PEA Soup

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.

A bleg for help on narrow scope requirements to intend and objective requirements to believe

Consider that following plausible wide scope requirement, a requirement that many philosophers endorse (including, I believe, M. Bratman, G. Harman, J. H. Sobel, and J. D. Velleman):

(WSR) Subjective rationality demands that S be such that she does not intend to X if she believes that she will not X.

In order to move from this wide scope requirement to some corresponding narrow scope requirement, we might rely on the following principle:

(WSR->NSR) If there is a wide scope requirement to the effect that subjective rationality demands that S be such that she does not phi if she psi’s (e.g., does not believe not-Q if she believes both P and P entails Q), then it follows that there is a narrow scope requirement to the effect that S is objectively required [not to phi] if S is objectively required to psi.

Now, WSR and WSR->NSR together entail:

CFA: "Moral Motivation: Evidence and Relevance" Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden, 18-20 May 2012

Deadline for abstracts: January 20, 2012 (for instructions, see below)

The relation between moral judgments and moral motivation is a central issue in ethical theory. According to motivational internalism, making a moral judgment implies being motivated to act accordingly, at least under normal circumstances. The truth of motivational internalism is highly contested, and often taken to have implications for the nature of moral emotions and moral judgments, the meaning of normative terms, and the possibility of objective truth and knowledge in morality.
    During the last two decades, various new forms of motivational internalism have raised questions both about possible sources of evidence for and against these forms, and about the metaethical relevance of a defensible internalism. Some forms seem to be straightforward empirical claims, making traditional a priori arguments for or against internalism suspect; other forms make it unclear how internalism would favor moral anti-realism over realism. (For an overview of recent work on motivational internalism, see this Analysis paper.) 
    The conference Moral Motivation: Evidence and Relevance will bring together senior and junior scholars working on both issues of evidence and issues of relevance.

Subjunctive Analyses and the Conditional Fallacy

Subjunctive analyses of what we ought to do often appeal to what we would do (or what we would want ourselves to do) if we were both fully informed and fully rational. Many such analyses commit what is called the Conditional Fallacy and are, therefore, subject to counterexample. The counterexamples all involve cases where full information (and/or full rationality) affects what one has reason to do and, thus, what one ought to do. To illustrate, consider the following very simple analysis:

SLACRR 2 Program

St. Louis Annual Conference on Reason and Rationality
UM-St. Louis
May 22-24, 2011
Moonrise Hotel

The Department of Philosophy at UM-St. Louis is pleased to announce the program for SLACRR 2.  PEA Soupers on this year's program include Jamie Dreier (Keynote), Brad Cokelet, Jussi Suikkanen, Mark van Roojen, and Robert N. Johnson.  There is no fee to attend SLACRR, but since space is limited, we ask that you register, which you can do simply by emailing John Brunero or Eric Wiland at SLACRR@gmail.com.  More information about the conference is available at  http://www.umsl.edu/~slacrr/ 
 
The full program is below the break --->

Cosmic Coincidence & Ethical Intuitionism

I want to discuss a problem for ethical intuitionism and an argument that seems to show that ethical intuitionists either have to embrace skepticism or naturalism.  It's an interesting argument and I'm not entirely convinced that the response I set out below adequately addresses the worries that motivate it, but I thought I'd give it a shot.  The argument from cosmic coincidence is taken from Matthew Bedke's Pacific Phil Quarterly paper (here or here if you can't get library access).  Before we get to the argument, I should say that the view I want to defend is the view that it's possible to have non-inferential moral knowledge based on intuition alone even if we have no independent grounds for thinking that our intuitions are reliable (provided, of course, that there aren't reasons to think intuition is unreliable that we ought to take account of).  The argument seems to show that if ethical properties are non-natural properties, intuitionists have to say that we cannot have moral knowledge.  Once we recognize this, we cannot have justified moral belief.  (Maybe you can have justified belief without knowledge, but I don't think you can justifiably believe that which you have good reason to think you aren't in a position to know.)  So, given some assumptions about the metaphysics of moral properties, the argument can lend some support to the skeptical view that it's not possible to have moral knowledge (ST1) and that it's not possible to have justified moral judgment (ST2).

MadMeta 2011 Call for Abstracts

From Russ Shafer-Landau:

A call for abstracts for the Eighth Annual Metaethics Workshop, to be held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on September 16-18, 2011. Christine Korsgaard (Harvard) will be this year's keynote speaker. Abstracts (of 2-3 double-spaced pages) of papers in any area of metaethics are due by May 1. There is a limit of one submission per person. Speakers in the 2009 or 2010 workshop are not eligible to submit abstracts for this year’s event. A program committee will evaluate submissions and make decisions by early June.
        Information on submitting an abstract, plus much other relevant information about the workshop, can be obtained at the workshop website.

        All questions about the workshop may be directed to me (that's Russ).

What is instrumental goodness?

In “Two Distinctions in Goodness” (Philosophical Review 1983), Christine Korsgaard argued that the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goodness should not be conflated with the distinction between final and instrumental goods. As it happens, I believe that she is entirely right that these two distinctions are distinct from each other. Still, her account of the distinction between final and instrumental goods does not seem quite correct to me.

As she puts it, a final good is something that “is valued as an end or for its own sake”, while an instrumental good “is valued as a means or for the sake of something else” (p. 170). There are at least three problems with this account.

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.

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Gunnar Björnsson and Stephen Finlay, "Metaethical Contextualism Defended"

We are pleased to present the latest installment of PEA Soup's collaboration with Ethics, in which we host a discussion of one article from an issue of the journal. The article selected from Volume 121, Issue 1 is Gunnar Björnsson and Stephen Finlay, "Metaethical Contextualism Defended."  We are very pleased that Ralph Wedgwood is providing a précis of the article to introduce the discussion.  His commentary begins below the fold.