PEA Soup

Moral Realism Discussion at TAR?

I thought I might direct people's attention to Brian Weatherson's blog, Thoughts, Arguments and Rants, where the journal Philosophy Compass is trying out a new experiment: discussion forums for their recently published articles. I'm pleased that they've chosen my survey paper on the moral realism debate as one of three articles for this experiment. They've made access to the article free for this purpose. So far it seems that the experiment isn't meeting with much success.

Because I Have To

One venerable objection against the principle that all motivation derives from desire points to the motive of duty, or practical necessity, as phenomenological evidence of its falsity. Supposedly, the experience of doing something because you have to (or, per Kant, the experience of being able to do something because you have to) is qualitatively distinct from the experience of doing something motivated by desire.

I think, however, that this phenomenological character of the motive of duty can be explained in a way fully compatible with the Motivation-by-Desire Principle. Here I'll try to explain how. In part, what I'm looking for from this post (other than the usual insightful criticism from fellow Pea-Soupers) is a sense of whether this project is interesting enough to spend any time on.

Pragmatics of 'Ought'

In my post on the semantics of 'ought', I intimated that my end-relational analysis of 'ought' could also handle categorical uses, but tried to bracket that claim and those uses out of the conversation. Kris has invited me to explain, however, and so here I am pasting the crucial parts of my paper. The strategy is fundamentally the same as the one I have laid out in my JoE and PI papers.