PEA Soup

Senior Ethics position at Syracuse

The Philosophy Department invites applications from senior figures to assume the Guttag Professorship of Ethics and Political Philosophy following the retirement of Guttag Professor Michael Stocker in May 2011. Duties normally include both graduate and undergraduate teaching, research, advising, and committee service. Salary and exact balance of duties  negotiable. We particularly encourage applications from women and minority candidates. Informal expressions of interest may be sent to Robert Van Gulick, Chair, Guttag Search Committee, Department of Philosophy (rnvangul@syr.edu). For formal consideration, candidates must complete an online Dean/Senior Executive/Faculty application, and attach a CV and contact information for three letters of recommendation. EO/AAE

(Note: feel free also to send your informal inquiries to me at wbradley@syr.edu.)

Libertarianism and Pollution

Libertarians want to say that my right to my body entails that you may not shoot me. Presumably they also want to say that you may not shoot a gun with only one bullet at me even if the gun has many, many empty chambers (even millions). I have a right, I imagine they must want to say, that you not put me at such risk even when the risk is very small. But then I was wondering how I get to fly my plane in areas where there is some, admittedly very small, chance that it will lose control and fly into your house or person, and thereby violate your rights. I am assuming for present purposes that it would count as a reductio to prohibit even well made planes from flying in populated areas without getting unanimous consent from the relevant population.

It seems not available to the Libertarian to say that the benefits of flight to society are sufficient to justify such a small involuntary imposition of a risk to my rights (whereas the benefit to society of permitting someone to aim a weird gun at me and pull the trigger do not). That sounds like the serpent winding of consequentialism that they want to avoid. I was wondering if they could say that there is a difference between my rights being put at some small risk being part of your aim vs. being merely foreseen. I am guessing such a view would be non-standard and might perhaps allow me to establish an involuntary survival lottery for organs where your organs are put at very small risk but my aim is to save as many people as possible.

I think most broadly the worry boils down to how Libertarians can make room for the permissibility of some small involuntary risks to that which we have a right without some consequentialist-style reasoning.

CFP: Reasons of Love, Leuven

CALL FOR PAPERS AND CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT

Reasons of Love
International Conference
Institute of Philosophy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
30 May-1 June 2011

This conference’s title is ambiguous on purpose. The relationship between
love and reasons for action is highly interesting and complicated. It is
not clear how love is related to reasons. Love might be a response to
certain normative reasons, since it seems fitting to love certain objects.
However, love also seems to create reasons and not to be a response to
certain appropriate reasons. Love’s relationship to morality is also
complex. It is not clear how the normative reasons for acting morally are
related to the reasons of love. It is sometimes argued that love is not a
virtue because the reasons for acting morally are not the same as the
reasons for acting lovingly. But the notion of ‘unprincipled virtue’ seems
to make room for love as a motive of morally praiseworthy actions.

This conference seeks to provide an opportunity to discuss these issues.
Related questions are the following: Do ‘the reasons of love’ constitute a
genuine, distinctive category of reasons?  Are different kinds of love
related to different kinds of reasons? What are the requirements of love,
as opposed to the requirements of duty? Are love’s reasons rational or non-
rational? Can love require to act immorally? If so, are love’s
requirements more or less important than those of morality? Is an action
out of love more praiseworthy than an action done out of a sense of duty?
Are there normative reasons for acting lovingly and to what extent do they
justify partiality? How are we to understand ‘acting lovingly’?

Keynote speakers:
Diane Jeske (Iowa), Michael Smith (Princeton) and R. Jay Wallace (Berkeley)

CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite abstract submissions on any issue related to the main topic as
stated above.  Graduate students are encouraged to participate.

The deadline for submission is December 1, 2010. Notification of
acceptance will be sent by January 20, 2011. Abstracts of 1500-2000 words
should be sent to Esther.Kroeker@hiw.kuleuven.be  and
Katrien.Schaubroeck@hiw.kuleuven.be.

At the conference 40 minute slots will be available for presentation,
followed by 20 minutes of discussion.

A selection of papers will be submitted to Philosophical Explorations for
publication.

Conference organizers:
Esther Kroeker, Katrien Schaubroeck, Stefaan E. Cuypers, Willem Lemmens

CFP: SLACRR 2

I'm glad to circulate this on PEA Soup first!  I was pleased to see several PEA Soupers at the first SLACRR, and I look forward to seeing more next May.    --Eric

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SLACRR 2

The second St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality (SLACRR) will take place May 22-24, 2011 at the Moonrise Hotel in St. Louis, MO.  The conference is designed to provide a forum for new work on practical and theoretical reason, broadly construed.  Jamie Dreier (Brown) will be giving the keynote address.  The Conference will include papers in ethics, epistemology, and other areas of philosophy that deal with reasons, reasoning, or rationality.  See last year's program here. 

Please submit an abstract of 500-1000 words by December 31, 2010 to SLACRR@gmail.com.  In writing your abstract, please bear in mind that full papers should suitable for a 30 minute presentation. We are also interested in finding commentators for papers, so please let us know if you would have an interest in commenting.

For more information, see http://www.umsl.edu/~slacrr/index.html

Further questions can also be directed to either John Brunero (bruneroj@umsl.edu) or Eric Wiland (wiland@umsl.edu).

Why the disconnect?

The contemporary debate over the constitutive norms of assertion, as well as related debates about the norms of belief and action, and the nature of epistemic value, deal with deep and important questions about the nature of normativity, especially constitutive normativity, about value, and about whether there really is an essential distinction between epistemic evaluation on the one hand, and practical rationality or ethical evaluation on the other. Some of these questions might be broadly categorized under the familiar heading 'ethics of belief', but that really doesn't do justice to the breadth of issues at stake.

For the most part, participants to these debates work in epistemology, philosophy of language and, to a lesser extent, social philosophy. Moreoever, I've been informed by more than one editor of more than one journal devoted to ethics (broadly understood) that work on these issues just isn't a good fit for their journal or audience.

I'm curious why this is so. Is it just an accident? Have the debates just not had quite enough time to percolate through various subdiscplinary borders? Do ethicists just not view these questions as genuinely ethical questions? Or are they viewed as ethical, but somehow derivative or secondary to other, more long-standing debates in the ethics literature?

CFP on Eudaimonia and Virtue

Call for Papers

Eudaimonia and Virtue: Rethinking the Good Life

University of Miami, February 25th-27th, 2011

Many ancient philosophers argued that our thinking and behavior should be grounded in a conception of eudaimonia, or human flourishing and virtue, instead of, for example, a hedonistic conception of happiness or a subjective conception of well-being. A growing number of contemporary psychologists and philosophers think that there is something deeply correct about this general eudaimonist approach, even if we may not fully accept all of the specific arguments and views propounded, for example, by Aristotle and the Stoics. 

Three Rivers Philosophy Conference 2011: Science, Knowledge and Democracy April 1-3, 2011

A conference announcment / call for papers that PeaSoupers might want to know about:  see here for the official flyer.

The goal of this conference is to bring together scholars working in moral and political philosophy, social epistemology, philosophy of science, and related areas to reflect broadly on the relationships between science, knowledge, and democracy. We aim to explore questions such as the following. In what ways should we be seeking to foster democratic influences on science, and why? Can we unpack the concept of objectivity (whether in the scientific or the political domain) more fruitfully by shifting from an individual to a social level of analysis? What is the nature of “lay expertise,” and what are its implications for pursuing public participation in scientific research and policy making? Do various forms of “epistemic injustice” detract from scientific knowledge or political decision making? What are the implications of political theory for thinking about how to democratize science and to integrate scientific knowledge into policy making? Does governmental involvement in and funding of scientific research pose special challenges to traditional epistemic and moral justifications for democracy?