PEA Soup

Workshop: Good Life: Theory and Practice

A group of our PhD students here at Birmingham asked me to email details of a workshop on the conceptions of a good life which they are organising here in June. This should be of interest for graduate students following this blog as there is also a call for abstracts for them included. Here's the announcement:

Call for abstracts and registration

Workshop at the University of Birmingham, Department of Philosophy
The Good Life: Theory and Practice
8th June 2012

Confirmed speakers
Beverley Clack (Professor in the Philosophy of Religion, Oxford Brookes University)
Chris Megone (Professor of Interdisciplinary Applied Ethics, University of Leeds)
Mozaffar Qizilbash (Professor of Economics, University of York)
Stephen Wilkinson (Professor of Bioethics, Keele University)
James Wilson (Lecturer in Philosophy and Health, University College London)

Enforcement Rights and Harm-Reduction

Imagine that you are walking home from the pub at night when two strangers suddenly pull out their guns clearly with the intention to kill you. Unbeknownst to you, there’s a vicious killer out in the area, and as it happens you fit the description of the mass murderer perfectly right down to every last detail.  These police officers have been given shoot to kill orders as several officers have already been killed. But, you don’t know that they are police officers – you just think that they are killers coming to get you. All you can think of is saving your own life. In a desperate attempt to do so, you hurl your heavy bag at one of the officer which hits him in the head and kills him. At the same time, the other officer fires and you die. Your only other options would have been to hurl the bag at the officer who ended up shooting you (in which he would have died but the officer you really killed would then have shot you), or to do nothing and take the bullet from both of the officers.

Have you done anything wrong? My intuition is that you haven’t. I think that the right to defend oneself also applies to cases where one is attacked by a far superior force. So, in this case too, you were perfectly entitled to defend yourself. In fact, most attacks where people have to defend themselves seem to be ones where the odds are heavily against the defender (the Stephen Lawrence murder here in the UK is a good example of this) given that the attackers are rarely stupid enough to attack targets who can defend themselves successfully. Yet, Peter Vallentyne’s recent theory of enforcement rights against non-culpable non-just intrusions has just the opposite consequence. He thinks that in these cases your only morally permissible option is to do nothing. This is why I think we should reject his theory and all other similar views that are based on harm reduction.

Conceptual Role Semantics and Reference

I’ve been reading David Enoch’s great Taking Morality Seriously. Enoch defends Robust Realism according to which there are judgment-independent non-natural (causally inert) normative properties. One of the objections to Robust Realism briefly discussed in the book is the problem of semantic access. Enoch is explicitly very modest when he responds to this objection (he merely explains how a response might go). I still want to raise a question about this response as I think that we are getting here into very deep and interesting questions about normative concepts and properties.

Hybrid Theory in Edinburgh

Guy Fletcher and Mike Ridge are organising a conference on hybrid theories in metaethics in Edinburgh this summer from 2nd of July to 4th of July. As you all know, these are views according to which telling a complete story of normative judgments requires talking about both beliefs and desire-like attitudes. The line-up is incredible: Dorit Bar-On (UNC-Chapel Hill), Stephen Barker (Nottingham), Dan Boisvert (UNC-Charlotte), Matthew Chrisman (Edinburgh), David Copp (UC-Davis), John Erikkson (Gothenberg), Steve Finlay (USC), Guy Fletcher (Edinburgh), Ryan Hay (Occidential College), Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck), Mike Ridge (Edinburgh), Mark Schroeder (USC), Laura Schroeter (Melbourne), Francois Schroeter (Melbourne), and Jon Tresan (UNC-Chapel Hill). Phhew! More information about the conference HERE. Just after the conference, there's also Joint Session and BSET in Stirling (see HERE and HERE).

Susan Wolf and Meaningfulness

A lot of interesting work has been done recently on what makes lives meaningful. One brilliant example of this is Susan Wolf’s recent wonderful book Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. It consists of two short lectures, critical commentaries by John Koethe, Robert M. Adams, Nomy Arpaly, and Jonathan Haidt, and responses by Wolf herself. What I want to do here is to introduce quickly Wolf’s ‘Fitting Fulfillment’ View, and then I'll raise a potential objection to it.

Goodin and the Big Society

As anyone who reads Leiter Reports or follows the Philos-L mailing-list knows, there has been a big uproar recently in the UK about the AHRC’s (a government body which funds Arts and Humanities research) ‘connected communities’ funding scheme. One problem is that, in advertising the scheme, the AHRC has adopted the current government’s notion of the ‘Big Society’. This raises a variety of important ethical questions about on what grounds public research funding should be distributed. However, in this post, I want to focus on the question of whether the Big Society is a good idea in the first place. It seems to me that, contrary to what some people at the AHRC and the government seem to think, there’s already plenty of good philosophical research done to show that it is not (which has unfortunately been ignored in the public discourse). So, to do my part of the unoriginal academic research on the Big Society, I want to lay out Robert Goodin’s argument against the Big Society from his wonderful 1988 book Reasons for Welfare – the Political Theory of the Welfare State.

RIP Birmingham Workshop: Free Will and Moral Responsibility

I'm helping to put together a Royal Institute of Philosophy workshop on Free Will and Moral Responsibility here at the Philosophy department of the University of Birmingham. It will from 1pm to 6pm on Saturday the 7th of May - at University of Birmingham Campus, ERI building. The workshop is free but please book a place by emailing me at jussiphil@gmail.com. The speakers are Veronica Rodriquez-Blanco (Birmingham), Raymond Tallis (Manchester), and Kevin Timpe (Northwest Nazarene University). More info below.

Deliberative Contractualism and the Conditional Fallacy

One of my favourite objections is the conditional fallacy. It reveals a structural flaw in theories which attempt to give a philosophical account of something in terms of what happens in some specific counterfactual circumstances. It was first formulated by Robert Shope in his 1978 “The Conditional Fallacy in Contemporary Philosophy”. Despite this objection, many still continue to construct counterfactuals-based theories. As an illustration, I want to look at deliberative contractualism – a new form of contractualism recently introduced by Nicholas Southwood in his Contractualism & Foundations of Morality. The book itself is brilliant – it clarifies the distinguishing features, advantages, and problems of different forms of contractualism. I just worry that Southwood’s theory too commits the conditional fallacy.

Williams, Thick Concepts, and Reasons

At first sight, there seems to be a blatant contradiction between Bernard Williams’s two central theories: his view about thick concepts and his existence-internalism about reasons (many others have hinted at this too – Gibbard and Scanlon, for instance). I want to quickly sketch what that tension is. I mainly wanted to know if anyone’s seen or can come up with an interpretation of Williams's theories that dissolves the contradiction. I’ll suggest a couple, but I’m not very happy with them.

Chalmers and Naturalism

As everyone knows, David Chalmers argues in The Conscious Mind against materialism and for dualism about phenomenal properties. On this view, conscious experiences are a sui generis feature of the world over and above its physical qualities. Yet, in order to defend his view, Chalmers also argues that his theory is a form of naturalism. What I want to show in this post is that, if Chalmers’s reasons for thinking that he is naturalist are sound, then ‘the dualists’ in metaethics – so far usually called ‘non-naturalists’ – count as naturalists for the very same reasons.