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.

Workshop: Good Life: Theory and Practice

A group of our PhD students here at Birmingham asked me to email details of a workshop on the conceptions of a good life which they are organising here in June. This should be of interest for graduate students following this blog as there is also a call for abstracts for them included. Here's the announcement:

Call for abstracts and registration

Workshop at the University of Birmingham, Department of Philosophy
The Good Life: Theory and Practice
8th June 2012

Confirmed speakers
Beverley Clack (Professor in the Philosophy of Religion, Oxford Brookes University)
Chris Megone (Professor of Interdisciplinary Applied Ethics, University of Leeds)
Mozaffar Qizilbash (Professor of Economics, University of York)
Stephen Wilkinson (Professor of Bioethics, Keele University)
James Wilson (Lecturer in Philosophy and Health, University College London)

Conference: 'Measures of Subjective Well-being for Public Policy: Philosophical Perspectives'

Sam Wren-Lewis is organizing a conference on subjective well-being and public policy at Leeds in July that might be of interest to Peasoupers (indeed, several of us are speaking there). Here's the official announcement:

Conference:  'Measures of Subjective Well-being for Public Policy: Philosophical Perspectives'

Registration now open.

Keynote Speakers:

• Richard Layard
• Peter Railton
• Valerie Tiberius
• Dan Haybron

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Justin Clarke-Doane’s “Morality and Mathematics: The Evolutionary Challenge” with commentary by Matthew Braddock, Andreas Mogensen, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

We are pleased to present the next installment of Ethics at PEA Soup. Our featured article this time around is Justin Clarke-Doane’s “Morality and Mathematics: The Evolutionary Challenge,” which is available here. We are very grateful to Matthew Braddock, Andreas Mogensen, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong for kicking off the discussion with the following thought-provoking post (see below the fold). Questions and comments about either Clarke-Doane’s article or the post by Braddock et al. are most welcome.

Welcome Jonathan Way!

I'm pleased to welcome aboard Jonathan Way, a Lecturer at the University of Southampton, as a contributor to PEA Soup.  Jonathan has published several articles on practical rationality, including a forthcoming piece in Ethics.  Great to have you here, Jonathan!

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Justin Clarke-Doane’s “Morality and Mathematics: The Evolutionary Challenge”

Moving to the Front: We are pleased to announce the next installment of our partnership with Ethics, where we host a discussion of one article from each issue of the journal, and the journal makes the article freely available for the period of our discussion. 

Our next featured article is Justin Clarke-Doane’s “Morality and Mathematics: The Evolutionary Challenge” (Volume 122, issue 2). The open-access article is now freely available.  We are also very grateful that Matthew Braddock, Andreas Mogensen, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong have agreed to provide a post that will kick off the discussion. Their post will appear, and discussion will begin, on Friday, March 23, 2012. We invite everyone interested to participate.

Strawson 50th Love Fest

In honor of my favorite philosophical article, I'm pleased to pass on the following announcement from Neal Tognazzini:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of P. F. Strawson's 'Freedom and Resentment'. In honor of its remarkable influence over the past half-century, the philosophy department at The College of William & Mary is hosting a two-day conference this fall, *Responsibility & Relationships*, that will explore Strawsonian themes in contemporary moral philosophy, psychology, and the law, including new work on blame, punishment, and the moral emotions. And you're all invited.

The website for the conference is here.

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.

Welcome, William J. FitzPatrick!

We are pleased to announce that William J. FitzPatrick has accepted our invitation to become a contributor here at PEA Soup. Bill is Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of Rochester. One of his primary research interests lies with defending a robust form of ethical realism that involves a non-naturalistic metaphysics of ethical facts and properties as well as an external reasons theory that allows for the categoricity of moral requirements. He is also interested in resisting consequentialism, particularly through defenses of the Doctrine of Double Effect against various recent objections. Welcome aboard, Bill!

Call on the New York Times to publish an obituary for Ruth Marcus

Michael Della Rocca has given me permission to post this request, which he sent to a number of Marcus-admirers and friends, to PEA Soup.

 

Dear Friends and admirers of Ruth Marcus,

Forgive the mass e-mailing, any duplications, or omissions.  As you
know, Ruth Marcus died over two weeks ago and an obituary has yet to
appear in the New York Times.  This failure to recognize one of the most
prominent and pioneering philosophers of the last 60 years is
appalling.  There have been multiple communications between Yale and
also NYU (Ruth's undergraduate alma mater) with the obituary editors at
the Times.  The Times has received a wealth of information from these
sources and still no obituary.  I fear that they have decided or are in
the process of deciding that Ruth is not a significant enough figure to
warrant the recognition of an obituary in the Times.  Don't get me
started on this -- it's simply outrageous.  Don Garrett, Diana Raffman
and I  have sent to the Times' obituary editors a strongly worded
message -- see below.  If you would like to endorse the sentiments in
this message please let me know and we will pass on this information to
the Times.  I plan to be in touch with them again soon.  Or if you would
like to write a message of your own to the Times that would be great.
The obituary editors are Bill McDonald<wmcdon@nytimes.com>   and Jack
Kadden<kadden@nytimes.com>.

If there are other philosophers you know of who might be interested in
helping out here, please feel free to forward this message and to
encourage them to be in touch with me or Diana or Don.

Don, Diana, and I will be in touch directly with the APA leadership
about this matter so that they may contact the Times too.

best,
Michael (and Diana and Don)

Below the fold is the message that was sent yesterday to the Obituary editors at the Times: