PEA Soup

Recruiting Philosophy Majors

At the "start of the year" college meeting last week our dean showed some Powerpoint slides listing the number of majors in each department over the last few years.  The point was to illustrate how the college is growing across the board.  Philosophy wasn't exactly a good illustration of his point, however.  In F08, the latest year for which he had data, we had only 39 majors.  That was more than in F03, but not only is it a small number in absolute terms, it is less than in the prior two years.  Next year's number should be slightly higher, and I think that we may not be getting credit for a few double majors.  Still, we don't have the number of majors that we should have, and among other problems this means that important and worthwhile courses are being canceled for lack of enrollment---theory of knowledge and philosophy of natural science being two recent examples.  As department chair, I need to do something to help the department recruit more majors.  But what?

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"?

Mill's Theory of Value

In the comments on Jussi's thread, a side discussion developed about Mill's theory of value.  Dale Dorsey indicated that he has concluded that Mill is not a hedonist.  I'm inclined to defend the claim that he is.  I'm not prepared to defend hedonism, and so I think that considerations of charity favor ascribing a different view to him, but I think the textual evidence is strong enough that we just have to say that Mill got this one wrong.  Of course, the first piece of evidence for me to cite is the following passage from Utilitarianism II2: