PEA Soup

Korsgaard on Moral Realism

I’ve just been reading Christine Korsgaard’s new book Self-Constitution – Agency, Identity, and Integrity. It’s a marvelous book, one of the best I’ve read in long time. It presents an appealing picture of actions, agency, practical deliberation, normativity, morality, and interpersonal relations, it draws from the history of philosophy in a rich way (not just from Kant, but also from Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and many others), and it’s wonderfully written. I do have a problem though. I don’t understand her argument against standard moral realism (which she calls dogmatic rationalism). I would be very thankful if someone could help me with this. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t read the book yet, I’ll try to give the argument in full.

Moral Dimensions Meets the Empirical Data

Tim Scanlon's new book Moral Dimensions provides an elegant account according to which an agent's mental states are relevant to the question as to whether that agent is blameworthy but not to the question as to whether the agent's behavior itself is morally wrong. 

As the philosopher Kristen Bell points out to me, however, the empirical data indicate that people's actual judgments show exactly the opposite pattern. People's wrongness judgments actually depend more on the agent's mental states than their blame judgments do. 

Expressivism and Moral Certitude

I’ve been reading Krister Bykvist’s and Jonas Olson’s wonderful paper entitled ‘Expressivism and Moral Certitude’ (HERE). Krister and Jonas argue that ecumenical forms of expressivism are unable to give a reply to Michael Smith’s objection to non-ecumenical forms of expressivism according to which expressivists cannot account for moral certitude. I have no quarrels with their arguments but I fail to see Smith’s problem for expressivists in the first place on which their argument is based. Here’s why.

Practical and Epistemic Reasons

We act for reasons all the time. Here's an interesting question: (Q1) what kind of thing are those reasons our actions are based on?

We believe things for reasons all the time too. Here's another interesting question: (Q2) what kind of thing are those reasons our beliefs are based on?

Set aside those two specific questions for the moment. I want to ask a more general question about the relationship between the two questions.

Punishments Versus Prices

I once heard someone maintain something absolutely absurd: A life in prison is just the price for committing murder, he said, and you are "free" to commit murder as long as you are willing to pay that price.  Clearly this is crazy.  A life in prison, execution---these are not "prices" for committing murder; they are punishments.   But what exactly distinguishes a "price" from a "punishment"?

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 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

Beliefs are not necessary for motivation

Many philosophers think that whenever we are motivated to act, our motivation always involves a belief. E.g. according to the version of the Humean Theory of Motivation that is defended by Michael Smith, your motivation for action always consists of a desire and a "means-end belief" (see The Moral Problem, p. 92).

I think this is false. There are cases in which for no further reason, you simply form an intention to perform a certain basic action right now. Then I think that this intention can motivate you to act, without the need for any "means-end belief" at all.

Moral Psychology Conference at the University of San Francisco

For people in the Bay Area, or those interested in making a trip to it, there will be a small conference entitled "Mind, Agency, and Emotion: New Perspectives on Moral Psychology" held at the University of San Francisco on November 9th and 10th.

Speakers will include Chrisoula Andreou, John Doris, Anne Jacobson, Jeanette Kennett, Benoit Monin, Shaun Nichols, Jenefer Robinson, and Christine Swanton.

For more information, go here:
http://www.usfca.edu/fac-staff/mrvargas/Conferences/Indexical/MP/Program.html

a problem for (some) hybrid theories

According to some (but not all) 'hybrid' metaethical theories, moral sentences like 'stealing is wrong' express both beliefs and desires, but different beliefs for different speakers.  I think Paul Edwards was a forebear of this position, but it has recently been defended by Stephen Barker and Michael Ridge.

I understand these kinds of views to work something as follows: every speaker is assumed to have some property, P, such that she disapproves of P-actions.  Then, for any given speaker, S, who disapproves of P-actions, 'Stealing is wrong' expresses the belief that stealing is P, and expresses disapproval of P-actions.