PEA Soup

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Cécile Fabre's "Guns, Food, and Liability to Attack in War"

We are pleased to announce the first installment of our collaboration with Ethics, where we will host a discussion of one article from each issue of the journal, and the journal will make a copy of that article freely accessible (for a limited time) to our participants. 

Our first featured article is Cécile Fabre's "Guns, Food, and Liability to Attack in War" (Volume 120, issue 1).  The article is now available here.  We are also very pleased that Jeff McMahan has agreed to provide a précis to introduce the discussion.  Professor McMahan's précis will appear, and discussion of the article will begin, on Monday, January 11.

The Ethics of Santa

Many people teach their small children the myth of Santa Claus:  that a magical being who lives at the North Pole brings presents on Christmas Eve.  Secondary aspects of the myth are that whether one receives presents is a function of one’s behavior, and that you can communicate with Santa about your preferences.  Not only parents, but retail establishments and (I have recently discovered) public schools collude in perpetuating this myth among children of a certain age.

 

Perpetuating the Santa myth has at least these moral reasons against it:

CFP: Graduate Conference in Political Theory

Princeton University

9-10 April 2010

The Committee for the Graduate Conference in Political Theory at Princeton University welcomes papers concerning any period, methodological approach or topic in political theory, political philosophy, or the history of political thought. Approximately eight papers will be accepted.

Analyzing Act, Rule, and Global Consequentialism

As a first pass, we may think of Consequentialist moral theories as those that specify the right in terms of the good.  But these terms occlude some important structure that can be brought out by further analysis.  In particular, I take it that to say what's good is to say what we have reason to desire, whereas to ask about what's right is to ask about what we have reason to do.

I'm interested in how our understanding of different variants of consequentialism may be advanced by reformulating them in terms of reasons.  I think we obtain two especially illuminating results if we discipline our normative theorizing in this way.  Firstly, we find that Global Consequentialism (GC) is arguably just a terminological variant that fails to go beyond Act Consequentialism (AC) in any substantive respect.  Second, we gain some insights into the structure of Rule Consequentialism.

Welcome Richard Chappell!

We are pleased to announce that Richard Chappell has accepted our invitation to be a contributor here at PEA Soup. Richard is a graduate student in Philosophy at Princeton University. He is the author of Philosophy, et cetera. He specializes in ethical theory with a primary interest in rational normativity, or the all-things-considered "ought". Welcome aboard, Richard!

The Definition of ‘Securable’

As I argued in my previous post, I think that ‘ought’ implies ‘securable’, and, from that, it follows that agents can only be required to perform securable acts. I am, however, a bit unsettled about how best to define ‘securable’. Below, I list the three most obvious contenders and explain why my current thinking is that something along the lines of D3 is best. Here are the three contenders, D1-D3:

Doing the Best We Can

I used to think that we ought to do the best we can. After debating the issue with Richard Chappell, doing some more research, and rereading some articles that I hadn’t read in awhile, I’ve changed my mind. The idea that we ought to do the best we can is plausible if we assume that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ and nothing more restrictive than ‘can’. Consider that it is plausible to suppose that we ought to perform the best alternative, whatever the relevant set of alternatives is – at least, this is plausible so long as we presume, as I will, that the best alternative is to be understood in a theory-neutral way such that the best alternative is not necessarily the one that has the best consequences but is necessarily the alternative that is best according to the correct normative theory (i.e., the one that there is best/most reason to perform). But what is the relevant set of alternatives? I used to think that it was the set of alternatives that the agent can perform – call these ‘personally possible’. But what if ‘ought’ implies something more restrictive than ‘personally possible’? Suppose, for instance, that ‘ought’ implies ‘X’, where the set of alternatives that are X is a proper subset of those that are personally possible. If that’s true, then there would be some acts that are personally possible for me but which I cannot be obligated to perform: those that are personally possible for me but not X. I now think that there is such an X and that X equals ‘securable’. Below the fold, I explain the notion and defend the claim that ‘ought’ implies ‘securable’.

Strawson’s Argument for Buck-Passing

In Sir P.F. Strawson’s brilliant 1949 paper ‘Ethical Intuitionism’, I came across a short and seemingly powerful argument for the buck-passing accounts of value and other ethical words that I haven’t seen elsewhere. Even if I am a buck-passer, I do think that this argument is too good to be true. So, what I want to do is to first give the argument in a full quote, then make three observations about it, and finally sketch out the ways in which opponents of the buck-passing view could reply to this argument.

CFP: Northwestern University Society for Ethical Theory and Political Philosophy

CALL FOR PAPERS

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
SOCIETY FOR ETHICAL THEORY AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE

MAY 20-22, 2010

CFP: The Felician Ethics Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS: The fourth annual meeting of the Felician Ethics Conference will be held at the Rutherford campus of Felician College on Saturday, April 24, 2010, from 9 am – 6 pm. (Felician’s Rutherford campus is located at 223 Montross Ave., Rutherford NJ, 07070.)