PEA Soup

Online Papers in Philosophy (OPP) Lives!

As many of you may know, OPP hasn't been running for awhile now. It looks like there's now hope of reviving it or, perhaps, even starting something better. For details, see here. For now, there's an RSS Feed that's does essentially what OPP did, except that it's even better in that it's updated daily. Here's the link to the feed: http://www.umsu.de/wo/opp.rss. I've tried to include a link to it under "ELSEWHERE" to the right, but so far TypePad won't allow this sort of URL. Hopefully, I can get that changed.

Welcome, Thom Brooks!

We are pleased to announce that Thom Brooks has accepted our invitation to become a contributor here at PEA Soup. Thom is Reader in Political and Legal Philosophy at the University of Newcastle. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Moral Philosophy and a founding co-director of the Newcastle Ethics, Legal, and Political Philosophy Group.Thom works primarily in the area of political and legal philosophy, but he has also written on ancient Greek philosophy, democratic theory, the history of political thought, and Indian philosophy. His current projects include three monographs: one on the philosophy of crime and punishment, another on global justice, and another still on political philosophy for Blackwell’s “Fundamentals in Philosophy” book series. It's great to have you aboard, Thom!

Rutgers conference: Human Rights in Theory and Practice

Conference: Human Rights in Theory and Practice
Date: Friday, October 3rd, 2008
Location: Rutgers University School of Law-Camden

Description:
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, and in recognition of the UDHR’s 60th anniversary, the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy will host a one-day conference featuring panels on a range of philosophical and legal aspects of human rights.

A poor man's pragmatic encroachment

First things first.  I want to thank Doug, Dave, Dan, and Josh for inviting me to come on as a contributor.  I'm interested in connections between reasons for action and belief.  For a while, I've been content to argue that at a certain high level of abstraction, we ought to expect similarities between reasons for action and belief.  So, for example, if we can show that reasons for action belong in a certain ontological category, it would be surprising if the right account of reasons for belief located those kinds of reasons in an entirely different ontological category.  If there's a gap between reasons and rationality on the practical side, it would be surprising if there were no similar gap on the theoretical side.  (Of course, if there's no gap between reasons and rationality on the theoretical side, we ought to reconsider the suggestion that there's a gap on the practical side.)  You get the idea. 

What justification is there for thinking that claims about reasons for action justify claims about reasons for belief?  I suppose you might say that the arguments that (purport to) show that there's a gap between reasons and rationality on the practical side show that there's nothing to the concepts of normative reason or rationality that require them to go hand in hand.  If someone wishes to defend the view that there's no gap between reasons and rationality on the theoretical side, the onus would be on them.  To paraphrase a remark of John Gibbons' from a forthcoming paper of his, there's a built in explanation of the similarities since both reasons for belief and action are reasons. 

I'm interested to see if we can establish something stronger than just the claim that there's a burden of proof on those who wish to insist that reasons for action and belief differ in important ways.  I've been kicking around an idea for the past few months and thought I'd see what sort of reaction it would receive here.  Consider:
Link: If you oughtn't φ, you oughtn't believe that you ought to φ or that you may φ.

Online reading group on Broome

THIS looks very interesting. The postgraduate students at St Andrews are organising an online reading group on John Broome's brilliant Weighing Lives book. There's even a symposium with Broome in October.

Visiting Faculty Fellowships 2009-10

The University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics invites applications for its Visiting Faculty Fellowships. For the academic year 2009-10, two fellowships will be awarded to outstanding scholars and teachers interested in writing and conducting research about ethics during a year in residence at the University of Toronto.

Further details are available here: http://www.ethics.utoronto.ca/index.php?id=5

10th International Conference on Ethics Across the Curriculum

Theme: The Ethics of the Family
Where: Towson University, Maryland
When: November 14-16, 2008
More info: http://www.rit.edu/cla/ethics/seac/conferences.html

The Recognitional View of Instrumental Rationality

The "recognitional view" of practical rationality - as I shall use the term - is the view that all requirements of practical rationality are justified by the fact that it is reasonable to expect one's conforming to these requirements to lead to one's practical reasoning's getting things right to a higher degree than one's violating these requirements. If R is a requirement of practical rationality, then it must be reasonable to expect the results of one's conforming to R to be better - specifically, to involve one's practical reasoning's "getting things right" to a higher degree - than the results of one's violating R.

Can this recognitional view explain what justify the requirements of instrumental rationality (i.e., roughly, the requirement that we should take appropriate means to our ends)?  As I shall argue, it can.  Once we have a plausible view of what it is for one to "get things right" in one's practical reasoning, this recognitional view will have no difficulty explaining the requirements of instrumental rationality.

Welcome Two New Contributors

We are pleased to announce the addition of two new contributors to PEA Soup: Clayton Littlejohn and Jason Raibley. Clayton is a Lecturer at Southern Methodist University. He specializes in epistemology, ethical theory, and philosophy of mind, and he has papers forthcoming in the Philosophical Quarterly and the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Jason is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University Long Beach. He specializes in ethics and recently co-edited (along with Richard Feldman, Kris McDaniel, and Michael J. Zimmerman) a festschrift for his graduate advisor, Fred Feldman: The Good, the Right, Life and Death. It’s great to have these two young, talented philosophers aboard.

Moral Rationalism and Blameworthiness

I’m sympathetic to the following view, which I call moral rationalism:

MR: If S is morally required to do x, then S has decisive reason (all things considered) to do x.

One popular argument for this view appeals to blameworthiness. This sort of argument is found both in Darwall (2006, 287-292) and in Skorupski (1999, 170) as well as in Shafer-Landau (2003, 190-193), although Shafer-Landau employs it to argue for only weak moral rationalism:

WMR: If S is morally required to do x, then S has a (pro tanto) reason to do x.

The following is my reconstruction of their argument.