PEA Soup

APA Book Prize

Congratulations to PEA Soup's Simon Keller for winning this year's APA book prize, for The Limits of Loyalty!  Details here.

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

We are pleased to present our first installment of PEA Soup's collaboration with Ethics, in which we host a discussion of one article from each volume of the journal.  The article selected from Volume 120, Issue 1, is Cécile Fabre's "Guns, Food, and Liability to Attack in War" (open access copy here).  We are very grateful to Jeff McMahan for starting our discussion; his commentary follows beneath the fold...

The Deepest Error in Kant's Ethics

Unlike many other readers, I am inclined to read Kant as a kind of realist (rather than a “constructivist”) about goodness. Nonetheless, Kant holds a distinctive view of goodness: In his view, the fundamental kind of goodness can only be instantiated by the will itself.

According to Kant, this view of goodness is built into common sense moral thought. But in my opinion, this Kantian view is deeply mistaken. Indeed, it is the central illusion on which Kant’s ethics is based.

In this post, I shall first explain what this Kantianview of goodness amounts to; then I shall explain why I believe that this view is false.