PEA Soup

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Cécile Fabre's "Guns, Food, and Liability to Attack in War"

We are pleased to announce the first 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 first featured article is Cécile Fabre's "Guns, Food, and Liability to Attack in War" (Volume 120, issue 1).  The article is now available here.  We are also very pleased that Jeff McMahan has agreed to provide a précis to introduce the discussion.  Professor McMahan's précis will appear, and discussion of the article will begin, on Monday, January 11.

The Ethics of Santa

Many people teach their small children the myth of Santa Claus:  that a magical being who lives at the North Pole brings presents on Christmas Eve.  Secondary aspects of the myth are that whether one receives presents is a function of one’s behavior, and that you can communicate with Santa about your preferences.  Not only parents, but retail establishments and (I have recently discovered) public schools collude in perpetuating this myth among children of a certain age.

 

Perpetuating the Santa myth has at least these moral reasons against it:

Smilansky's non-punishment paradox

Saul Smilansky's 10 Moral Paradoxes is a delightful book. The paradoxes are easy to appreciate and though it's written in a light and accessible style, it still has plenty of philosophical heft.

I'm intrigued by the paradox Smilansky labels the non-punishment paradox. Here's the gist:

Does Benatar's asymmetry argument generalize?

Coming to exist is always a harm. Or so argues David Benatar in his provocative book, Better Never to Have Been.

A central pillar of Benatar's defense of this offputting 'anti-natalist' thesis is what he calls the asymmetry argument (BNHB, p. 30):
Pleasure benefits us and pain harms us.
(1) The presence of pain is bad.
(2) The presence of pleasure is good.
So far, pleasure and pain are symmetrical in their goodness and badness. But they are not symmetrical with respect to their absence.  More specifically:
(3) The absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone, but
(4) The absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody (an actual somebody) who is deprived by its absence.

Not in My Interests

BBC has estimated that, in the UK, about 85.000 women were raped in the year 2006. In the US, during the same year, 92.455 rapes were reported to law-enforcement officers and we know that there were far more unreported cases than that. These sorts of numbers support the feminist view that we are dealing with a wide-spread social practice rather than merely with discrete acts of individuals who are morally corrupt and perhaps mentally ill.

     I find the feminist analyses of rape appealing even if I want to try to amend them in one respect. Many feminist philosophers claim that it is not only the raped women who are harmed by this practice. Instead, all women suffer as a group because of it. This seems plausible. However, the feminists then go on to argue that it is not only the rapist men who benefit. Rather, all non-rapist men benefit. It is this claim that I want to challenge. I want to also suggest that even the rapists themselves are worse off for raping women whether they get caught or not. If this is right, then rape is a deeply irrational practice even before we get to the moral considerations – it harms all of us.

Shifting burdens of proof in practical ethics

In my recent thinking about the ethics of suicide, I've been compelled to confront a methodological issue in practical ethics that I'd not really given much thought to before now. (Nor, as best I can tell, have other ethicists thought much about the issue either.)

Traditionally, we assign act tokens to one of three deontic categories: forbidden, (merely) permissible, or obligatory.  And prior to careful investigation of the morality of an act, our default assumption appears to be that an act is permissible. Furthermore, those who claim the act is either forbidden or obligatory bear the burden of proof to give reasons or arguments in favor of their claims.

The ethics of the faculty furlough

Let's get a little down to earth here at PEA Soup: I may have to confront an actual ethical quandary in a few months, and I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts about how I ought to respond.

Budget woes in the California State University system are severe.  One possibility being considered for the fall is to reduce personnel costs by imposing 'furloughs' on all CSU employees, faculty included.  This would mandate that faculty take 1-2 days off per month and take about a 5% cut in their gross pay. Now, as I gather most people understand, I don't actually teach, attend meetings or even come to my campus 5 days a week. The norm is that I come three or four days a week, and often spend the other weekdays, my evenings, and my weekends doing much of the work that constitutes my job (preparing class meeting, grading papers, doing my philosophical research and writing). There's definitely five days per week of work, just not five days per week at work.

The issue is: Should I respond to the furlough mandate by working less, the equivalent of 1-2 days per month? And if so, where should I reduce my efforts? Some possibilities:

 

Arguments for the DDE

I apologise for this but I want to return to the Doctrine of Double Effect. One thing that Tim Scanlon said in the comments was that his motivation for arguing against the DDE is, quote: ‘I see no plausible theoretical defense for it’. I wanted to ask about whether there really is no theoretical justification for the DDE. What are the best possible positive arguments for the DDE? What arguments have been presented in the literature so far? I also want to present a virtue-ethicist argument which I think works the best. It’s not very original (Alison Hills uses a similar one) but I ‘ll formulate it slightly differently.

Act vs. orientation?

There's been an important discussion going on at Brian Leiter's blog (here and here). There's a petition, signed by well over 1000 members of the American Philosophical Association, encouraging the APA to either drop its policy that schools advertising in the JFP may not discriminate based on sexual orientation, or enforce the policy. There's also a counter-petition, signed by, perhaps, a few dozen APA members, which urges the APA to stick with the status quo.

That brings me to the substantive part of this post.

A dilemma for interrogational torture?

Several months back, Ralph's post on torture provoked a good deal of valuable discussion, so I wanted to draw attention to C.A.J. Coady's review of a recent book by Bob Brecher, a book that deals only with the  'ticking time bomb' scenario often used by defenders of torture. The book looks intriguing because (a) this scenario seems to be the one that leads even those otherwise morally opposed to torture to make an exception, and (b) the scenario deals with the only rationale that (at least in my opinion)  is even a candidate for morally justifiying torture, namely, that torture could be used as an interrogation method to extract information that could prevent significant amounts of harm to innocent people.