. I wonder whether this argument is available for Jackson himself.
Last year about this time, Kris McDaniel posted some important questions about the nature of the hiring process in philosophy, particular with respect to APA interviews. I’d like to resurrect one of Kris’s questions for a new round of discussion as well as add another.
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