PEA Soup

The Proto-Frege-Geach Problem

When I first met Jonathan Dancy three years ago, I remember him mentioning the early emotivist papers in Analysis. One night year and a half ago, I was working at the library and things weren’t really going anywhere so I thought I’d check those out. I recall finding interesting things and thinking about writing something about them. Didn’t happen. I got the same idea when I was at UNC this year, but it turned out that they didn’t have the first issues of Analysis at the library. So, when I got back toEngland, I thought I’d check those papers again. To my horror, those journals were not there anymore. Thankfully, the librarians were friendly enough to get them from the cellars. Here’s some things that got my attention long time ago.

Teaching metaethics to undergraduates

Greetings, all.  Sorry that my first official post will be so mundane, but here goes.  I'll be teaching an upper-level undergraduate course in metaethics for the first time this fall.  I'm wondering if anyone who has taught metaethics at this level can recommend an anthology to use.  Many of the big anthologies and overviews of the field I've looked at seem pitched a bit high for undergraduates.  I  may end up scrapping the book idea altogether, but it would be nice to know if anyone's had particular success with a collection.  And while we're at it, if you've got favorite articles for teaching metaethics to undergraduates, I'll happily take those recommendations as well.  Thanks.

Call for Papers - BSET 2008

CALL FOR PAPERS
THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR ETHICAL THEORY
2008 CONFERENCE

University of Edinburgh, UK

14-16th July 2008

Invited Speakers: Barbara Herman (UCLA), Wlodek Rabinowicz (Lund)

Papers are invited for the annual conference of the British Society for Ethical
Theory, to be held at the University of Edinburgh. The subject area is open
within metaethics and normative ethics. Papers on topics in applied ethics or
the history of ethics may also be considered provided they are also of wider
theoretical interest.

Papers, which should be unpublished at the time of submission, should be in
English, no longer than 6500 words, readable in at most 45 minutes and in a
form suitable for blind review. Please send your submission electronically, and
include an abstract, as well as your full name, address and academic
affiliation. Those who submitted papers for our previous conferences -
successfully or otherwise - are welcome to submit again (though not of course
the same papers!).

Please tell us if you are a postgraduate student: submissions from
postgraduates
are encouraged as our aim is that some such should be represented at the
conference.

Selected conference papers will be published in the journal “Ethical Theory and
Moral Practice”. Please make clear in any covering letter whether you wish your
paper to be considered for publication here as well as for the conference
programme.

The deadline for submissions is 7th December, 2007.

Papers and accompanying particulars should be emailed to Dr. Elinor Mason:

[email protected]

Note that ONLY electronic submissions will be accepted.

Incoherentism

File this under "meta-meta-ethics"

Don Loeb and Michael Gill currently defend a 'variability thesis', the view that ordinary moral thought and language contains both cognitivist and non-cognitivist elements.

Agency Conference

PEA Soup readers may be interested in this conference on Agency. 

Agency at the Intersection   

We are pleased to announce the 2007 Conference on Agency and Responsibility, to be held at Indiana University, Bloomington on September 13-15, 2007.

Shoemaker on Moral Responsibilty and Moral Ignorance

It is often  supposed that people are not morally responsible for their behavior when that behavior is the product of non-culpable ignorance, but the issue becomes considerably more complex when the ignorance in question is concerned only with moral truths.  Suppose that an agent knows all of the relevant non-moral facts but simply fails to know the moral truths that would allow her to figure out that a particular action is wrong.  Is she morally responsible for her action? 

Unfortunately for those who think that this question admits of an easy answer, our own David Shoemaker has just conducted a dazzling experimental study that raises some very interesting and difficult new philosophical issues here. 

First, he presented subjects with a case modeled on Susan Wolf's story of JoJo:

JoJo is the favorite son of Jo the First, an evil and sadistic dictator of a small, undeveloped country, entirely cut off from the outside world. Because of his father’s special feelings for the boy, JoJo is given a special education and is allowed to accompany his father and observe his daily routine. In light of this treatment, little JoJo, who worships his father (as most boys do), takes his father as a role model and develops values just like his dad’s. As an adult, JoJo does the same sorts of things his father did, including sending people to prison or to death or to torture chambers on the basis of whim. He does these things because he sincerely believes they are morally right, and he is aware of no reason to think otherwise. One day, a peasant sneezes as JoJo walks by, so JoJo heads over to the peasant and punches him in the face, just like his father would have done. He feels no guilt afterwards.

Other subjects were presented with a case exactly like this one except that it described  JoJo  as having all of the relevant moral knowledge.  Just as one might expect, subjects thought that JoJo was less morally blameworthy when they were told that he suffered from moral ignorance than they were when they were told that he had the relevant moral knowledge.  So far, no surprises. 

But now comes the surprising part.  In another condition, Shoemaker presented subjects with a story in which JoJo's action is morally praiseworthy:

 

JoJo is the favorite son of Jo the First, an evil and sadistic dictator of a small, undeveloped country, entirely cut off from the outside world. Because of his father’s special feelings for the boy, JoJo is given a special education and is allowed to accompany his father and observe his daily routine. In light of this treatment, little JoJo, who worships his father (as most boys do), takes his father as a role model and develops values just like his dad’s. As an adult, he does the same sorts of things his father did, including sending people to prison or to death or to torture chambers on the basis of whim. He does these things because he sincerely believes they are morally right, and he is aware of no reason to think otherwise. One day, a peasant sneezes as JoJo walks by, so JoJo heads over to the peasant to punch him in the face, just like his father would have done. As he’s pulling back his fist, though, he suddenly feels compassion and discovers that he can’t bring himself to punch the peasant, even though he still believes it’s the right thing to do. He thus backs away and lets the peasant go free, even though he believes that doing so is immoral, and he feels quite guilty afterwards.

Here again, the intuitions of  subjects who received this story could be compared with intuitions of subjects who received a story that was almost exactly the same except that JoJo had all of the relevant knowledge.  But this time, there was no difference in moral judgments.  Subjects thought that JoJo was no less praiseworthy when he didn't know he was doing the right thing as when he did know.   

In other words, there seems to be an asymmetry such that moral ignorance makes people think an agent is less blameworthy but does not make people think the agent is less praiseworthy.  I actually find myself having the very same intuitions, but it's hard to see exactly why this asymmetry is arising.  Is there some more general principle from which all of the intuitions we see here can be derived?

Part II, Expressivism and Logic

Thank you all for helping me, in the previous thread, to clarify what is at stake in being able to provide, for expressivism, a logic based on the preservation of content rather than one based on the (ir)rationality of holding certain combinations of attitudes. In this follow up post, I wanted to give some of the basic ideas of the semantic and logical story for exclamative sentences that I'm trying to make work for expressivism. I can't possibly give all the details of the theory, but I'll try to say most of the important things and then respond to a few of the most serious questions or concerns. Even so, however, I'm afraid this is a rather long post.

Expressivism and Logic

I have started in on a paper in which I show how expressivists can use a certain kind of semantic theory. The semantic theory, which originated with Kirk Ludwig, is based on the story Kirk and I tell here about the semantics for nondeclaratives and, in particular, a semantics for exclamative sentences. So, for example, we provide, in part, a semantics for 'Congratulations!', one that explains what is contributed to more complex sentences like 'If you won the race, congratulations!'. (In short, what exclamatives contribute to the more complex sentence is their sincerity conditions, that is, conditions that must obtain in order to warrant the application of the predicate 'is sincere (relative to a speaker and a time) in English'.) Since most expressivists think ethical sentences work very much like exclamatives, I claim that expressivists can use the theory, with appropriate modifications, of course.  My question is not, in particular, about the theory—I might write something up on that in a future post—but about something more general, namely, what is at stake if expressivists can provide a logic that is based, in the first instance, on sentential content or implication rather than on attitudes.  So…