PEA Soup

Williamson and (Moral) Realism

Even though I’m not a real expert on his work (and his new book is way too expensive), I’m a huge fan of Timothy Williamson. The part of his work I know the best is his comments on anti-realism vs. realism debates of the Dummett and Wright kind. I want to reconstruct his argument from the margin of error for realism (i.e., the anti-luminosity argument) whilst applying it in the moral realm to argue for moral realism. I want to then ask how we should react to this argument.

Welcome Brad Cokelet!

We are pleased to announce that Brad Cokelet has accepted our invitation to be a contributor here at PEA Soup. Brad is currently finishing his dissertation entitled Virtue, Rational Agency, and Respect for Persons at Northwestern University and will be starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of Miami in the fall. He works on normative ethics, moral psychology, and the history of ethics. His paper “Ideal Agency and the Possibility of Error” has just come out in the latest issue of Ethics. We are very pleased to have him on board.

A moral equivalent of Moore's paradox?

So here's an idea I've been fiddling with for a while and would be interested to hear if anyone thinks that further exploration of this idea would be fruitful. (I'm also trying out this line of thought later this month at the ETMP conference in Amsterdam, so I wouldn't mind some 'pre-feedback' before my presentation.)

I assume most of us are familiar with examples of Moore's paradox:
    (P) It's raining, but I don't believe it

Peter Railton (in the paper "Moral factualism" that he wrote for the Blackwell moral theory anthology edited by PEA Souper Jamie Dreier) suggests that there are moral equivalents of Moore's paradox:
    (Q) Hurting animals for fun is wrong, but I don't care