I need to help develop an undergraduate course on ethics in journalism and the media, to be taken primarily by aspiring TV/film writers and producers. Have any of our readers ever taught such a course? Anyone willing to share syllabi, advice about texts, etc.? Thanks!
You are offered a choice between two experience machines.
Machine A is just like the ones you already know about. You'll be on the experience machine until you are 120 years old, getting lots of various sorts of pleasure.
Machine B offers exactly the same experiences as Machine A. However, the experiences are crammed into a much shorter period of time: just one day. The first 12 hours of this day seem to last 12 hours. The next 6 hours seem to last 12 hours. The next 3 hours seem to last 12 hours. And so on (as in Sorensen's "The Cheated God"). A fraction of a second before the 24 hours are up, the machine kills you painlessly. At that time it seems to you as if you have lived 120 highly pleasant years.
Which machine should you choose?
The 2008 Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference has posted its call for papers. As far as I know, this is the only philosophy conference where you can win a prize for sustaining a physical injury. (Visit to ER may be required to claim prize; only one winner per year.) Needless to say, I will be there.
Psychologist Wray Herbert has written an article for Newsweek about happiness. The title is “Can You Be Too Happy?” How could you be too happy? Too happy for what? Sounds crazy. Let’s take a look!
Check out this interview on MSNBC with Psychiatrist Dr. Donald E. Rosen, conducted by MSNBC health editor Jane Weaver. I’m breaking it down FJM-style.
In “Contractualism and Utilitarianism” Scanlon introduces what he calls “philosophical utilitarianism” (PU). PU is the view that “the only fundamental moral facts are facts about individual well-being.” PU is supposed to be answering a different question from the one answered by more familiar versions of utilitarianism. It is a view in what Scanlon calls “philosophical ethics,” which means that it is supposed to explain “why anyone should care” about morality at all; to “make clearer to us the nature of the reasons that morality does provide.” It’s supposed to do some other things too.
I don’t understand PU, nor do I understand how it could be thought to do any of the things Scanlon wants a philosophical theory of morality to do.
This got to be too long to be a comment on Michael C's post. People sometimes criticize utilitarianism for being "inapplicable," or for entailing that you shouldn't try to use it as a decision procedure. I don't think there is any way to interpret this criticism such that utilitarians should worry about it.
In Mike Almeida's recent post, this topic came up: what is it for a person to harm someone? I'm interested in a more general question: what is it for an event or state of affairs to harm someone? Here's the view I like best:
(H) X harms S iff X makes S worse off than S would have been had X not occurred or obtained.
Below the fold I defend the following disjunction: either (H) is the correct account of harm, or harm is irrelevant (or maybe both).
Suppose you find yourself in a situation in which you can either save A and B or save C. A, B and C are relevantly similar – all are strangers to you, none is more deserving of life than any other, none is responsible for being in a life-threatening situation, and so on. John Taurek (“Should the numbers count?”) argued that when deciding what to do in such a situation, you should flip a coin, thereby giving each of A, B and C a 50% chance of survival. Taurek seemed to be employing the “Equal Greatest Chance” principle (EGC), according to which, when deciding whom to save, one must give each person the greatest possible chance of survival consistent with everyone else having the same chance. Others, including Jens Timmermann, have endorsed a “weighted lottery” that gives each person a chance to live, but gives a greater chance to those in the larger group. Finally there is the “Save the Greater Number” principle (SGN), which needs no elaboration. Here is a story that refutes the EGC and weighted lottery principles. (The story shares important features with one given by Judy Thomson in The Realm of Rights. For some reason, Thomson did not think her example refuted EGC. If anyone knows why, I’d like to know.)
I'm curious what people think about the specialty ethics journals - which ones do you read? Which ones do you think are good? Which ones do you think other people read and think are good?
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