PEA Soup

Nebraska Conference on Practical Reasons and Metaethics - April 20-22 2012.

David Sobel and I have been working to put together a conference on Practical Reason and Metaethics. (A highly original title, I know, but somehow strangely apt.) It will be held about a year hence, on April 20-22, 2012 at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. We will be treated to talks by Nomy Arpaly, Michael Bratman, Jamie Dreier, Peter Railton, Connie Rosati, Mark Schroeder, and Michael Smith.  We also are saving two time slots for blind refereed papers. The submitters of the two chosen papers will have reasonable expenses (up to $1000) of getting here and staying for the conference picked up by by us.

NOWAR Program

I'm pleased to announce the program for the inaugural New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR), taking place in New Orleans at the Intercontinental Hotel November 3-5, 2011.  The official schedule is here, and more information about the workshop, including the link to making hotel reservations, can be found here.

In addition to the keynote speakers Sarah Buss and Gary Watson, the presenters are Luca Ferrero, David Brink/Dana Nelkin, Michael McKenna, Michael Bratman, Daniel Jacobson, Tamler Sommers, Zac Cogley, Oisin Deery/Matt Bedke/Shaun Nichols, Heidi Maibom, Paul Russell, and Matt Talbert.  I hope to see many of you there!

Experiment Month Studies Go Live!

The Yale Experiment Month studies have now gone live here.  They are a series of experimental philosophy scenarios proposed by a variety of folks that successfully made their way through the Yale team's vetting process (as well as that of their home institutions' HSRB) and are now ready to pump your intuitions.  Please go take a survey (or two or three).  I suspect there will be many interesting new results we'll be hearing about over the next several months.  (Full disclosure: David Faraci and I have a survey included in the mix.)

Goodin and the Big Society

As anyone who reads Leiter Reports or follows the Philos-L mailing-list knows, there has been a big uproar recently in the UK about the AHRC’s (a government body which funds Arts and Humanities research) ‘connected communities’ funding scheme. One problem is that, in advertising the scheme, the AHRC has adopted the current government’s notion of the ‘Big Society’. This raises a variety of important ethical questions about on what grounds public research funding should be distributed. However, in this post, I want to focus on the question of whether the Big Society is a good idea in the first place. It seems to me that, contrary to what some people at the AHRC and the government seem to think, there’s already plenty of good philosophical research done to show that it is not (which has unfortunately been ignored in the public discourse). So, to do my part of the unoriginal academic research on the Big Society, I want to lay out Robert Goodin’s argument against the Big Society from his wonderful 1988 book Reasons for Welfare – the Political Theory of the Welfare State.

Trolling for Intuitions on Punishment

Adam Lerner, a student at William & Mary, has constructed a survey (also part of Yale's Experiment Month) to gather intuitions on punishment.  Go here to get your intuitions pumped.

Call for Abstracts: Third Annual Arizona Workshop on Normative Ethical Theory

The Third Annual Arizona Workshop on Normative Ethical Theory will be held in Tucson, Arizona on January 5-7, 2012.  Abstracts are welcome in any area or on any topic in normative ethical theory (to be distinguished as well as possible from metaethics and applied ethics).

Abstracts should be 2-3 double-spaced pages and are due no later than June 1, 2011. Please send abstracts by email to Mark Timmons, mtimmons@u.arizona.edu.  Those who presented at the 2010 workshop will not be eligible to present until 2013.