PEA Soup

Post Survey Roundup

So the results are in. 63% of the respondents said that they would have most reason to refrain from making such significant sacrifices. 62% said that they would not be morally required to make such significant sacrifices. And 77% denied that the fact that the climate disaster would have been averted had, contrary to fact, everyone (or even just nearly everyone) been willing to make the significant sacrifices required to drastically reduce their carbon footprints constitutes a reason for them to make these sacrifices that is strong enough to outweigh the reasons that they have to avoid doing that which would be significantly detrimental to how they and their families fare.

One More Related Survey

This concerns the same prompt: Here it is: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MF5WX2Y

Intuitions Wanted

Please take the survey here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MS5MLCJ

UPDATE: And this one too: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MF5WX2Y

If you want a preview before deciding whether to take the survey, see below the fold.

PEA Soup 2.0

The next phase of PEA Soup is here.  As of this announcement, Dan Boisvert, Doug Portmore, and Josh Glasgow are stepping down from their posts as co-editors of PEA Soup with Dave Shoemaker.  Going forward, the blog will be run by Dave Shoemaker and David Sobel.

Those of us stepping down want to take this chance to thank everyone--contributors, commentators, participants in the Ethics-at-PEA-Soup discussions, and everyone else who is part of the PEA Soup family--for making the blog such a great place.  This June will kick off the tenth year of its existence, and when we started so many years ago, the four of us couldn't have predicted that such a wonderful community would take root here.  We are thrilled that this blog has become a valuable site for those working in ethics and cognate areas. 

We are also grateful to Shoemaker and Sobel for taking things over from here, and we look forward to the next era at PEA Soup.

Sincerely,
Dan, Doug, and Josh

Books Received in November

Authors and/or their presses kindly sent at least one of the editors the following books.

Welcome Peter A. Graham!

We are pleased to announce that Peter A. Graham has accepted our invitation to be a contributor at PEA Soup. Pete is a professor of philosophy at UMass Amherst. His current research concerns arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism, theories of moral blameworthiness, the relation between ability and obligation, and subjective and objective moral obligation. Welcome Pete!

Welcome Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder!

We are thrilled to welcome Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder to PEA Soup! Nomy, whose research interests include ethics, moral psychology, action theory, metaethics, and free will, is Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. She is the author of Merit, Meaning,and Human Bondage: An Essay on Free Will (Princeton U.P., 2006) and Unprincipled Virtue (Oxford U.P., 2002). Tim is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ohio State University. He works broadly in the areas of moral psychology and philosophy of mind and is author of Three Faces of Desire (Oxford, U. P., 2004).  His current project is tentatively titled Reasons from Atoms. It's wonderful to have you both aboard!

The 4th annual Arizona Workshop in Normative Ethics

The program is available from the workshop’s website:  http://ethics.arizona.edu/program.html.

Registration is free and open to all. You may register by emailing Mark Timmons -- see the workshop's website for his email address. Timmons will send periodic updates to those who register.

Feminists Encountering Animals

A free online forum sponsored by Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy and Wiley-Blackwell. Scheduled to run July 9 to 13, the invited symposium "Feminists Encountering Animals," published in the Animal Others special issue of Hypatia, is open for public comments and discussion.
 
Leading feminist animal studies scholars Lori Gruen (Ethics and Animals: An Introduction) and Kari Weil (Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now) invited six feminist scholars to reflect on trends within this burgeoning new field of scholarship. The online forum will include free access to their co-edited special issue in addition to commentary and real-time interaction among participants and authors—allowing for a lively discussion that extends the beyond the printed page.
 
The first posts went live at 11 A.M. EST on Mon, July 9 and can be found at the following address: http://philosophy-compass.com/phileye/online-events/hypatia-symposium/. No registration is necessary.

Should better teachers give higher grades?

We haven’t had a post on professional issues lately, but I hope that readers won’t mind a bit of light reading. In any case, here it goes:

Suppose that I’ve become a better teacher. Suppose, for instance, that I’ve used the same bank of test questions over the years and that, due to implementing certain non-substantive changes in my PHI X course, students taking that course from me this year are doing a better job answering those questions than students who took the same course from me in previous years. So the material that I’m trying to get the students to learn and the technique that I’ve been using for assessing whether they’ve learned it hasn’t change, but I’ve become more effective in that my current students are, on average, leaving the course with a better understanding of the material than students who took the same course from me in previous years.

The question, then, is: Should I (A) adopt higher standards with respect to what level of understanding I expect from them so as to earn certain grades or (B) keep the same standards and give higher grades on average than I had been giving in previous years?