PEA Soup

Questions from McTaggart, Part 1

Folks, it's time for some summer fun.  And everyone knows what that means -- it means McTaggart!

Here's a question McTaggart wondered about.  McTaggart's discussion of the question appears in The Nature of Existence, vol II., Chapter LXVII. 

Suppose that pleasure is intrinsically good, and that the value of a pleasure is partially a function of how long it lasts.  If there are two pleasures, p1 and p2, that are otherwise equal, but p2 lasts twice as long as p1, then p2 is twice as good as p1. 

Suppose also that there are timeless persons, i.e., persons that exist but do not exist in time.  Suppose one of those persons has a feeling of pleasure.  How intrinsically valuable is that feeling?

(Grant that we can make sense of timeless persons having mental states.)

McTaggart thinks that the answer is "infinitely valuable", regardless of the intensity of the pleasure.  Is he right?

Rights and Intrinsic Properties

I'm curious what people think of the following principle:

(RIP): Suppose that some person x has intrinsic feature F; suppose that x has a moral right to have F.  Suppose that some other person y can bring it about that y has F without violating anyone else's moral rights.    Then y has a moral right to have  F.

I'll explain the potential application of this principle (or something like it, if it needs tweaking) in a later post.

Bleg Time

I have a bleg.  Can anyone recommend papers in ethics -- preferably on value-theory or meta-ethics -- that (i) are good pieces of philosophy, (ii) are very clearly written, (iii) are not exceptionally long, and (iv) could be profitably read by an intelligent but young undergrad who knows next to nothing about philosophy?

Thanks!

Is the Eastern APA Worth It?

How much does it cost a department to interview job candidates at the Eastern APA?  And is the  information about the job candidates that one acquires worth that money? 

Desire Bleg

Does anyone hold the following view? If so, who? Where? When? Why?

The notion of desire is to be understood/analyzed in terms of the notion of preference, perhaps along the following lines:

S wants that P =df. S prefers P to not-P.

(The basic idea is that what one wants is (i) determined by one's preferences, where preference is a contrastive relation that links a subject to two other entities, and (ii) we should accordingly analyze desire in terms of preference.)

Thanks!

Harm at a Distance?

Suppose Unrestricted Desire Satisfactionism is true.  (UDS, is roughly, the view that how well one's life is going for oneself is determined by the extent to which one's desires are satisfied or frustrated.)  I have some naive questions about harm given UDS, and some parallel questions about the badness of death. More below the fold.

Expressivist Psychology

There's been a great discussion on an earlier thread about expressivism.  I don't want to kill it off, but I do want to raise a diferent worry about expressivism.  It appears below the fold.

Peter Singer visits Salon

There's an interesting interview with Peter Singer in todays Salon.com.  The webpage is posted beneath the fold.

Putnam: Introduction part I

Re: Putnam's Introduction to Ethics Without Ontology

In this post, I'll briefly discuss the main moves made by Putnam in the introductory chapter.  I'll focus on some of the things that struck me as interesting or provocative.

Putnam, Ethics, Ontology

Hi Friends,

   I'll be reading Putnam's relatively new book, Ethics without Ontology over the next month, and will post summaries and commentaries on each chapter here.  My goal is to post on a chapter a week.  My first post will be on the Introduction, and will appear tomorrow.  To give you a feel for what the book promises to be about, I'm reproducing the Amazon.com blurb here: