PEA Soup

Final CFA: SLACRR (St Louis), Dec 31

This is the final call for abstracts for the next St. Louis Conference on Reasons and Rationality, meeting May 20-22, 2012 in the Moonrise Hotel.  Jonathan Dancy will be the keynote speaker. Abstracts are due December 31, 2011. 

St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality (SLACRR) provides a forum for new work on practical and theoretical reason, broadly construed. Please submit an abstract of 750-1500 words by December 31, 2011 to SLACRR (at) gmail.com. In writing your abstract, please bear in mind that full papers should suitable for a 30 minute presentation.

For more information, see http://www.umsl.edu/~slacrr/

Hybrid Theory in Edinburgh

Guy Fletcher and Mike Ridge are organising a conference on hybrid theories in metaethics in Edinburgh this summer from 2nd of July to 4th of July. As you all know, these are views according to which telling a complete story of normative judgments requires talking about both beliefs and desire-like attitudes. The line-up is incredible: Dorit Bar-On (UNC-Chapel Hill), Stephen Barker (Nottingham), Dan Boisvert (UNC-Charlotte), Matthew Chrisman (Edinburgh), David Copp (UC-Davis), John Erikkson (Gothenberg), Steve Finlay (USC), Guy Fletcher (Edinburgh), Ryan Hay (Occidential College), Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck), Mike Ridge (Edinburgh), Mark Schroeder (USC), Laura Schroeter (Melbourne), Francois Schroeter (Melbourne), and Jon Tresan (UNC-Chapel Hill). Phhew! More information about the conference HERE. Just after the conference, there's also Joint Session and BSET in Stirling (see HERE and HERE).

The Smoker: A Proposal

The "smoker" has been getting a lot of bad press and deservedly so. See here for some of the relevant links. I have a proposal. Either members of the interview teams should not attend the reception/"smoker" or they should refuse to talk to prospective job candidates during the reception. They should, then, let all their interviewees know that they will not be attending (or talking to them during) the reception. This is what I would propose to my department if we were conducting APA interviews.

I take it that there is no point in getting rid of the reception. What's problematic is not the reception itself; rather, it's that many schools treat the reception/"smoker" as an extended part of the interview process. We should put an end to that, and it seems that my proposal would do that. What do others think?

A bleg for help on narrow scope requirements to intend and objective requirements to believe

Consider that following plausible wide scope requirement, a requirement that many philosophers endorse (including, I believe, M. Bratman, G. Harman, J. H. Sobel, and J. D. Velleman):

(WSR) Subjective rationality demands that S be such that she does not intend to X if she believes that she will not X.

In order to move from this wide scope requirement to some corresponding narrow scope requirement, we might rely on the following principle:

(WSR->NSR) If there is a wide scope requirement to the effect that subjective rationality demands that S be such that she does not phi if she psi’s (e.g., does not believe not-Q if she believes both P and P entails Q), then it follows that there is a narrow scope requirement to the effect that S is objectively required [not to phi] if S is objectively required to psi.

Now, WSR and WSR->NSR together entail:

Comparative Desert and the Bounds of Well-Being

Suppose, for simplicity, that the basis for moral desert is virtue and what’s deserved is well-being. According to the Ratio View of Comparative Desert, for two people to get what they comparatively deserve, the ratio of their levels of well-being must be the same as the ratio of their noncomparatively deserved levels of well-being. That is, if A noncomparatively deserves 10 units of well-being (A’s ‘peak’ is 10) and B noncomparatively deserves 20, they get what they comparatively deserve whenever B gets twice as much as A. So if A’s level is fixed at 15 (there’s no way to change it), B comparatively deserves 30.

This is an appealing view with an impressive pedigree (it is suggested by what Aristotle says about distributive justice, for example). But recently Shelly Kagan (2003, forthcoming) has presented seemingly devastating objections to it. I'll try out a straightforward response to them. It'll require that there is, at least, a lower bound to well-being.

Call for Papers and Panels: Indiana Philosophical Association

Spring Meeting, 20-21 April 2012. DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana http://www.ipa-online.info/

Keynote Speaker: Margaret Urban Walker, Marquette University

Papers. Papers in any area of philosophy are welcome. Submitted papers should be limited to 14 double-spaced pages and prepared for blind review. They should also be accompanied by a separate page that includes a title, an abstract (limited to 150 words), and author information (name, affiliation, and contact information). Materials should be submitted as either RTF or PDF files to Jared Bates at bates@hanover.edu. Submission deadline is 29 February 2012.

CFP: THEORIES OF ACTION AND MORALITY

THEORIES OF ACTION AND MORALITY: Perspectives from philosophy and social theory

 10-11 September 2012, at Universidad de Navarra

Pamplona, Spain

This conference addresses the question of whether human action is intrinsically moral, and hence the question of whether or in what sense a conception of the nature of action is relevant for a theory of what is good or right to do.  This issue comes up in contemporary discussions in many different forms: whether practical rationality can be understood in instrumental terms, whether instrumental rationality is normative, whether all intentional action is done under “the guise of the good,” etc.  The aim of the conference is to address this question from a variety of perspectives, both historical (Aristotelian, Humean, Kantian and Hegelian approaches) and contemporary (Davidson, Anscombe, etc.).  Also of interest are perspectives on action in the social sciences, which standardly approach action is instrumental (“rational choice”) and yet also theorize the social dimensions of human agency, like Hegel or even Aristotle.  The conference aims to make a contribution to the study of human action, overcoming the abstractions and shortcomings that stem from a lack of dialogue between different traditions and academic disciplines.

Satisficing by Effort

[I'm never quite sure when it's appropriate to cross-post things from philosophyetc.net here, but Doug suggested that this post might be of broader interest, and I'd certainly welcome Souper feedback, so here goes!]

Satisficing Consequentialism aims to capture the intuitive idea that we're not morally obligated to do the best possible, we merely need to do "good enough" (though of course it remains better to do better!). Ben Bradley, in 'Against Satisficing Consequentialism', argues convincingly against forms of the view which introduce the baseline as some utility level n that we need to meet. Such views absurdly condone the act of gratuitously preventing boosts to utility over the baseline n. But I think there is a better form that satisficing consequentialism can take. Rather than employing a baseline utility level, a better way to "satisfice" is to introduce a level of maximum demanded effort below which one straightforwardly maximizes utility. That is:

(Effort-based Satisficing Consequentialism) An act is permissible iff it produces no less utility than any alternative action the agent could perform with up to X effort.