PEA Soup

Have another PEAR!

I really liked BEARS, though it seems to be extinct now.  Uriah and Josh contributed a few juicy PEARs some weeks ago.  I like this idea and think we should do more Pea-Soup Electronic Article Reviews.

William Alston's essay, "Moral Attitudes and Moral Judgments" (Nous 2:1 (1968), 1-23) is fairly old by the standards of work in metaethics, but one of the ideas he discusses has been gaining some recent popularity, and I've never seen his argument discussed.  He argues that the most plausible attempt to analyze moral judgment along expressivist lines leads to a dilemma for expressivists: the analysis is either circular, or the expressivist has to give up non-cognitivism.

What a theory of political obligation should explain

A useful technique in thinking about a philosophical issue is to try to identify what we "pre-theoretically" believe about the subject at hand and see if any theory can account for these beliefs.  If no theory can, then among our options are to discard one or more of these beliefs and see which theory survives, or to become "skeptics" about the subject at hand.

In teaching political philosophy recently, I found this technique valuable as a way of evaluating competing theories of political obligation, i.e., theories about why we ought to support the state by obeying its laws, etc. I'd be curious to know if the pre-theoretical beliefs enumerated below accurately capture our (your) pre-theoretical understanding of our obligations to the state, and if so, whether any theory could actually vindicate all these beliefs.

P.F. Strawson Obituary

For those of you who haven't heard yet, Sir Peter Strawson died on Monday.  He was 86.   Relative to the fields I work in these days (free will and agency generally), I can't think of a more masterful philosophical essay than "Freedom and Resentment."  Here is the link to a detailed and informative obituary.

Zangwill against Ethical Response-Dependent Realism

According to Ethical Response-Dependent Realism (ERDR), moral properties are response-dependent: for something to instantiate a moral property is for it to be disposed to elicit the right kind of response in the right kind of respondent. Most mornings I like ERDR. I like it mostly because it allows us to combine cognitivism and internalism. If a moral commitment is the cognizing of a disposition to elicit a motivational response in me, then both cognitivism and internalism are true of moral commitments.

Sadly, I just read a very interesting argument by Nick Zangwill against ERDR (in Erkenntnis 59: 285-290, 2003). The argument is that non-vacuous versions of ERDR are incompatible with the existence of action on the motive of duty. The argument is based on three ideas:

(DUTY)        There is such a thing as acting on the motive of duty – doing the right thing for its own sake

(KNOWN)       The essence of moral properties either is (or at least could be) known by us.

(TRY)           If an agent A knows that E is the essence of properties P, then in trying to instantiate P, A tries to instantiate E.

Side note: Zangwill construes the “is” version of KNOWN as a commitment of analytic ERDR, according to which the response-dependence is part of the very concept of a moral property, and the “could be” version as a commitment of synthetic ERDR, according to which the response-dependence is the unobvious underlying nature of a moral property.

Zangwill’s argument can be formulated as a reductio. Assume for reductio that ERDR is true. The conjunction of ERDR and KNOWN entails the following:

1)      Moral properties’ being dispositions to elicit the right responses in the right respondents either is (or at least could be) known by us.

The conjunction of 1 and TRY entails:

2)      In trying to instantiate moral properties, we try to instantiate a disposition to elicit the right responses in the right respondents (or at least would upon discovering that moral properties are response-dependent).

However, acting on the motive of duty just means that one acts with disregard for the responses one’s action might elicit. That is, DUTY entails this:

3)      We sometimes try to instantiate moral properties but do not try to instantiate any responses in any respondents (and would not try to instantiate any responses in any respondents upon discovering that moral properties are response-dependent).

It’s important to realize that giving up on 3 means giving up on the possibility of acting purely on the motive of duty.

The problem is that 2 entails the negation of 3:

4)      We never try to instantiate moral properties without trying to instantiate any responses in any respondents (or at least would never so try upon discovering that moral properties are response-dependent).

Thus we reach an absurdity: the contradiction between 3 and 4.

I don’t know if there’s been discussion of this argument in the literature, but it seems pretty plausible on the face of it. The weakest links are probably those bridge principles that do not pertain to the meta-ethical substance of the argument, notably TRY. Suppose I try to buy gold. Is it true that I am thereby trying to buy atomic element 79? Perhaps the intensionality of trying is enough to secure that something like TRY is false. At any rate, that would be my first reaction in defending ERDR.

Welcome Mike Almeida!

Mike Almeida has kindly accepted our invitation to become the latest contributor to PEA Soup.  Mike is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he specializes in ethics, and has regularly commented on posts here at PEA Soup.   Welcome, Mike!  We're glad to have you aboard.

3rd Annual Metaethics Workshop--Call for Abstracts

Russ Shafer-Landau has just emailed the following Call for Abstracts for the 3rd Annual Metaethics Workshop.  I attended the first workshop, but wasn't able to attend last year's.  Believe me, I won't miss this year's.  It is important to note that this year's workshop falls on a football weekend in Madison, so hotel rooms will likely be unavailable after August 14th.
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Dear Colleague,

I’m pleased to announce a call for abstracts for the third annual Metaethics Workshop, to be held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on September 15-17, 2006. David Brink (UC-San Diego) and Geoff Sayre-McCord (UNC-Chapel Hill)  will be the keynote speakers. Abstracts (of 2-3 double-spaced pages) of papers in any area of metaethics are due by MAY 1. There is a limit of one submission per person. Speakers in the 2004 or 2005 workshop are not eligible to submit abstracts for this year’s event. A program committee will evaluate submissions and make decisions by early June.

Information on submitting an abstract, plus much other relevant information about the workshop, can be obtained at the workshop website: http://philosophy.wisc.edu/info/2006 Metaethics Workshop.htm

All questions about the workshop may be directed to me. . . .

I would greatly appreciate your forwarding this email to colleagues in your department, and to any other philosophers you believe might be interested in participating in the workshop.

Thanks very much, and hope to see you in Madison this autumn.

All good wishes,

Russ Shafer-Landau