PEA Soup

SLACRR 3 - Program

Here are the main speakers at the next St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality, May 20-22, 2012.

Keynote:  Jonathan Dancy (Texas/Reading), "More Right than Wrong"

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:

SLACRR 2 Program

St. Louis Annual Conference on Reason and Rationality
UM-St. Louis
May 22-24, 2011
Moonrise Hotel

The Department of Philosophy at UM-St. Louis is pleased to announce the program for SLACRR 2.  PEA Soupers on this year's program include Jamie Dreier (Keynote), Brad Cokelet, Jussi Suikkanen, Mark van Roojen, and Robert N. Johnson.  There is no fee to attend SLACRR, but since space is limited, we ask that you register, which you can do simply by emailing John Brunero or Eric Wiland at SLACRR@gmail.com.  More information about the conference is available at  http://www.umsl.edu/~slacrr/ 
 
The full program is below the break --->

CFP: Reasons of Love, Leuven

CALL FOR PAPERS AND CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT

Reasons of Love
International Conference
Institute of Philosophy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
30 May-1 June 2011

This conference’s title is ambiguous on purpose. The relationship between
love and reasons for action is highly interesting and complicated. It is
not clear how love is related to reasons. Love might be a response to
certain normative reasons, since it seems fitting to love certain objects.
However, love also seems to create reasons and not to be a response to
certain appropriate reasons. Love’s relationship to morality is also
complex. It is not clear how the normative reasons for acting morally are
related to the reasons of love. It is sometimes argued that love is not a
virtue because the reasons for acting morally are not the same as the
reasons for acting lovingly. But the notion of ‘unprincipled virtue’ seems
to make room for love as a motive of morally praiseworthy actions.

This conference seeks to provide an opportunity to discuss these issues.
Related questions are the following: Do ‘the reasons of love’ constitute a
genuine, distinctive category of reasons?  Are different kinds of love
related to different kinds of reasons? What are the requirements of love,
as opposed to the requirements of duty? Are love’s reasons rational or non-
rational? Can love require to act immorally? If so, are love’s
requirements more or less important than those of morality? Is an action
out of love more praiseworthy than an action done out of a sense of duty?
Are there normative reasons for acting lovingly and to what extent do they
justify partiality? How are we to understand ‘acting lovingly’?

Keynote speakers:
Diane Jeske (Iowa), Michael Smith (Princeton) and R. Jay Wallace (Berkeley)

CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite abstract submissions on any issue related to the main topic as
stated above.  Graduate students are encouraged to participate.

The deadline for submission is December 1, 2010. Notification of
acceptance will be sent by January 20, 2011. Abstracts of 1500-2000 words
should be sent to Esther.Kroeker@hiw.kuleuven.be  and
Katrien.Schaubroeck@hiw.kuleuven.be.

At the conference 40 minute slots will be available for presentation,
followed by 20 minutes of discussion.

A selection of papers will be submitted to Philosophical Explorations for
publication.

Conference organizers:
Esther Kroeker, Katrien Schaubroeck, Stefaan E. Cuypers, Willem Lemmens

SLACRR program

St. Louis Annual Conference on Reason and Rationality

UM-St. Louis

May 23-25, 2010

Moonrise Hotel

The Department of Philosophy at UM-St. Louis is pleased to announce the first St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality (SLACRR), which will take place May 23-25, 2010.  Information about the conference is available on our website: http://www.umsl.edu/~slacrr/  

Our keynote address will be given by Michael Bratman, and we'll have talks by Mark Schroeder, Agnes Callard, David McNaughton & Piers Rawling, Michael Titelbaum, Ruth Chang, Anton Ford, Eric Marcus, Stephen Kearns & Daniel Star, Garrett Cullity and Paul Weirich. 

 
There is no fee to attend SLACRR, but since space is limited, we ask that you register, which you can do simply by emailing John Brunero or Eric Wiland at SLACRR@gmail.com

Commonsense Consequentialism: A Bleg for Comments

Currently, I’m working on a book entitled Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality. (Click on the link to be taken to a web site where you can download individual chapters.) The book is on morality, rationality, and the interconnections between the two. In it, I defend a version of consequentialism that both comports with our commonsense moral intuitions and shares with other consequentialist theories the same compelling teleological conception of practical reasons. I have a complete draft of the book finished, but I’m still in the process of revising it. I have promised to submit it by the end of this coming January. I would be very grateful, then, to those who have the time to read it (or any portion of it) and give me comments before then, as this would be of tremendous help to me in revising it. Comments, questions, and/or criticisms can be posted here or sent to me at douglas.portmore@asu.edu. Below the fold, I include the table of comments followed by a brief synopsis of each chapter.

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.

Reasons not to intend

The distinction between the 'right' and 'wrong' kind of reasons is taken to play at least three important roles: 'right' kind but not 'wrong' kinds of reasons contribute to standards of correctness, and in the case of reasons for attitudes, 'right' kind but not 'wrong' kinds of reasons can serve to make attitudes rational, and exhibit at least a strong asymmetry, in that it is at least substantially easier to believe or intend for the 'right' kinds of reasons, if not outright impossible to believe or intend for the 'wrong' kind.

Toxin-puzzle style considerations often lead philosophers to endorse the following thesis:

R is a RK-reason to intend to do A iff R is a reason to do A. 

This is because it seems difficult, if not impossible to intend to drink the toxin directly for the reason that so intending will result in a reward, and moreover that believing that so intending will result in a reward doesn't make intending to drink it rational, but only makes acting to get oneself to have that intention rational - corresponding to at least two of the earmarks of a 'wrong'-kind reason.

Proponents of the so-called 'state-given/object-given' distinction appear to go further than this, and claim that all RK-reasons which bear on intention are reasons for or against the object of that intention.

The Paper Towel Dispenser Puzzle

Let me be the first PEA Souper to follow the blogging trend of linking to FAILBlog, and direct you to this real-life instance of the toxin puzzle.

Bird-in-Hand Satisficing vs. Self-Sacrificing Satisficing

Consider absolute-level satisficing consequentialism:

ALSC: “There is a number, n, such that: An act is morally right iff either (i) it has a utility of at least n, or (ii) it maximizes utility” (Bradley 2006, 101).

ALSC, like many other versions of satisficing consequentialism, permits agents to go out of their way to prevent some good state of affairs from coming about and for absolutely no good reason. To illustrate, consider the following scenario: