PEA Soup

Moral Fictionalism

In their recent “Moral Fictionalism vs. The Rest,” (Australasian J. Phil. 83 (Sept. 2005), 307-330), Daniel Nolan, Greg Restall, and Caroline West do a very illuminating job of characterizing moral fictionalism, laying out its advantages, and opening up some challenges facing the view.

With standard forms of non-realism, moral fictionalism [MF] holds that all of the claims in first-order moral discourse, discourse offering moral judgments and the like (what the authors call “positive” moral claims), are false. First-order moral claims are false because, on the surface anyway, they purport to describe some moral reality with too much ontological baggage. But, for MF, these are useful fictions, so, contrary to the eliminativism of, say, error theory, we should keep realism-committed, erroneous moral claims.

MF is one of those have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too positions: get all the ways in which moral realism can accommodate ordinary moral discourse without committing to realism’s ontology. But MF is not, I think, as advantageous as Nolan, Restall, and West think it is.

Welcome Michael Huemer, Newest PEA Brain

We are happy to announce that  Michael Huemer has accepted our invitation to become the newest PEA Brain!   Mike is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he specializes in ethics, metaethics, and epistemology.  Welcome, Mike!  We're looking forward to your posts.

Pacific APA Ethics-Related Talks

Below the fold are most of the ethics-related sessions at the upcoming Pacific Division APA.  It's surprising how many more ethics-related sessions there are at the Pacific than at December's Eastern meeting.  If I've missed any session that you think should be added to the list, please feel free to add it in the comment section.

Click here for a copy of the list in text (.rtf)  format.

Click here for the full meeting program.

Online Philosophy Conference: deadline extended

The deadline for submitting papers to the Online Philosophy Conference, which looks like it will be an exciting electronic event, has been extended to January 31. (I'm guessing there's still a need for commentators as well.)
 

An Argument Against the Rational Care Theory of Welfare

Stephen Darwall has advanced the rational care theory of welfare, a metaethical thesis about the meaning of welfare judgments.  Somewhat informally, here’s the view:

RCTW: to say that some state of affairs x would be good for someone is to say that anyone who cares for that person should desire that x occur for his sake; to say that some state of affairs x would be bad for someone is to say that anyone who cares for that person should desire that x not occur for his sake.

On this view, it’s not that you should desire what’s good for those you care about because it’s  good for them; rather, it’s good for them in virtue of the fact that you should desire it.  The ‘should’ here is the ‘should’ of rationality, as in “appropriateness.”  To say you should desire the thing is to say that it is appropriate for you to do so, that the thing merits, or calls for, your desiring it.

Here's an argument against RCTW, based on Parfit's case My Past or Future Operations.

Lucretius’ Symmetry Argument (LSA):

1. My previous pre-vital nonexistence is not, and was not, bad for me.

2. My previous pre-vital nonexistence is relevantly similar to my forthcoming post-mortem nonexistence—that is, just as it is true to say that my going out of existence sooner than I might have means that I will end up having done less, having experienced less, having accomplished less, etc. than I otherwise would have, so it is also true to say that my coming into existence later than I might have means that I will end up having done less, having experienced less, having accomplished less, etc. than I otherwise would have. 

3. Therefore, my forthcoming post-mortem nonexistence is not, and will not be, bad for me.

This argument challenges the deprivation account of the badness of death, the view that holds that death is not intrinsically bad (as, say, suffering is) but is extrinsically bad, for it deprives us of the goods of life. The challenge arises, because it seems that my pre-vital and post-mortem non-existences are symmetrical with respect to depriving me of the goods of life.

Carnivores on the Run

It’s holiday time, and lots of good food is being ingested, so I figured this might be a good opportunity to explore an issue that’s caused me significant moral squirming over the past several years.  I’m a carnivore.  Yes, I said it.  But I’m finding there to be less and less of a rational justification for this position.  (That’s probably an inaccurate way of putting it, for it may be that there just is no rational justification for it, and never has been, in which case the scalar dimension of this comment refers literally to the degree of scales that have fallen from my eyes, rather than to the degree of justification itself.)  Nevertheless, I also find myself utterly unmotivated to change my ways.  And I know I’m not alone here (I know for a fact that there’s at least one other PEA brain, for example, who is in the same situation).  So what’s going on?