PEA Soup

Virtue Bleg

Yes, well, I realize that the genuine article is not transferable. 

I am teaching a 400-level course on virtue ethics next spring.  I’m looking for reading-list suggestions.  They need to be relatively short, readable, accessible to majors.  I’d ideally like a broad selection of ancient/modern/contemporary, East/West, religious/secular.  I’m also a fan of intro-level hand-holding kinds of texts for students, so any suggestions on that front would be welcome as well.  Thanks! 

Personal Constraints?

A personal constraint is a constraint on action that arises from certain associative relations, such as kinship, friendship, etc. Typically, they are injunctions to treat one's personal relations with a certain form of priority over strangers even if, for instance, not doing so would promote more good overall. One could construe this as a constraint on rational action, viz., that any action that disobeyed such a constraint is all-things-considered irrational, or as a moral constraint, that any action that disobeyed such a constraint is all-things-considered immoral. (I'll leave this question open.) Personal constraints differ from personal options. I might have an option to treat my wife with a certain priority in the face of a greater good elsewhere, but I need not do so--in a conflict case I could also be justified in acting for the greater good. Personal constraints deny that one can be justified in refusing to act with priority to one's associates. Do such constraints exist? I want very briefly to run an argument up the flagpole that they do not.

Justice Across the Generations

This looks like a great conference but I couldn't help feeling irked that here was another conference with no women on the program. I'm never quite sure what to do about this since by the time these are announced it's too late to do much. Still, it's an important issue and the speakers who are on the program are people I'd like to hear.

CONFERENCE ON JUSTICE BETWEEN AGE GROUPS

University of Essex, UK
Wednesday 25 June – Friday 27 June

CONFERENCE THEME

The conference addresses the question: what is a fair distribution of important resources – for example, education, health care, and income support – between different age groups? This question is both of philosophical interest and of great political urgency given the demographic changes taking place within modern democratic states, where declining fertility rates and longer life-expectancy result in ageing populations, and new pressures on standard models of welfare provision.
          The conference papers will fall in two main areas. First, some papers will debate fundamental principles for distributing resources between different age groups. The main research questions in this area are the following. Should the state devote equal amounts of social resources to different age groups – say, on health care for the elderly and the young? Or, perhaps more plausibly, should the state devote unequal amounts of resources to different age-groups, so as to meet equally their unequal needs? The second set of papers will tackle questions of public policy from a principled point of view, including the following: What does a society owe to children with respect to educational provision? Is age-discrimination in the labour market morally defensible? How should the state support the institution of the family given the family’s role in serving the interests of children, parents and third parties? How must the state adjust education and health policy, childcare support, and labour market regulations, so as to facilitate family life?
        The conference is supported by the British Academy, the Mind Association, the Society for Applied Philosophy, and the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex.


SPEAKERS

Richard Arneson, University of California, San Diego
Paul Bou-Habib, University of Essex
Matthew Clayton, University of Warwick
Norman Daniels, Harvard University
Axel Gosseries, Université Catholique de Louvain
Dennis McKerlie, University of Calgary
Adam Swift, University of Oxford
Andrew Williams, University of Warwick

If you are interested in attending the conference, please contact Paul Bou-Habib ([email protected]) for information about conference fees and booking arrangements. Places can be booked no later than 1 June 2008.

Knowability of moral truths again

In the previous post, I applied Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument to argue for the claim that there must be some moral truths that cannot be known. Now I want to look at one of the best arguments against the view at the other end of the scale – that all moral truths could be unknowable. I will use basic act-consequentialism as an example. Yet, similar problems would be faced by Rossians who think that we can never know the over-all ‘duty proper’ in particular circumstances and by contractualists whose view would imply that we can never know which principles are non-rejectable because we cannot know what kind of standpoints the principles create for individuals. The argument is an application of Wright’s Wittgenstein. It is based on the idea that, if all moral truths turned out to be unknowable, it is not clear whether anything would count as intending to do the right action because it is right.

New Hobbes blog

Sharon Lloyd, the noted Hobbes scholar, has started a new blog, Hobbes Today, focusing on Hobbes' moral and political philosophy.  There are already intriguing posts about Hobbes' theories of human nature and of political sovereignty, and given the usual quality of Sharon's work, I'm sure that the level of discussion will be high.

A Puzzle about 'Right' and 'Wrong'

Intuitively, it's clear that 'wrong' entails 'ought not'; and the term 'right' seems simply to be the contradictory of 'wrong' (after all, 'It's not right' seems at first glance to entail 'It's wrong', and obviously nothing can be both right and wrong). But then it follows that 'right' cannot entail anything stronger than 'it is not the case that ... ought not...'. I.e., 'right' cannot mean anything stronger than 'permissible'.

Intuitively, however, 'right' seems stronger than 'permissible'. If I say, "You're quite right to F", I seem to be expressing a much stronger sort of approval of your F-ing than if I merely said "It is quite permissible for you to F".  It's natural to talk about "the right thing to do", but decidedly odd to talk about "a right thing to do" (whereas it's perfectly natural to talk about "a permissible thing to do"). So, what does 'right' mean -- does it just mean 'permissible' or does it mean something stronger?

CFP: Philosophic Methodology Conference

The UT-Austin philosophy department is pleased to announce a week-long graduate student workshop on philosophical methodology, August 12 – August 16.

Possible workshop subtopics include (but are not limited to) intuition, conceptual analysis, reflective equilibrium, reduction, and ontological commitment.

Already confirmed speakers include Julia Driver (Dartmouth), Marc Moffett (Wyoming), Roy Sorensen (Dartmouth), Ernest Sosa (Rutgers), and a number of UT faculty.

We hope to accept around 10 outside graduate student participants.  If you are interested in applying, please see the website for details.

A Bleg: Obligation Dilemmas

As I understand it, an obligation dilemma exists where an agent faces a choice situation in which two (or more) of her available act alternatives are morally obligatory and yet it is impossible for her to perform both of those two act alternatives. Does anyone know of a moral theory or a moral theorist that endorses the existence of obligation dilemmas? Do you think that the divine command theory allows for obligation dilemmas in that it seems possible for God to command an agent to perform both of two mutually exclusive act alternatives? If the divine command theory does allow for the possibility of obligation dilemmas is this a good reason to reject the theory?

Is there a duty to vote?

Rumor has it that there's a presidential election scheduled in the U.S. this fall, which raises the perennial ethical question: Is there a duty to vote?  Harry Brighouse provides some excellent arguments for there not being such a duty, but here I'll lay out a few pros and cons and invite people to weigh in on whether there is such a duty.