PEA Soup

Frankfurt and Moral Requirements

I greatly admire the work of Harry Frankfurt. More recently, he has argued that love and caring, in the form of volitional necessities, are the sole source of our practical reasons. One corollary of this is that moral requirements are not important independently of our attitudes of love and caring. The argument to this conclusion is interesting. I have constructed it below from quotes from his 2006 book Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting it Right (pp. 22-3). I have some idea about where the argument goes wrong but this time I'm more interested in what others make of the argument.

Knowability of moral truths again

In the previous post, I applied Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument to argue for the claim that there must be some moral truths that cannot be known. Now I want to look at one of the best arguments against the view at the other end of the scale – that all moral truths could be unknowable. I will use basic act-consequentialism as an example. Yet, similar problems would be faced by Rossians who think that we can never know the over-all ‘duty proper’ in particular circumstances and by contractualists whose view would imply that we can never know which principles are non-rejectable because we cannot know what kind of standpoints the principles create for individuals. The argument is an application of Wright’s Wittgenstein. It is based on the idea that, if all moral truths turned out to be unknowable, it is not clear whether anything would count as intending to do the right action because it is right.

Metaethics on webtv

Geoff Sayre-McCord chatting about free will, metaethics, and stuff HERE.

Williamson and (Moral) Realism

Even though I’m not a real expert on his work (and his new book is way too expensive), I’m a huge fan of Timothy Williamson. The part of his work I know the best is his comments on anti-realism vs. realism debates of the Dummett and Wright kind. I want to reconstruct his argument from the margin of error for realism (i.e., the anti-luminosity argument) whilst applying it in the moral realm to argue for moral realism. I want to then ask how we should react to this argument.

Jackson and Non-Naturalism, Part I

I find Frank Jackson’s arguments against non-naturalist realism in his From Metaphysics to Ethics fascinating. So I think that, over a longer period of time, I would like to post a couple of things about them. Today, I am puzzled about the one that has received most attention. I wonder whether this argument is available for Jackson himself.

The Value of Practical Reason

Some thought-experiments just grab you and so you think about them for months. Here’s one that I’ve been pondering about for awhile now. It’s from Roger Crisp’s Mill on Utilitarianism (p. 60-62) but adapted from Griffin (Well-Being, p. 9):

The Committee          When you are 22 years old, you are approached by a committee composed of friends and family. One of the members tells you that the committee will, if you wish, take over the running of your life for you. The committee will decide which job you take, where you should live, which hobbies you should indulge in and so on.

Metaethics with Pictures

Anyone interested in metaethics should take a look at Antti Kauppinen's brilliant slideshows at the University of St Andrews. They can be accessed from the webpage of his course HERE.

Contractualism, Rule-Consequentialism, and Animals

I’m a contractualist. There – I’ve said it. My supervisor Brad Hooker is the rule-consequentialist. You might think that we have endless debates about which of the closely resembling views is right. Unfortunately we have better things to do. But, I do want to explain why his main argument based on the moral status of animals against contractualism fails to convert me into a rule-consequentialist.

Zombies and Metaethics

I’d like to return to one of the favourite topics of Pea Soup for a bit, i.e., the Zombies. Couple of years ago we had great discussions about Zombies, well-being, and the notion of ‘good for’ (here, here, and here). We’ve even talked about whether it would be wrong to eat Zombies (here). I’m actually quite fond of the Zombies discussed in the philosophy of mind. For this reason, I’d like to put on the table a slightly more general question about what implications, if any, the conceivability arguments and their conclusions would have for metaethics.

Hawthorne and Stanley on Knowledge and Action

Currently, epistemologists seem to be very interested in practical reasons and practical rationality. One good example of this is an interesting new paper entitled ‘Knowledge and Action’ by John Hawthorne and Jason Stanley (here) forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophy. Usually, when I read epistemologists writing about reasons I feel like entering a strange new world where things look slightly peculiar.