PEA Soup

Does Ought Imply Can Outside Ethics?

[My apologies if this is well-trodden ground.  I am pretty ignorant of the ought-implies-can literature, and quick check over articles didn't reveal anybody discussing what I'm about to write.]

In general, philosophers take it for granted that a person morally ought to X if and only she can X.  I'll treat this as equivalent to claiming that a person can have an all-things-considered moral duty to X if and only she can X. So, e.g, I cannot have an all-things-considered duty to shoot magic fireballs from my fingers because I am physically unable to do so.

Outside of ethics, though, there seem to be a few cases where intuitively we don't accept this, or, at least, I don't.  

CFP: Northwestern Ethics Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS FROM FACULTY AND GRADUATE STUDENTS.

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY SOCIETY FOR ETHICAL THEORY FIFTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE, MAY 19-21, 2011

KEYNOTE ADDRESSES: PHILIP PETTIT AND R. JAY WALLACE

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: The deadline is February 15, 2011.

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Gunnar Björnsson and Stephen Finlay, "Metaethical Contextualism Defended"

We are pleased to present the latest installment of PEA Soup's collaboration with Ethics, in which we host a discussion of one article from an issue of the journal. The article selected from Volume 121, Issue 1 is Gunnar Björnsson and Stephen Finlay, "Metaethical Contextualism Defended."  We are very pleased that Ralph Wedgwood is providing a précis of the article to introduce the discussion.  His commentary begins below the fold.

Call for Papers: Special Issues of Theoretical and Applied Ethics

Theoretical & Applied Ethics is planning to publish three special issues, one on Bioethics, the second on Ethics and Religion, and the third on the Moral Philosophy of Bernard Williams, very soon.  This is a call for papers for those special issues.  The deadline for submissions is January 1st.  Submissions should be formatted for blind review, submitted in .doc or .wp format, and should not exceed 4,500 words.  They can be submitted to TheoreticalAndAppliedEthics@gmail.com

Princeton Grad Conference in Political Theory

April 8-9, 2011
 
The Committee for the Graduate Conference in Political Theory at Princeton University welcomes papers concerning any period, methodological approach or topic in political theory, political philosophy, or the history of political thought.  Approximately eight papers will be accepted.
 

CFP: Felician Ethics Conference

The fifth annual meeting of the Felician Ethics Conference will be held at the Rutherford Campus of Felician College:

Welcome Gunnar Björnsson

We are pleased to announce that Gunnar Björnsson has joined the roster of contributors here at PEA Soup.  Among other areas of interest, Gunnar works on a variety of topics in meta-ethics. He is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Department of Culture and Communication at Linköping University and a research fellow at the department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science at the University of Gothenburg. He is also the principal investigator of Moral Motivation: Evidence and Relevance, funded by the Swedish Research Council.  Welcome, Gunnar!

Call for Abstracts: New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility

This is a call for abstracts for the first biennial New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility (NO WAR), to be held in New Orleans, LA at the Intercontinental Hotel on November 3-5, 2011.  Abstracts are welcome on any topic having to do with agency and/or responsibility.  Perspectives beyond just those from moral philosophy (e.g., psychology, legal theory, neuroscience, economics, metaphysics, and more) are welcome.  (To see more about the workshop’s general aims and other details, follow this link.)

Abstracts should be 2-3 double-spaced pages and are due no later than March 1, 2011.  Please send abstracts by e-mail to David Shoemaker, dshoemak@tulane.edu.  A program committee will evaluate submissions and make decisions by early May.

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Gunnar Björnsson and Stephen Finlay, "Metaethical Contextualism Defended"

We are pleased to announce the next installment of our collaboration with Ethics, in which we host a discussion of one article from each issue of the journal.  The article selected from Volume 121, Issue 1 is Gunnar Björnsson and Stephen Finlay, "Metaethical Contextualism Defended."  We are very pleased that Ralph Wedgwood will be providing a précis of the article to introduce the discussion. 

Professor Wedgwood's précis will appear, and discussion of the article will begin, on Monday, December 13.  The open-access version of Björnsson and Finlay's article is here.  Abstract:

We defend a contextualist account of normative judgments as relativized both to (i) information and to (ii) standards or ends against recent objections that turn on practices of normative disagreement. Niko Kolodny and John MacFarlane argue that information-relative contextualism cannot accommodate the connection between deliberation and advice. In response, we suggest that they misidentify the basic concerns of deliberating agents, which are not to settle the truth of particular propositions but to promote certain values. For pragmatic reasons, semantic assessments of normative claims sometimes are evaluations of propositions other than those asserted. Other writers have raised parallel objections to standard-relative contextualism, particularly about moral claims; we argue for a parallel solution.