Sam Wren-Lewis is organizing a conference on subjective well-being and public policy at Leeds in July that might be of interest to Peasoupers (indeed, several of us are speaking there). Here's the official announcement:
Conference: 'Measures of Subjective Well-being for Public Policy: Philosophical Perspectives'
We are pleased to present the next installment of Ethics at PEA Soup. Our featured article this time around is Justin Clarke-Doane’s “Morality and Mathematics: The Evolutionary Challenge,” which is available here. We are very grateful to Matthew Braddock, Andreas Mogensen, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong for kicking off the discussion with the following thought-provoking post (see below the fold). Questions and comments about either Clarke-Doane’s article or the post by Braddock et al. are most welcome.
I'm pleased to welcome aboard Jonathan Way, a Lecturer at the University of Southampton, as a contributor to PEA Soup. Jonathan has published several articles on practical rationality, including a forthcoming piece in Ethics. Great to have you here, Jonathan!
Moving to the Front: We are pleased to announce the next installment of our partnership with Ethics, where we host a discussion of one article from each issue of the journal, and the journal makes the article freely available for the period of our discussion.
Our next featured article is Justin Clarke-Doane’s “Morality and Mathematics: The Evolutionary Challenge” (Volume 122, issue 2). The open-access article is now freely available. We are also very grateful that Matthew Braddock, Andreas Mogensen, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong have agreed to provide a post that will kick off the discussion. Their post will appear, and discussion will begin, on Friday, March 23, 2012. We invite everyone interested to participate.
In honor of my favorite philosophical article, I'm pleased to pass on the following announcement from Neal Tognazzini:
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of P. F. Strawson's 'Freedom and Resentment'. In honor of its remarkable influence over the past half-century, the philosophy department at The College of William & Mary is hosting a two-day conference this fall, *Responsibility & Relationships*, that will explore Strawsonian themes in contemporary moral philosophy, psychology, and the law, including new work on blame, punishment, and the moral emotions. And you're all invited.
Imagine that you are walking home from the pub at night when two strangers suddenly pull out their guns clearly with the intention to kill you. Unbeknownst to you, there’s a vicious killer out in the area, and as it happens you fit the description of the mass murderer perfectly right down to every last detail. These police officers have been given shoot to kill orders as several officers have already been killed. But, you don’t know that they are police officers – you just think that they are killers coming to get you. All you can think of is saving your own life. In a desperate attempt to do so, you hurl your heavy bag at one of the officer which hits him in the head and kills him. At the same time, the other officer fires and you die. Your only other options would have been to hurl the bag at the officer who ended up shooting you (in which he would have died but the officer you really killed would then have shot you), or to do nothing and take the bullet from both of the officers.
Have you done anything wrong? My intuition is that you haven’t. I think that the right to defend oneself also applies to cases where one is attacked by a far superior force. So, in this case too, you were perfectly entitled to defend yourself. In fact, most attacks where people have to defend themselves seem to be ones where the odds are heavily against the defender (the Stephen Lawrence murder here in the UK is a good example of this) given that the attackers are rarely stupid enough to attack targets who can defend themselves successfully. Yet, Peter Vallentyne’s recent theory of enforcement rights against non-culpable non-just intrusions has just the opposite consequence. He thinks that in these cases your only morally permissible option is to do nothing. This is why I think we should reject his theory and all other similar views that are based on harm reduction.
We are pleased to announce that William J. FitzPatrick has accepted our invitation to become a contributor here at PEA Soup. Bill is Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of Rochester. One of his primary research interests lies with defending a robust form of ethical realism that involves a non-naturalistic metaphysics of ethical facts and properties as well as an external reasons theory that allows for the categoricity of moral requirements. He is also interested in resisting consequentialism, particularly through defenses of the Doctrine of Double Effect against various recent objections. Welcome aboard, Bill!
Michael Della Rocca has given me permission to post this request, which he sent to a number of Marcus-admirers and friends, to PEA Soup.
Dear Friends and admirers of Ruth Marcus,
Forgive the mass e-mailing, any duplications, or omissions. As you know, Ruth Marcus died over two weeks ago and an obituary has yet to appear in the New York Times. This failure to recognize one of the most prominent and pioneering philosophers of the last 60 years is appalling. There have been multiple communications between Yale and also NYU (Ruth's undergraduate alma mater) with the obituary editors at the Times. The Times has received a wealth of information from these sources and still no obituary. I fear that they have decided or are in the process of deciding that Ruth is not a significant enough figure to warrant the recognition of an obituary in the Times. Don't get me started on this -- it's simply outrageous. Don Garrett, Diana Raffman and I have sent to the Times' obituary editors a strongly worded message -- see below. If you would like to endorse the sentiments in this message please let me know and we will pass on this information to the Times. I plan to be in touch with them again soon. Or if you would like to write a message of your own to the Times that would be great. The obituary editors are Bill McDonald<wmcdon@nytimes.com> and Jack Kadden<kadden@nytimes.com>.
If there are other philosophers you know of who might be interested in helping out here, please feel free to forward this message and to encourage them to be in touch with me or Diana or Don.
Don, Diana, and I will be in touch directly with the APA leadership about this matter so that they may contact the Times too.
best, Michael (and Diana and Don)
Below the fold is the message that was sent yesterday to the Obituary editors at the Times:
Congratulations to Professors Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons, Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona, who are recipients of a John Templeton Foundation Grant in the amount of $230,386 to support their book project “Illuminating Reasons: An Essay in Moral Phenomenology.”
We are pleased to announce that Justin Clarke-Doane has accepted our invitation to become a contributor here at PEA Soup. Justin recently received his PhD from NYU and is currently a fix-term Lecturer at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Justin's work centers on foundational and methodological problems in metaphysics and epistemology. Recently, his work has concerned indeterminacy and undecidability in set theory, a priori knowledge, and comparisons between ethics and mathematics. Welcome aboard, Justin!
Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in any given post reflect the opinion of only that individual who posted the particular entry or comment.
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