PEA Soup

Aggregating for lifetime character (and well-being): is there an end-of-life bias?

Newman, Lockhart, and Keil recently published their finding that when judging a person’s overall moral goodness or badness across a lifetime, we seem biased toward the end of life (at Cognition here).  According to this theory, we do not judge the moral qualities of a person’s lifetime character by merely adding up the ‘moral points’ of her individual actions over that life.  Instead, if Scrooge or Andrew Carnegie turns things around at the end of their lives, we will attribute much greater goodness to them across their whole lives because we give greater consideration to what people do at the end of their lives than we give to the rest of their lives, when determining the moral character of a life.  I think that the data presented by Newman et al. are open to at least two other explanations, however.

3 Quarks Daily Blogging Contest

Details here.  We've had some success in this contest in the past, so nominate and vote for your favorite PEA Soup post from the past year and perhaps we can do it again.

Subjunctive Analyses and the Conditional Fallacy

Subjunctive analyses of what we ought to do often appeal to what we would do (or what we would want ourselves to do) if we were both fully informed and fully rational. Many such analyses commit what is called the Conditional Fallacy and are, therefore, subject to counterexample. The counterexamples all involve cases where full information (and/or full rationality) affects what one has reason to do and, thus, what one ought to do. To illustrate, consider the following very simple analysis:

Tulane Faculty Fellowships

The Murphy Institute’s Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at Tulane University invites applications for up to three Faculty Fellowship positions for the 2012-2013 academic year.

Libertarianism and Paternalism

Previously I have argued here (and here) that the Self-Ownership views associated with left and right-libertarianism have difficulties stemming from their failure to adequately differentiate serious from unimportant property rights infringements. The self-ownership libertarian (the only kind of libertarian I am here discussing) tends to conclude that we enjoy very strong protection against paternalism or infringing our property rights for the sake of the greater good of others. They tend to reach these conclusions by supposing that our property rights provide strong (if not absolute) protection even against infringements that involve only small or trivial harm to the person whose rights are infringed. This presupposition is what licenses the inference that such actions are quite generally wrong without an investigation into the size of the harm that would be caused by the infringement.

But such powerful protections would make impermissible most pollution or fires as these things cross the border of other people’s property, e.g. their lungs, without permission. I argued earlier (following Nozick and Railton), that when we see this, we see that the above simple path from self-ownership to a vindication of traditional libertarian conclusions is unpromising. Thus the path from self-ownership to traditional libertarian conclusions needs to become more complicated if it is to be plausible.

One obvious way to respond to the challenge would be to distinguish between important property rights and relatively trivial ones and be willing to sell violations of the less important property rights relatively cheaply for social good. That is, the view might provide a theory of value that explains why some property rights are more significant than others by showing that some protect more valuable things and others protect only trivial things.

Personal Electronic Libraries: Problems, Suggestions, and Ethical Issues

Going forward, I want all the articles and books that I read to be in an electronic format that is (1) searchable; (2) annotatable, (3) portable (something that I can use and annotate on my multiple devices—i.e., my iPhone, iPad, laptop, and desktop); and (4) faithful to the print version (the fonts, tables, pagination, and page layout being identical to that in the print version). Now, there’s no problem here when it comes to journal articles. Nowadays, I can get almost every journal article that I want as a PDF file that I can annotate using Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader (or, on my iPad, using iAnnotate, which works great). These PDFs are faithful to the print version. And I can use DropBox to sync the annotations that I make on one device with all my other devices.

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Philip Pettit's "The Instability of Freedom as Noninterference: The Case of Isaiah Berlin," with Commentary by David Schmidtz

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 4 is Philip Pettit's "The Instability of Freedom as Noninterference: The Case of Isaiah Berlin" (open access here).  We are also extremely grateful that David Schmidtz has agreed to provide the critical precis of the article.  His commentary begins below the fold and is followed by several replies from Professor Pettit.

CFP: Ethics Workshop with Jeff McMahan

 

University of Miami 

 4^th Annual Graduate Ethics Workshop

October 21 - 22, 2011

Keynote Speaker: Jeff McMahan, Rutgers University

 

We welcome submissions from graduate students in any area of ethics. However, we are especially interested in papers related to the work of our keynote speaker, Jeff McMahan.  Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following: the ethics of war, nationalism, abortion, euthanasia, death, personal identity.

Welcome, Jon Riley!

Continuing the string of great news, we are pleased welcome Jon Riley as a new contributor here at PEA Soup.  Professor Riley is Professor of Political Economy and Philosophy at Tulane University, Facult Member of the Murphy Institute of Political Economy, and Co-founding Editor of the journal Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.  He has authored, edited, and co-edited seven books and numerous articles in the areas of Utilitarian ethics, liberalism, and rational choice theory.  It's wonderful to have you aboard, Jon!

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Philip Pettit's "The Instability of Freedom as Noninterference: The Case of Isaiah Berlin"

(Moving to the front from August 2nd.)

We are pleased to announce the next installment of our collaboration with Ethics, where we will host a discussion of one article from each issue of the journal, and the journal will make a copy of that article freely accessible (for a limited time) to our participants. 

Our next featured article is Professor Philip Pettit's “The Instability of Freedom as Nonintererence: The Case of Isaiah Berlin" (Volume 121, issue 4).  The article is now freely available here.  We are also very pleased that Professor David Schmidtz  has agreed to provide a précis of the article to kick off the discussion.  Professor Schmidtz's  précis will appear, and discussion of the article will begin, next Tuesday, August 9, 2011.