PEA Soup

Submission Deadline--Fourth Annual Metaethics Workshop, UW-Madison

The following is an announcement from Russ Shafer-Landau:

Dear Colleague,

I’m pleased to announce a call for abstracts for the Fourth Annual Metaethics Workshop, to be held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on September 7-9, 2007.  Gilbert Harman (Princeton) and Nicholas Sturgeon (Cornell) 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 2005 or 2006 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/2007/Metaethics_Workshop/ 

All questions about the workshop may be directed to me. Please see the contact information below.

I would greatly appreciate your forwarding this email to colleagues and/or graduate students 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   

Moller on Love and Death

Think of the person who loves you more than anyone else in this world does.  And now think about how that person would feel if you suddenly died.  Would he or she be utterly heartbroken?  Filled with despair?  Or would the person perhaps be deeply unhappy but somehow manage to make it through the next year or so? 

As it happens, there has been a great deal of  systematic psychological research on this topic, and the overwhelming preponderance of  data supports the conclusion that most people simply aren't that disturbed when their loved ones die.  People appear to be upset for a relatively short time  and then -- after that brief interval is over -- they feel more or less the same as they did before.  Thus, one recent study showed that people sometimes felt more depressed immediately after their loved ones died but that even two months after the death of their loved ones there was no  significant increase in depression. 

Psychologists sometimes suggest that we should be happy and inspired to find that people show such 'resilience' in the face of hardship.  They suggest that it is a good thing that people are able to get over their problems and simply move on. 

But in a forthcoming paper (titled, appropriately enough, 'Love and Death'), the philosopher Dan Moller argues for a more bittersweet conclusion.  Although there is surely something good about the fact that people are able to avoid sadness in these difficult straits, he claims that there is actually something to be regretted about our surprising resilience.  The problem, he suggests, is that our lack of emotional response shows a failure to properly appreciate the importance of those we care for most. 

I think his paper is fantastic, and I would encourage you all to read it... but whether you read it or not, I would love to hear your thoughts on the basic thesis.  Is there something of value in the despair and suffering we sometimes experience when bad things happen to those we love?  Even if no good consequences come from this feeling, might there be something of value in the feeling itself? 

Global Justice conference at Rutgers

The Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy will be hosting a one day conference on global justice this coming May 5th at the Rutgers School of Law-Camden. Participants include Charles Beitz, A. J. Julius, Ethan Kapstein, George Letsas, Stephen Macedo, Jamie Mayerfeld, Mathias Risse, and Gerardo Vildostegui. (This would be utterly shameless self-promotion if I were participating; as it is, its just shameless self-promotion.) The schedule as well as registration details are here: http://www.lawandphil.rutgers.edu/theupconferences.html. Hope to see some PEA brains there!

How many doctoral programs do we need?

I'd like to raise what I imagine may be a touchy subject but one worth the attention of those in the philosophy profession: We occasionally hear of efforts to shut down undergraduate philosophy degree programs, but rarely do we hear of efforts to shut down Ph.D. granting philosophy programs. In fact, my own perception is that one or two new philosophy doctoral programs open annually.  My question is whether this growth in doctoral programs is healthy, or whether we might conclude that the profession would be healthier with fewer such programs.

Agent-relative positive duties

A lot of moral theorists are sceptics about Act Consequentialism (AC). For example, some of these sceptics think that we need to qualify AC with the following two agent-relative elements: (i) “deontological constraints”, which forbid us to do certain horrible acts even if those horrible acts would make the world as a whole a slightly better place; and (ii) “agent-relative prerogatives”, which allow us sometimes to pursue our own personal projects or commitments even if we thereby fail to make the world as a whole as good a place as we could have done. However, a lot of these sceptics think that AC gets it exactly right about our positive duties of beneficence, such as our duties to help those who are in need.

This seems to me a half-hearted compromise. Those who reject AC, I suggest, should reject it root and branch. So I am drawn towards a more thoroughgoing nonconsequentialism, according to which absolutely no moral duties – indeed, absolutely no reasons for action at all – are agent-neutral in the way that AC thinks of our moral duties as being. On this approach, then, the moral duty to help those in need would not just consist in morality’s giving me the aim that those who are in need are helped. It would consist in morality’s giving me the aim that I play a role in helping those who are in need. In that sense, this approach makes this duty agent-relative. 

Suppose that from an impersonal, agent-neutral point of view the world as a whole will be equally good whether I play a role in helping those who are in need or not. (Suppose that if I don’t help those in need, others will step up and do the helping instead of me, etc.) According to AC, in this situation, I have no compelling moral reason to help, since the world as a whole will be equally good whether I do any helping or not. Indeed, from a moral point of view, I should be quite indifferent between my helping and my not helping. According to an agent-relative interpretation of the duty to help, on the other hand, I should not be indifferent. I should have a definite preference for the state of affairs in which I play a role in helping those who are in need, even if the world as a whole is not a better place as a result.

I haven’t begun to work this idea out in detail, but I suspect that according to the most plausible way of developing this more thoroughgoing nonconsequentialist approach, reasons for action are always reasons for the agent to put herself into the right sort of relationship with the intrinsic values that are at stake in her situation – where the “right sort of relationship with these intrinsic values” may be a non-harming relationship, or a protective relationship, or a creative relationship, but never just the simple relationship of “promoting” that is favoured by AC.

Welcome Ralph Wedgwood

We are pleased to announce that Ralph Wedgwood has accepted our invitation to blog here at PEA Soup.  Ralph is CUF Lecturer   in Philosophy, and Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, Merton   College, Oxford.  It's great to have you aboard, Ralph!

Scanlon on Reasons, Desires, and Motivation

Here’s a quote from Scanlon:

A rational person who judges that there to be sufficient grounds for believing that P normally has that belief, and this judgment is normally sufficient explanation for so believing. There is no need to appeal to some further source of motivation such as “wanting to believe.” (Scanlon 1998, 33)

Immediately following this quote, Scanlon goes on to say that the same is true of intending to do x. We don’t need to appeal to a desire to explain why someone who judged that there was sufficient grounds for intending to do x intended to do x.