PEA Soup

Passing the buck right back where it started

Some hope to cash out claims about goodness in terms of claims about reasons to respond.  One such account is the Buck Passing Account of Value (BPV), which says that to be valuable is to have other properties that provide reasons to take up an attitude in favor of it.  I am thinking about the merits and originality of an objection to BPV.  Consider the following claim BR:

(BR)  One can have a reason to take up some attitude, a reason not to take up that same attitude, and one of these reasons is better than the other.

BR is overwhelming plausible.  But BR uses evaluative terms: it says that some reason is better than another reason.  So, BR uses evaluative language.  Can BPV be reconciled with BR? 

It can if we can express the thought BR expresses by substituting some nonevaluative term for "better".  We might be tempted to go with "stronger".  But we are not talking about explanatory reasons here; we are talking about justifying reasons.  So "stronger" is at best merely metaphorical.   It won't do.

We might be tempted to rely on reasons-talk again.  To say that reason A is better than reason B, it might be suggested, is to say that we have reason to do what reason A recommends rather than what reason B recommends.  Let's call this reason about reasons a meta-reason.  Will this solve the problem?  I don't think so.  Meta-reasons themselves can be better or worse than other meta-reasons.  To escape this regress, we would need a reason that itself is not better or worse than other reasons.  I don't relish the taste of that bullet.  Alternatively, we could embrace the infinite regress.  Yuk.

Instead, it seems better to reject BPV.

I'll delete this post if it merely rehearses a well-known (but unknown to me) objection.

Schrage to School Thomas

PEA Soup's own Laurie Schrage is planning to hand deliver a welcome message to Florida International's new basketball coach, Isaiah Thomas.  See the NY Times story here.

Call for Abstracts

The first Annual Arizona Workshop on Normative Ethics will take place in Tucson, Arizona, at the Westward Look Resort on January 7-9, 2010. Keynote speakers will be Thomas E. Hill (UNC, Chapel Hill), Holly Smith (Rutgers), and Peter Railton (Michigan).

Those interested in presenting a paper at the workshop are invited to submit a 2-3 abstract (double-spaced) by June 1, 2009. Only one submission per person is permitted. Abstracts will be evaluated by a program committee and decisions made in early July.

Arguments for the DDE

I apologise for this but I want to return to the Doctrine of Double Effect. One thing that Tim Scanlon said in the comments was that his motivation for arguing against the DDE is, quote: ‘I see no plausible theoretical defense for it’. I wanted to ask about whether there really is no theoretical justification for the DDE. What are the best possible positive arguments for the DDE? What arguments have been presented in the literature so far? I also want to present a virtue-ethicist argument which I think works the best. It’s not very original (Alison Hills uses a similar one) but I ‘ll formulate it slightly differently.

Good and Bad

Sometimes I hear people (well, philosophers) compare the goodness of one thing with the badness of another. They say, for example, the goodness of pleasure is less than the badness of pain; or pleasure is less good than pain is bad. Do such comparisons make sense?

Here's a reason to doubt that they do. They seem similar to comparisons such as the following:

• Ben Wallace is less tall than Mugsy Bogues is short.
• Sydney is less hot than Glasgow is cold.
• Wood is less hard than feathers are soft.

But it's not clear what these could mean.

Can anyone make sense of this?

[Update: I neglected to say before that my thinking about this issue was prompted by an interesting talk which Tom Hurka recently gave here at Edinburgh.]