PEA Soup

Strawson’s Argument for Buck-Passing

In Sir P.F. Strawson’s brilliant 1949 paper ‘Ethical Intuitionism’, I came across a short and seemingly powerful argument for the buck-passing accounts of value and other ethical words that I haven’t seen elsewhere. Even if I am a buck-passer, I do think that this argument is too good to be true. So, what I want to do is to first give the argument in a full quote, then make three observations about it, and finally sketch out the ways in which opponents of the buck-passing view could reply to this argument.

Hyperplans and vagueness

We’ve been having a reading group on Gibbard’s Thinking How to Live. It’s been really interesting to go back to it after there having been so much discussion about it recently. At the heart of Gibbard’s expressivist semantics lie ‘the hyperplans’. This is a technical notion that is supposed to be helpful in elucidating the content of our normative judgments. I’ve started to become worried about whether there are or could be any hyperplans as Gibbard understands them. I’m uncertain about how big of a worry this would be for him. So, after quickly explaining my worry, I’ll leave you with some options about how he might proceed.

Arguments from Disagreement

There is a powerful argument that is frequently used in metaethics (and elsewhere). It’s based on the idea that disagreement requires shared concepts. Thus, by looking at who we can intuitively disagree with we can determine who we share our concepts with. And, in when it comes to morality, it seems we can disagree with people who classify very different things under moral terms. As a result, it is argued, ethical terms cannot have ‘descriptive content’. I used to think that this great argument works. Today I’m feeling less certain about this and I’d like to hear about your thoughts. Here is why.

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.

Naturalism Workshop in Leeds

Workshop: "Naturalism: Ethical and Metaphysical"
University of Leeds
September 18-19, 2009

This workshop brings together researchers interested in issues
concerning naturalism in moral philosophy and in metaphysics and
epistemology. Registration for the workshop is now open. More details
about the workshop and registration can be found at:
http://naturalism09.wordpress.com/.

The workshop begins at 2pm on Friday, 18 September, and ends at 4:15pm
on Saturday, 19 September. The speakers are:

Ted Sider (NYU): “Fundamentality and Evaluative Anti-Realism”
Ralph Wedgwood (Oxford): TBA
Jonas Olson (Stockholm): “In Defence of Moral Error Theory”
Carrie Jenkins (Nottingham): “Naturalism and the A Priori”
David Copp (UC Davis): “Toward a Pluralist and Teleological Theory of
Normativity”

Metaethics, Semantics, and Metasemantics

One thing I’ve become much more aware of in Leeds is the distinction between semantics and metasemantics. There is a worry that ignoring this distinction is creating some confusion. Metaethicists have traditionally claimed to be doing moral semantics whereas in fact they have mainly been doing metasemantics. Today, there is a new debate in which people also say that they are doing semantics. This time this claim is actually true. However, as a consequence, the new debate is not at the same metasemantic level as the previous debates. I know this is a bit confusing but let me try to elaborate a bit.

 

Korsgaard on Moral Realism

I’ve just been reading Christine Korsgaard’s new book Self-Constitution – Agency, Identity, and Integrity. It’s a marvelous book, one of the best I’ve read in long time. It presents an appealing picture of actions, agency, practical deliberation, normativity, morality, and interpersonal relations, it draws from the history of philosophy in a rich way (not just from Kant, but also from Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and many others), and it’s wonderfully written. I do have a problem though. I don’t understand her argument against standard moral realism (which she calls dogmatic rationalism). I would be very thankful if someone could help me with this. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t read the book yet, I’ll try to give the argument in full.

Williams conference in Leeds

THEMES FROM THE ETHICS OF BERNARD WILLIAMS’, UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS, 30 JUNE – 2 JULY 2009

Registration has opened for the 'Themes from the Ethics of Bernard Williams' Conference, which is taking place between 30 June and 2 July at the University of Leeds.

The main speakers at the Conference are: Sarah Broadie, John Broome, Jonathan Dancy, Philip Pettit, Joseph Raz, Samuel Scheffler, Michael Smith, R. Jay Wallace, and Susan Wolf. The respondents are: Roger Crisp, David Enoch, Alison Hills, Brad Hooker, Gerald Lang, James Lenman, Elinor Mason, Michael Ridge, and Ralph Wedgwood.

The following link supplies further details, and includes a booking and registration form: http://williamsconference.googlepages.com/

For further information, please email Dr. Jon Robson at: themesfromwilliams@googlemail.com

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.

Kant, Well-being, and Happiness

I’m intrigued by Kant’s remarks on happiness and well-being. I’ve been thinking of the traditional understanding of his view and a passage we’ve discussed in a reading group on the Second Critique. I’m left with jigsaw puzzle where I cannot seem to make all the parts fit. I would be thankful for any help.