PEA Soup

Featured Philosopher: Tom Hurka (Part 1)

Hello all.  It's my supreme pleasure to introduce our inaugural featured philosopher: Tom Hurka!  I'm especially pleased because Tom has agreed to do not one but TWO posts on his current thinking.  His first starts below the fold.  (Second to follow on Friday.)

Tom certainly needs no introduction, but just a cursory glance at his body of work shows that he's clearly one of the top moral philosophers of our time.  His work on value theory, including Perfectionism; Virtue, Vice, and Value; and The Best Things in Life have certainly influenced the thinking of countless Soupers and others, including myself.  I'm tempted to say a lot more, but I don't want to dilute his post with my blathering.  So, without further ado, I'm very happy to introduce our first featured philosopher, and one of my philosophical heroes: Tom Hurka.

-dd

Post Survey Roundup

So the results are in. 63% of the respondents said that they would have most reason to refrain from making such significant sacrifices. 62% said that they would not be morally required to make such significant sacrifices. And 77% denied that the fact that the climate disaster would have been averted had, contrary to fact, everyone (or even just nearly everyone) been willing to make the significant sacrifices required to drastically reduce their carbon footprints constitutes a reason for them to make these sacrifices that is strong enough to outweigh the reasons that they have to avoid doing that which would be significantly detrimental to how they and their families fare.

One More Related Survey

This concerns the same prompt: Here it is: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MF5WX2Y

Intuitions Wanted

Please take the survey here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MS5MLCJ

UPDATE: And this one too: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MF5WX2Y

If you want a preview before deciding whether to take the survey, see below the fold.

Rule-Based Ethical Theories and Counter-Cultures

There are many ethical theories that think of right and wrong in terms of what consequences the general adoption of moral principles would have. Contractualists think of what consequences the principles would have for individual lives; rule-consequentialists think of what consequences they  would have for the aggregate wellbeing and other general values; Kantians think of the consequences which the principles would have for the effectiveness of our subjective principles of action; and so on. It’s now generally accepted that we shouldn’t compare the moral codes at universal, 100% level of acceptance. This is because we want to also generate principles for self-improvement, dealing with moral disagreements, punishment, and so on. It is an interesting problem at what lower level of social acceptance should we compare the principle. But, here I am just going to assume that there is some such level n% where n is less than 100 at which it makes sense to compare the consequences of different moral codes. It has become evident that this idea leads to further problems which the defenders of these theories haven’t really tackled yet. These problems have surfaced in various discussions I’ve had with many people but they have also been formulated very forcefully in the last section of Holly Smith’s wonderful 2010 Utilitas paper “Measuring the Consequences of Rules”. Here I want to introduce the problem and also three ways of trying to respond to it. I’m still sceptical about these answers but I would like to hear other people’s opinions about and also whether there might be other solutions.

Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism Bleg

Ben Eggleston and I are putting the final touches on the manuscript for The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism, forthcoming from... well, you know. Now that most of the writing and editing is done, we're facing the real hurdle to getting a book published... the marketing questionnaire. One question on this questionnaire asks about courses/modules in which the volume might be used. I'm writing to ask if any SOUPers can volunteer names and numbers of undergraduate or graduate courses/modules at their universities in which this volume might be assigned in full or in part, as either a required or a recommended reading.

Weighing Reasons in Princeton - November 30 to December 1

The program for the Princeton conference on the topic of Weighing Reasons put together by Errol Lord and Barry Maguire has now been finalized.  The program is below the fold:

No Pro Tanto Duty to Keep A Promise

I have a very short argument to the effect that the promising-relevant pro tanto moral obligation is not a pro tanto moral obligation to keep one's promises but, rather, a pro tanto moral obligation to not break one's promises.

[The argument crucially depends on the notion of a conditional release from a promise. Whereas an unconditional release (or a simple release) is a promisee's saying to a promisor something like "You don't have to phi", where phi-ing is something the promisor had promised the promisee to do, a conditional release is a promisee's saying to a promisor something like "If C, then you don't have to phi". I take it that both simple and conditional releases are altogether ordinary moral phenomena.]

Here's the argument: Suppose that on Monday A says to B "I promise to lend you my recording of Don Giovanni on Wednesday" and on Tuesday, B says to A "If you let me hold onto this copy of Cosi fan Tutte which you lent me the other day and were planning to take back today, then you don't have to lend me your Don Giovanni tomorrow." In this case, it seems that the following two courses of action are both permissible: (1) A takes back his Cosi fan Tutte on Tuesday and on Wednesday lends B his Don Giovanni, and (2) A does not take back his Cosi fan Tutte and on Wednesday does not lend B his Don Giovanni. However, option (1) involves the keeping of a promise and the breaking of no promises and option (2) involves neither the keeping nor the breaking of any promises. If there were a pro tanto moral obligation to keep a promise, as opposed to merely not breaking one, in this case (1) should be obligatory and (2) impermissible. If, on the other hand, the only promising-relevant pro tanto moral obligation were to not break one's promises, then, as neither involves the breaking of a promise, both courses of action would be permissible, which, I contend, is in fact the case. 

Weighing Reasons in Princeton in late Fall (Workshop w CFP)

Errol Lord and Barry Maguire are organizing a two day workshop (Nov. 30- Dec. 1) dedicated to developing/criticizing systematic accounts of weighing reasons.

Invited Speakers: Ruth Chang (Rutgers), Stephen Darwall (Yale), John Horty (Maryland), Stephen Kearns (Florida State) & Daniel Star (Boston University), Joseph Raz (Oxford/Columbia), T.M. Scanlon (Harvard)  There is also a call for papers which are due by September 15th.  There's a link to the workshop website below the fold.

The 4th annual Arizona Workshop in Normative Ethics

The program is available from the workshop’s website:  http://ethics.arizona.edu/program.html.

Registration is free and open to all. You may register by emailing Mark Timmons -- see the workshop's website for his email address. Timmons will send periodic updates to those who register.