PEA Soup

New Website for the Study of Character

On behalf of the Character Project at Wake Forest University, I am pleased to announce the launch of a new website devoted to the academic study of character and related notions of virtue and vice. The website can be found here: http://www.studyofcharacter.com/

This site presents recent books, journal articles, and events pertaining to research on character, as well as faculty webpages, blogs, centers, encyclopedia entries, and other resources. The focus is on recent work in the fields of psychology, philosophy, and theology. We would certainly appreciate it if people linked to this page! Also, we welcome updates and corrections; please send any such information to character@wfu.edu.

Fordham Epistemology and Ethics Workshops

Starting next year, Fordham will be hosting a series of epistemology and ethics workshops at its Lincoln Center Campus in Manhattan. For the 2011-2012 academic year, speakers will include...:

Welcome, Victor Tadros!

We're pleased that Victor Tadros, a legal theorist/philosopher of law at the University of Warwick's School of Law, has accepted our invitation to join the cast of characters at PEA Soup.  Victor has written a ton of excellent articles and books on criminal responsibility, the moral foundations of the criminal law, and moral philosophy generally, and we're very pleased to have him officially on board.

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Tom Dougherty's "On Whether to Prefer Pain to Pass," with commentary by Caspar Hare

We are pleased to present the next 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 3 is Tom Dougherty's "On Whether to Prefer Pain to Pass" (open access here).  We are very grateful that Caspar Hare has agreed to provide the critical precis of Tom's article, and his commentary begins below the fold.

Conference: The British Society for Ethical Theory

St Anne's College, University of Oxford, 11 – 13 July

Keynote Speakers: Mike Otsuka (UCL) and Susan Wolf (UNC Chapel Hill)

Registration is now open.  Registration form and a list of papers are available here:

 http://www.bset.org.uk/2011.html

 ***Book before 17th June to avoid the late booking fee***

Local organizer: Edward Harcourt, edward.harcourt@philosophy.ox.ac.uk

Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress: Call For Commentators

If you're interested in being a commentator at our upcoming Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress this August in Boulder, Colorado (or if you'd just like to see a preliminary main conference program), please continue reading ...

Scanlon on Blame, Part 3: Criminal Blame and Meaning

In the previous post, I noted that there are two important aspects of Scanlonian blame -- relationships and meaning -- and that extending Scanlon's account to cover criminal blame (punishment) was problematic with respect to the former in virtue of the fact that the necessary sort of relationship (whose impairment prompts blame) was missing in the citizenry/legal case.  I want to focus here (in much briefer terms) on the second aspect, meaning.

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup (Moving to the Front)

The next discussion in our collaboration with Ethics will be on Tom Dougherty's "On Whether to Prefer Pain to Pass," which is now freely available here. We will begin our discussion this Wednesday, May 25, kicked off with a critical precis by Caspar Hare (MIT).  We hope to see many of you participating in the discussion.

Scanlon on Blame, Part 2: Criminal Blame?

Part 1, for those of you old enough to remember, was posted two years ago here.  Yes, I'm a very slow thinker.

In Part 2, I want to explore the possibility of extending Scanlon's account of blame to include criminal blame.  For both legal and moral theorists writing on these issues, criminal responsibility (and the intelligibility of criminal blame) entails moral responsibility (and the intelligibility of moral blame).  I have begun to believe that this assumption is just false, or at least the relation between criminal and moral responsibility is far more complicated than people have believed.  In order to explore this idea, I want to look at recent, plausible accounts of blame to see how, if at all, they might ostensibly explain both moral and criminal blame.  I begin today by discussing one worry about doing so with Scanlon's view.  I hope (sooner this time!) to discuss another worry of doing so, and if I'm energetic enough, I'll then turn to George Sher's account of blame to explore the same issues.  If anyone's still awake by then, I may offer a diagnosis of the problem.  Warning: long row to hoe ahead!

Academic Peer-Review…Crowd Sourced

Here's an interesting idea for an open-access philosophy journal:

 

http://www.sympoze.com/

 

Check it out and consider volunteering to become a reviewer.