PEA Soup

Arizona WiNE: call for abstracts

From Mark Timmons, here is a call for abstracts for the Fourth Annual Arizona
Workshop in Normative Ethical Theory that will be held in Tucson, Arizona on
January 3-5, 2013. Abstracts are welcome in any area or on any topic in
normative ethical theory (to be distinguished as well as possible from
metaethics, political philosophy, and applied ethics).

Abstracts should be 2-3 double-spaced pages and are due no later than Monday June 4,
2012. Please send abstracts by email to Mark at mtimmons@u.arizona.edu.
Those who presented at the 2011 or 2012 workshops are not eligible for presenting at the 2013 workshop.
A program committee will evaluate the submissions and decisions will be finalized by early July.

Julia Annas (Arizona), Brad Hooker (Reading), and Shelly Kagan (Yale) are the 2013 keynote speakers.

Further information about the submission of abstracts and about the Workshop is
available at the Workshop website.

Enforcement Rights and Harm-Reduction

Imagine that you are walking home from the pub at night when two strangers suddenly pull out their guns clearly with the intention to kill you. Unbeknownst to you, there’s a vicious killer out in the area, and as it happens you fit the description of the mass murderer perfectly right down to every last detail.  These police officers have been given shoot to kill orders as several officers have already been killed. But, you don’t know that they are police officers – you just think that they are killers coming to get you. All you can think of is saving your own life. In a desperate attempt to do so, you hurl your heavy bag at one of the officer which hits him in the head and kills him. At the same time, the other officer fires and you die. Your only other options would have been to hurl the bag at the officer who ended up shooting you (in which he would have died but the officer you really killed would then have shot you), or to do nothing and take the bullet from both of the officers.

Have you done anything wrong? My intuition is that you haven’t. I think that the right to defend oneself also applies to cases where one is attacked by a far superior force. So, in this case too, you were perfectly entitled to defend yourself. In fact, most attacks where people have to defend themselves seem to be ones where the odds are heavily against the defender (the Stephen Lawrence murder here in the UK is a good example of this) given that the attackers are rarely stupid enough to attack targets who can defend themselves successfully. Yet, Peter Vallentyne’s recent theory of enforcement rights against non-culpable non-just intrusions has just the opposite consequence. He thinks that in these cases your only morally permissible option is to do nothing. This is why I think we should reject his theory and all other similar views that are based on harm reduction.

Ethical AutoCorrect

Computers and smartphones sometimes autocorrect what you type, so that your words are properly spelled. We know that this doesn't work perfectly. Suppose it did. Further, suppose that somehow there were also a perfect Ethical AutoCorrect, which if activated would alter any unethical action you were trying to perform into an ethical action. For example, if activated, and if extreme pacifism were true, then your attempt to switch the runaway trolley from the track with x people on it to the track with only x-1 people on it would fail. When you try to do what is indeed ethical, the Ethical AutoCorrect doesn't change a thing.

Two questions:  First, is such an Ethical AutoCorrect even an coherent idea? Or is there something about ethics such that the very idea of an Ethical AutoCorrect is confused? Second, if it is a coherent idea, and if it were a live option, should you use it?

Comparative Desert and the Bounds of Well-Being

Suppose, for simplicity, that the basis for moral desert is virtue and what’s deserved is well-being. According to the Ratio View of Comparative Desert, for two people to get what they comparatively deserve, the ratio of their levels of well-being must be the same as the ratio of their noncomparatively deserved levels of well-being. That is, if A noncomparatively deserves 10 units of well-being (A’s ‘peak’ is 10) and B noncomparatively deserves 20, they get what they comparatively deserve whenever B gets twice as much as A. So if A’s level is fixed at 15 (there’s no way to change it), B comparatively deserves 30.

This is an appealing view with an impressive pedigree (it is suggested by what Aristotle says about distributive justice, for example). But recently Shelly Kagan (2003, forthcoming) has presented seemingly devastating objections to it. I'll try out a straightforward response to them. It'll require that there is, at least, a lower bound to well-being.

Satisficing by Effort

[I'm never quite sure when it's appropriate to cross-post things from philosophyetc.net here, but Doug suggested that this post might be of broader interest, and I'd certainly welcome Souper feedback, so here goes!]

Satisficing Consequentialism aims to capture the intuitive idea that we're not morally obligated to do the best possible, we merely need to do "good enough" (though of course it remains better to do better!). Ben Bradley, in 'Against Satisficing Consequentialism', argues convincingly against forms of the view which introduce the baseline as some utility level n that we need to meet. Such views absurdly condone the act of gratuitously preventing boosts to utility over the baseline n. But I think there is a better form that satisficing consequentialism can take. Rather than employing a baseline utility level, a better way to "satisfice" is to introduce a level of maximum demanded effort below which one straightforwardly maximizes utility. That is:

(Effort-based Satisficing Consequentialism) An act is permissible iff it produces no less utility than any alternative action the agent could perform with up to X effort.

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:

Libertarianism and Paternalism

Previously I have argued here (and here) that the Self-Ownership views associated with left and right-libertarianism have difficulties stemming from their failure to adequately differentiate serious from unimportant property rights infringements. The self-ownership libertarian (the only kind of libertarian I am here discussing) tends to conclude that we enjoy very strong protection against paternalism or infringing our property rights for the sake of the greater good of others. They tend to reach these conclusions by supposing that our property rights provide strong (if not absolute) protection even against infringements that involve only small or trivial harm to the person whose rights are infringed. This presupposition is what licenses the inference that such actions are quite generally wrong without an investigation into the size of the harm that would be caused by the infringement.

But such powerful protections would make impermissible most pollution or fires as these things cross the border of other people’s property, e.g. their lungs, without permission. I argued earlier (following Nozick and Railton), that when we see this, we see that the above simple path from self-ownership to a vindication of traditional libertarian conclusions is unpromising. Thus the path from self-ownership to traditional libertarian conclusions needs to become more complicated if it is to be plausible.

One obvious way to respond to the challenge would be to distinguish between important property rights and relatively trivial ones and be willing to sell violations of the less important property rights relatively cheaply for social good. That is, the view might provide a theory of value that explains why some property rights are more significant than others by showing that some protect more valuable things and others protect only trivial things.

Post Survey Round Up

I’ve pasted the survey questions and results below. Note that not everyone saw the whole survey. Since the point of the survey was to test the intuitions of only those who accept that there are objective time-indexed obligations, only those who answered 'yes' to questions 1 and 2 were asked to answer questions 3-5. More specifically, I wanted to see whether those who accept that there are objective time-indexed obligations would also accept that a necessary condition for being obligated at t1 to do A at t2 is that there is some intention such that if the agent were to form that intention at t1 one would do A at t2.

A New Survey

I have a new survey that will test your moral intuitions. It should take no more than five minutes (probably less). Please consider taking it. You can take the survey by clicking here:

http://www.kwiksurveys.com?s=NIKEJN_70c5ab88

Later on, I'll write a post on what my intuitions are and why. Thanks in advance for your help.

Call for Abstracts: Third Annual Arizona Workshop on Normative Ethical Theory

The Third Annual Arizona Workshop on Normative Ethical Theory will be held in Tucson, Arizona on January 5-7, 2012.  Abstracts are welcome in any area or on any topic in normative ethical theory (to be distinguished as well as possible from metaethics and applied ethics).

Abstracts should be 2-3 double-spaced pages and are due no later than June 1, 2011. Please send abstracts by email to Mark Timmons, mtimmons@u.arizona.edu.  Those who presented at the 2010 workshop will not be eligible to present until 2013.