PEA Soup

Call for Papers: Pittsburgh Area Philosophy Colloquium

PITTSBURGH AREA PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Washington and Jefferson College
Washington, Pennsylvania
Keynote Speaker: Karl Schafer (University of Pittsburgh)

Call for Applications: Summer Institute on Justice

The CEU Summer University
JUSTICE: THEORY AND ITS APPLICATIONS
July 4-15, 2011
Budapest, Hungary

The problem of justice occupies a special place in contemporary political philosophy. In the words of its most influential figure, Rawls, "justice is the first virtue of social institutions". That view seems to be shared by a majority of authors and theories. However, there is no comparable agreement regarding what justice demands, from whom and to whom. These questions have utmost relevance for political philosophers. However, their importance spill over other disciplines. Given that many choices policy makers make are distributive in nature, it is not surprising that issues of justice appear in many other spheres. In addition to dealing with purely theoretical issues, the course will revise some contexts which raise important questions about justice: education, health care, environmental issues, taxation.
 
Applications are invited from graduate students, postdocs, young faculty in Philosophy, Political Science, Public Policy, Law and Economics, familiar with Anglo-American political theory, especially with theories of justice.

What is instrumental goodness?

In “Two Distinctions in Goodness” (Philosophical Review 1983), Christine Korsgaard argued that the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goodness should not be conflated with the distinction between final and instrumental goods. As it happens, I believe that she is entirely right that these two distinctions are distinct from each other. Still, her account of the distinction between final and instrumental goods does not seem quite correct to me.

As she puts it, a final good is something that “is valued as an end or for its own sake”, while an instrumental good “is valued as a means or for the sake of something else” (p. 170). There are at least three problems with this account.

Call for Abstracts: Naturalisms in Ethics Conference

When: Thursday July 16^th- Friday July 17^th, 2011

Where: University of Auckland

Submission Deadline: May 1^st, 2011

CFP: Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference

See here: http://myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/nmarkos/BSPC/BSPC2011/BSPC_2011/Call_for_Papers.html.

Moral Expertise Workshop

There's a workshop at Princeton on Moral Expertise to be held April 29-May 1, 2011. More info can be found here: http://www.princeton.edu/~smcgrath/meconf.html.

Williams, Thick Concepts, and Reasons

At first sight, there seems to be a blatant contradiction between Bernard Williams’s two central theories: his view about thick concepts and his existence-internalism about reasons (many others have hinted at this too – Gibbard and Scanlon, for instance). I want to quickly sketch what that tension is. I mainly wanted to know if anyone’s seen or can come up with an interpretation of Williams's theories that dissolves the contradiction. I’ll suggest a couple, but I’m not very happy with them.

Fitting Consequentialist Agents

I’m interested in defending consequentialism against allegations that it represents an inherently perverse perspective, or that the consequentialist agent would have a morally bad character. For example, critics allege that the consequentialist agent would have ‘one thought too many’, that they would treat others as replaceable ‘value receptacles’, that they would be cold and calculating, untrustworthy, and incapable of genuine personal relationships. I aim to rebut these charges.