PEA Soup

Moral Rationalism and Blameworthiness

I’m sympathetic to the following view, which I call moral rationalism:

MR: If S is morally required to do x, then S has decisive reason (all things considered) to do x.

One popular argument for this view appeals to blameworthiness. This sort of argument is found both in Darwall (2006, 287-292) and in Skorupski (1999, 170) as well as in Shafer-Landau (2003, 190-193), although Shafer-Landau employs it to argue for only weak moral rationalism:

WMR: If S is morally required to do x, then S has a (pro tanto) reason to do x.

The following is my reconstruction of their argument.

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.

Ethics Encyclopedia Entries bleg

I'm an editor for Blackwell's International Encyclopedia of Ethics, and my current (and first) task is to help make sure the IEE will have the right entries, or headwords, for metaethics. Below the fold are the headwords that the über-editors and I came up with so far. What's missing?

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.

A Puzzle about 'Right' and 'Wrong'

Intuitively, it's clear that 'wrong' entails 'ought not'; and the term 'right' seems simply to be the contradictory of 'wrong' (after all, 'It's not right' seems at first glance to entail 'It's wrong', and obviously nothing can be both right and wrong). But then it follows that 'right' cannot entail anything stronger than 'it is not the case that ... ought not...'. I.e., 'right' cannot mean anything stronger than 'permissible'.

Intuitively, however, 'right' seems stronger than 'permissible'. If I say, "You're quite right to F", I seem to be expressing a much stronger sort of approval of your F-ing than if I merely said "It is quite permissible for you to F".  It's natural to talk about "the right thing to do", but decidedly odd to talk about "a right thing to do" (whereas it's perfectly natural to talk about "a permissible thing to do"). So, what does 'right' mean -- does it just mean 'permissible' or does it mean something stronger?

A Bleg: Obligation Dilemmas

As I understand it, an obligation dilemma exists where an agent faces a choice situation in which two (or more) of her available act alternatives are morally obligatory and yet it is impossible for her to perform both of those two act alternatives. Does anyone know of a moral theory or a moral theorist that endorses the existence of obligation dilemmas? Do you think that the divine command theory allows for obligation dilemmas in that it seems possible for God to command an agent to perform both of two mutually exclusive act alternatives? If the divine command theory does allow for the possibility of obligation dilemmas is this a good reason to reject the theory?

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.

A moral equivalent of Moore's paradox?

So here's an idea I've been fiddling with for a while and would be interested to hear if anyone thinks that further exploration of this idea would be fruitful. (I'm also trying out this line of thought later this month at the ETMP conference in Amsterdam, so I wouldn't mind some 'pre-feedback' before my presentation.)

I assume most of us are familiar with examples of Moore's paradox:
    (P) It's raining, but I don't believe it

Peter Railton (in the paper "Moral factualism" that he wrote for the Blackwell moral theory anthology edited by PEA Souper Jamie Dreier) suggests that there are moral equivalents of Moore's paradox:
    (Q) Hurting animals for fun is wrong, but I don't care

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.