PEA Soup

Welcome, Patricia Greenspan!

We are pleased to announce that Patricia Greenspan has accepted our invitation to become a contributor here at PEA Soup. She is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, and works primarily in the areas of ethics and philosophy of mind. “She is the author of two books on the role of emotions in rational and moral motivation and several articles on emotions, rationality, metaethics, and free will. She has held research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1983-84), the National Humanities Center (1990-91), and Australian National University (Summer 1995). In 1991 she was elected to membership in the International Society for Research on Emotions. She has also served on the Executive Council of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry. Her current work concerns issues of metaethics, practical reasoning, and responsibility.” (This quotation is from here). Below this one is a post on Bird-in-Hand Satisficing, a view that Pat Greenspan first introduced me to.

Bird-in-Hand Satisficing vs. Self-Sacrificing Satisficing

Consider absolute-level satisficing consequentialism:

ALSC: “There is a number, n, such that: An act is morally right iff either (i) it has a utility of at least n, or (ii) it maximizes utility” (Bradley 2006, 101).

ALSC, like many other versions of satisficing consequentialism, permits agents to go out of their way to prevent some good state of affairs from coming about and for absolutely no good reason. To illustrate, consider the following scenario:

Punishments Versus Prices

I once heard someone maintain something absolutely absurd: A life in prison is just the price for committing murder, he said, and you are "free" to commit murder as long as you are willing to pay that price.  Clearly this is crazy.  A life in prison, execution---these are not "prices" for committing murder; they are punishments.   But what exactly distinguishes a "price" from a "punishment"?

'Bell's Inequality'

The philosopher Kristen Bell has discovered a puzzling new asymmetry which has come to be known affectionately as 'Bell's Inequality.' Probably the best way to explain the effect she uncovered is just to describe her original experiment.

Pictures of RoME

Last weekend, several of us Soupers participated in a terrific conference in Boulder, CO, the first annual Rocky Mountain Ethics Conference.  For the voyeurs among you, Alastair Norcross and Eric Chwang have set up websites with many pictures from the event.  Alastair's link is here, and Eric's is here.  Thanks to all of the organizers from the University of Colorado for putting together what turned out to be a really fun, stimulating, and high altitude conference.  Looking forward to next year!

The Early Modern Philosophy Curriculum

Many philosophy departments require a course in the history of (usually early) modern philosophy for their majors.  My impression of the way such courses are usually taught is that they focus on metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind:  the metaphysics of substances; the epistemology of empiricism versus rationalism, both of which are classically foundationalist; ideas, impressions, and other varieties of sense data in the philosophy of mind. I imagine that this curriculum was set back in the mid-twentieth century, when M&E was considered “real” philosophy.  But nowadays, it strikes me as bizarre.

Comment Feeds

Thanks to Simon Rippon's urging and help, two different kinds of comment feeds have now been set up.

Comments feed for the whole bowl of Soup:  http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/comments.rdf

The feed seems to be working well with Google Reader, NewsGator, Bloglines, Google personal homepages, and with the Firefox browser (and its Live Bookmarks).  (I seem to be having some trouble with the feed from My Yahoo.)

Comments feed for each individual post:  At the bottom of each individual post on which someone has commented, there is a link to the feed that allows you to "follow this conversation by subscribing to the comments feed for this post."

(If you're unfamiliar with RSS readers/aggregators, you can copy the feed links and follow your reader's directions to Add a Feed.  If anyone has some better tips for keeping track of feeds, by all means, let us in on it.)

Ethics and Disability Conference

Here's an announcement from Eva Feder Kittay for an upcoming conference in NYC that I'm proud to be participating in myself:

CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT:

The Stony Brook University Department of Philosophy presents
Cognitive Disability: A Challenge to Moral Philosophy

September 18 – 20, 2008
Stony Brook Manhattan 401 Park Avenue South (Between 27th and 28th Street)

Rethinking and revising traditional assumptions about personhood, autonomy, agency, justice, care, human relationships, classification, and moral responsibility...in light of Alzheimer’s, autism and ‘mental retardation.’

Keynote Speakers: Michael Bérubé Pennsylvania State University; Leslie Francis University of Utah; Ian Hacking Collège de France, University of Toronto; Martha Nussbaum University of Chicago; Peter Singer Princeton University; Jeff McMahan Rutgers University; Anita Silvers San Francisco State University; Daniel Wikler Harvard University School of Public Health; Jonathan Wolff University College London.

See below the fold for other speakers, panelists, and general information.

Reparations for Slavery?

I just read a chapter about slave reparations by my colleague David Boonin. David presents an interesting and surprisingly strong argument in favor of reparations. (This argument apparently has been advanced before, but this is the first time I heard it.) Here's an abstract of how it goes:

Job Announcement

Georgetown University is seeking applications for the full-time position of Managing Editor of Ethics beginning December 1, 2008. Now, we don't usually post job announcements here at PEA Soup, but I wanted to make an exception in this case, because Ethics is one of the best run philosophy journals and I would like do whatever I can to help keep it that way. Also, I know from talking with the new editor, Henry S. Richardson, that he is aware of and takes seriously the various concerns people have raised about the management of journals both here at PEA Soup and over at Leiter Reports. Please see below the fold for the official JFP announcement.