PEA Soup

Intuitionism and Social Reliabilism

Moral epistemology is an area of metaethics that I feel most uneasy about. I’ve done the least research in this area, and I’m never quite happy with what I read. However, I have tried to get at least started. So, this post is a Groundwork to my moral epistemology (not that the presented view will be original). I want to start from Sidgwick’s intuitionist position as described by Roger Crisp in the section 3.4 of his book. Call this the ‘Crispwick’ view which I used to find very appealing. I will then explain why I have come to doubt this view, and why these doubts give me a reason to be drawn into a view which I call ‘Social Reliabilism’.

Moral Obligation Applies to Act-Types, Not Act-Tokens

In a couple of conversations that I’ve had recently, I’ve been surprised to find that several moral philosophers believe that when we are morally obliged to do an act, this “act” that we’re obliged to do is an act-token, not an act-type. In my view, this is confused: the act that we’re obliged to do is always an act-type.

There are two main views of act-tokens out there:

1. Act-tokens are Davidsonian events, which are concrete particulars, individuated by their basic physical properties (including their position in the causal order).
2. Act-tokens are Kim-style entities corresponding to a trio consisting of an agent x, an act-type A, and a time t, such that the agent x does something of act-type A at time t.

On either view, the idea that moral obligation applies to act-tokens runs into grave problems.

SLACRR program

St. Louis Annual Conference on Reason and Rationality

UM-St. Louis

May 23-25, 2010

Moonrise Hotel

The Department of Philosophy at UM-St. Louis is pleased to announce the first St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality (SLACRR), which will take place May 23-25, 2010.  Information about the conference is available on our website: http://www.umsl.edu/~slacrr/  

Our keynote address will be given by Michael Bratman, and we'll have talks by Mark Schroeder, Agnes Callard, David McNaughton & Piers Rawling, Michael Titelbaum, Ruth Chang, Anton Ford, Eric Marcus, Stephen Kearns & Daniel Star, Garrett Cullity and Paul Weirich. 

 
There is no fee to attend SLACRR, but since space is limited, we ask that you register, which you can do simply by emailing John Brunero or Eric Wiland at [email protected]

Thoughts/propositions as motivating reasons

I'm working on a paper about the ontology of reasons and have some questions about motivating reasons that I was hoping some readers here might help me with.  It's hard for me to say exactly what motivating reasons are for and so it's hard for me to say what they are (facts? propositions? mental states?  none of the above?  All of the above!?!).  I'd like to say that in describing someone's motivating reasons, we say what it is that they saw/knew that led them to act in the way that they did.  I'd like to say, then, that since what someone sees or knows that leads them to act as they did has to be a fact rather than a proposition or a mental state, motivating reasons are the facts we believe we're responding to.  The problem with this, I'm told, is that in cases of error I'm forced to say things that are too harsh.  If the facts don't fit the beliefs that fit in deliberation, there aren't any facts to serve as our reasons for acting and so we've failed to act for a reason.  I want to try to understand these kinder, gentler views about motivating reasons, but part of the difficulty for me is that my semantic intuitions seem to be getting me in trouble.  I can get out of this trouble by identifying motivating reasons with mental states, but there are supposed to be problems with this view that it would be a distraction to discuss here.

Ratio Conference: Deontology

Here is another great looking conference, this time organised by Brad Hooker. The topic is deontology and this is at the University of Reading on the Saturday 17th of April. The programme is:
10.00 David Owens (Univ. of Sheffield)
11.45 Peter Vallentyne (Univ. of Missouri-Columbia)
2.15 Philip Stratton-Lake (Univ. of Reading)
4.00 Michael Smith (Princeton)
For more info, contact Ms. Jacqui Lorraine Fletcher at [email protected]

Workshop: Value Concepts

Pekka Vayrynen has put together a workshop on Value Concepts at the University of Leeds on 5-6 March. The programme looks great:

Matti Eklund (Cornell)
    “Misevaluation, Moral Semantics, and Moral Realism”
Janice Dowell (Nebraska)
    “A Flexible, Contextualist Account of ‘Ought’”
Antti Kauppinen (Amsterdam)
    “A Defence of Moral Invariantism”
Simon Kirchin (Kent)
    “Determinables, Determinates, and Thick Concepts”
Daniel Elstein (Leeds)
    “Why There Can Be No Good Reason to Accept the Shapelessness Hypothesis”
Debbie Roberts (Reading)
    “Evaluation and Variability: Why Thick Concepts Are Not Determinates of
    the Thin”

The workshop is free (to register, just send an email to [email protected]). More information at: http://leedsvalueconcepts.wordpress.com/

Religion and Employment Discrimination

The Pope has recently launched an attack on the UK's anti-discrimination legislation.

The Pope seems to be referring to certain provisions in the government's Equality Bill which is currently being debated in Parliament -- specifically, the provisions that clarify the conditions in which an employer can lawfully refuse to hire someone because of their sex or marital status or sexual orientation. According to the bill, the principal conditions in which a religious organization may do this is when filling positions that "mainly involve (a) leading or assisting in the observance of liturgical or ritualistic practices, or (b) promoting or explaining the doctrine of the religion (whether to followers of the religion or to others)."

According to the Pope, this "imposes ... unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs, [and] in some respects, ... violates natural law". I shall argue that on this point the UK government is basically right, and the Pope is wrong.

Madison Meta 2010 Call for Submissions

Russ Shafer-Landau has the 2010 Workshop announcement up. Here is Russ's note:

Dear Colleague,
I’m pleased to announce a call for abstracts for the Seventh Annual Metaethics Workshop, to be held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on September 24-26, 2010. Stephen Darwall (Yale) will be this year's keynote speaker. Abstracts (of 2-3 double-spaced pages) of papers in any area of metaethics are due by May 1. There is a limit of one submission per person. Speakers in the 2008 or 2009 workshop are not eligible to submit abstracts for this year’s event. A program committee will evaluate submissions and make decisions by early June.

Questions may be sent to Russ, whose contact information is on his website.

Using civilians as shields in war

A widespread tactics in war consists in using civilians as shields, eg by taking the fight into densely populated areas, or by more or less forcibly placing civilians in the line of fire - in the hope that the enemy will hold fire, take fewer risks, etc. Most people believe that resorting to such tactics is morally wrong (as well as unlawful as per the Geneva Conventions.) Yet, there are some other, widely held intuitions which seem to conflict with that view - in particular the intuition that military conscription is permissible.

Welcome, Cécile Fabre!

We are pleased to announce that Cécile Fabre has accepted our invitation to become a contributor to PEA Soup. The author of numerous books and articles on a variety of subjects, including justice, rights, bioethics, and the ethics of war, Cécile is a professor at the University of Edinburgh. Her recent article on just war was the focus of PEA Soup's first discussion in the collaboration with Ethics. Welcome aboard, Cécile!