PEA Soup

Kudos!

In case the cash is not enough, congratulations to Dave Shoemaker for his 3 Quarks Daily Prize in Philosophy for  this posting on Scanlon on Moral Responsibility and Blame!

Surely a few drops of glory have rained into the general PEA Soup pot (note Dennett's blurb on the award page). Good comments, and I'm sure it didn't hurt that Tim dropped by.

Bovine Existentialism

This posting is about one fictional philosopher and one real one, and how their theories interact. The real philosopher’s theory has to mis-characterize the fictional philosopher’s theory. The fictional philosopher’s theory also has some problems, but they will not concern me.

2009 Mad Meta: Program announced

Russ has released the program for the 2009 Madison Metaethics Workshop. Needless to say, it looks good.

Referees in the sunshine

In "Stalking the Perfect Journal" (Essay 8 in The Great Eskimo Snow Vocabulary Hoax), Geoff Pullum lists some suggestions for improving academic journals; his focus is on linguistics journals, but as you might imagine the suggestions generally apply equally well to philosophy journals. His last and most radical suggestion is that with each paper published, the names of accepting referees be listed (that is, the ones who recommended that the paper be published).

Pullum names three advantages: (i) that hard-working referees would get a little acknowledgment; (ii) that sloppy, too-lenient refereeing would be discouraged; and (iii) that editorial referee selection would have some sunlight thrown on it.

I've mooted this suggestion for discussion among the editors at JESP. Are there any particular worries you can think of? Would this policy make you, personally, less likely to referee for a journal that adopted it?

Free Bud for students!

Since we're talking about issues in the profession, I thought I'd toss this out there.

At the Eastern APA meetings, the registration fee for students is $10. What if the APA waived registration entirely for students? Not just fees -- students would not be required to register.

Advantages:

1. Transfer of $10 from the membership at large to students.

2. Vastly reduce the lines and hassle at conference registration.

Disadvantages:

1. Philosophers who look like students but aren't might try to get away with not paying.

2. Philosophers who are students and don't look like students might get funny looks.

Please list other advantages and disadvantages, criticisms of my purported advantages and disadvantages, and obvious things that I have overlooked, in comments.

Ethics Encyclopedia Entries bleg

I'm an editor for Blackwell's International Encyclopedia of Ethics, and my current (and first) task is to help make sure the IEE will have the right entries, or headwords, for metaethics. Below the fold are the headwords that the über-editors and I came up with so far. What's missing?

Help Jamie Fix Buck-Passing

I have a question regarding Buck-Passing about good — two questions, really — and Doug kindly gave me guest poster status so I could ask here. If this goes well, maybe I'll leech off industrious readers contribute again soon.

Here is the Buck-Passing account of good that I got from Tim Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other:

For something to be good is for it to have properties that provide reasons for behaving in certain ways with regard to it.

Scanlon himself does not quite say this. He says almost this about value, and then proceeds as if he has given an account of both value and good. So, I'm assuming what I've written is the intended Buck-Passing account of good.
But if so, it has an obvious problem. Here's a counterexample to illustrate.

Marsha is a corrupt, selfish, and sadistic government official who uses her position to enrich herself, punish her enemies, and cheat the public. However, she would never rat on a friend. Marsha therefore has a property — loyalty to friends —  that provides a reason for admiring her. But, she is not good.

Here's my first question: has nobody noticed this difficulty? I have looked in a few obvious places but not scoured the literature.

The malady doesn't look terribly serious. I can think of three ways to fix this particular problem with the Buck-Passing account of good.

1. For a feature to be good is for it to provide reasons for behaving in certain ways with regard to its bearers.
2. For something to be good-in-a-respect is for it to have properties that provide reasons for behaving in certain ways with regard to it.
3. For something to be good is for it to have properties that provide sufficient reasons for behaving in certain ways with regard to it.

One could also go for an 'ought' formulation instead of a 'reasons' formulation, but that seems not to be in the Scanlonian spirit.

Here's my second question: what fix (one of mine or some other) seems to you best?