PEA Soup

Parfit’s Triviality Objection

I was reading Dancy’s nonnaturalism entry to Copp’s Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory. Dancy discusses two arguments against naturalism which Parfit has presented in some of his unpublished writings. The first one is called the triviality objection against analytic versions of naturalism. Initially, I did find this argument compelling. However, at the same time I was reading  Blackburn's Spreading the Word on the problems of intensional semantics.  I think there is a nice reply to Parfit on those grounds - it's the same strategy as used to  reply to the open question arguments.

Around the Net

Below the fold are a few things going on around the net. If you have any other announcements that folks at PEA Soup might be interested in, please feel free to add them in the comments section.

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.

Trolley problems come in degrees

Like many other philosophers, I reject consequentialism in favour of a more deontological approach to ethics. That is, I favour a moral theory that implies that in certain cases, one ought to refrain from harming people in certain ways – even if, from an impartial agent-neutral perspective, the world as a whole would be a better place if one did harm those people in those ways. The notorious “trolley problem” is one good way to try to understand just what principles underlie these agent-relative, deontological restrictions:

Five people are trapped on the railway track, and a runaway railway trolley is hurtling towards them. In this case, it seems permissible to divert the trolley away from the main track (where it will crush five people), onto a side track where it will crush only one person. On the other hand, it does not seem permissible to push an innocent bystander onto the railway track so that after smashing into him, the trolley will grind to a halt before it can reach the five people who are trapped further down the track.

CFP: ETMP 10th Anniversary Conference

Via Simon Kirchin:

A reminder of a previous call for papers.

2008 sees the 10th anniversary of the journal "Ethical Theory and Moral Practice".  In celebration, the journal is organizing a major international conference, to be held in Amsterdam, 19th-20th March 2008.  The general conference theme is the title of the journal itself:  How do ethical theory and moral practice relate?

Details below the fold...

Velleman on pain, persons, and self-killing

Many Kantians have reservations about Kant's rather strident view concerning self-killing. In the Lectures on Ethics in particular, Kant's rhetoric pulls no moral punches.  Kant calls suicide "revolting", an act wherein we reduce ourselves to mere "carrion" with "no intrinsic worth." We ought to "shrink in horror" at the very thought of suicide, for "nothing more terrible can be imagined" than to treat our own value like that of a beast. 

David Velleman provides one of the few sympathetic defenses of a broadly Kantian view of self-killing. Here I hope everyone might help me put his defense in its most plausible light.

Happy 3rd Birthday!

Today marks the third anniversary of PEA Soup's burst (okay, limp) onto the blogosphere. We're celebrating with a new look, about which we'll say a bit more below. But first, right up front, we want to thank all of you—our fellow contributors, commentators, and readers—for helping to turn PEA Soup into "the ethics blog." 

We also wanted (without turning this post into a self-congratulatory love fest) to take this opportunity to say a few things about the blog, find out especially how folks have benefited from participating here at PEA Soup, ask for some feedback on the new look, and share the statistics for our three year run.

When we started PEA Soup, the four of us were all working in Southern California, Dave and Doug at CSU Northridge, Josh and Dan at CSU Bakersfield. At the time, there were few multiple-contributor, topic-oriented blogs. Certain Doubts, Experimental Philosophy, The Garden of Forking Paths, Philosophy of Art, and Prosblogion were also just starting up operations, and the few other multiple-contributor blogs that existed were either not topic-oriented or the contributors were usually restricted in some way, typically, to those in the same philosophy department or graduate program. We believed that so long as it remained an ethics-oriented blog, and so long as it encouraged participation from folks in any geographical area, PEA Soup would be able to provide a valuable service to those around the world working in ethics. In these respects, it has been great to see PEA Soup's healthy growth over the last three years, and we hope to continue to open up the conversation, both in terms of our contributors and our subject matter.

We would especially love to hear from all of you about the benefits and successes (e.g. publications, insights) that have resulted from participating in or reading PEA Soup. 

We would also like to hear from everyone about the new look of the blog. Do you prefer this new look, or would you rather we revert to the "traditional" look? This really is a decision that will be based on consensus (assuming there is one), so please let us know what you think, especially those of you who like the new look, since those in favor are usually those who remain silent.

Here are PEA Soup's three-year statistics as of this morning: 

371 Posts

5194 Comments

326 Page views per day (lifetime)

560 Page views per day (2007)

Thanks again to all of you! 

Expressivist '&' and '~'

I wanted to follow up on Jimmy Lenman’s suggestion in a recent discussion thread that there is something harder for expressivists about accounting for negation than about accounting for conjunction. I’d like to try explaining why I think that is not the case.

Jimmy describes the project of accounting for propositional logic within an expressivist framework as that of providing an ‘inferential role’ semantics for ‘~’ and ‘&’. That may be right, but inferential role semantics can take different forms.

Welcome, Mark Schroeder

The roster continues to grow in quantity and quality.  Over the past two days, we were pleased to announce that Jimmy Lenman and Sally Haslanger have agreed to contribute to PEA Soup, and we are now pleased to announce that Mark Schroeder has also accepted our invitation to join the roster.  Mark is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at USC, specializes in all areas of philosophy related to metaethics,  and has commented regularly on posts here at PEA Soup.  It's great to have you aboard, Mark!

Welcome, Sally Haslanger

We're very pleased to announce the addition of Sally Haslanger to PEA Soup's roster of contributors.  Sally is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT and is affiliated with MIT's Women's Studies Program.  Among her many contributions to the profession, she is an editor of another exciting Web-based forum, the Symposium on Gender, Race, and Philosophy, where readers can find her much-discussed paper on women in the profession.

It's great to have you join, Sally!