PEA Soup

How Humeans Can Explain Reason-Choosing

One objection to Humean views about motivation, and to the 'Standard Model' of intention on which intentions are complexes of desire and belief, is that these views don't allow agents to choose their reasons for doing some action.  In Reasons Without Rationalism, Kieran Setiya presents the Standard Model as unable to explain how "Our reasons are in some sense 'up to us' -- we decide why to do something, as well as what to do --  and we seem to recognize our reasons, as such" (39).  Similarly, in Rationality in Action John Searle objects to desire-belief views of motivation, writing that "when one has several reasons for performing an action, one may act on only one of them; one may select which reason one acts on" (65).

I can see where these objections are coming from.  On a traditional Humean picture, reason is the slave of the passions, and it doesn't have the ability to hold one desire back so that another can motivate action.  Neither can it noninstrumentally create or strengthen a desire so as to make it and not another desire decisive in motivating action.  Nevertheless, I think a traditional Humean approach on which all motivating reasons are desire-belief pairs and all practical reasoning is instrumental can explain reason-choosing.  Let me show how this works. 

Brian Leiter's Nietzschean Argument for Moral Scepticism

Brian Leiter has posted a short essay developing a Nietzschean argument for moral scepticism on the web site of the National Humanities Center On the Human.

There are also replies to Leiter's Nietzschean argument by me and by Paul Katsafanas; there will soon be a reply by Mike Ridge as well. (My friends will probably not be surprised to hear that my reply contains a robust response to Leiter's argument for moral scepticism....)

Call for Abstracts: Arizona Workshop on Normative Ethics

Mark Timmons writes: "I am pleased to announce a call for abstracts for the Second Annual Arizona Workshop on Normative Ethical Theory that will be held in Tucson, Arizona on January 6-8, 2011. Abstracts are welcome in any area or on any topic in normative ethical theory (to be distinguished as well as possible from metaethics and applied ethics).

All Things Considered?

I'm reading Wedgwood's discussion of Normative Judgement Internalism (NJI), which has prompted me to think the following:

Philosophers often refer to all-things-considered judgments about what one ought to do.  But this concept is underanalyzed.   I venture that almost no one who uses this term actually has a clear idea about what it means.  *What* exactly are you judging if you judge that, all things considered, you ought to V?

UNC Charlotte Neuroethics and Neuroaesthetics Symposium

APRIL 22-24, 2010

Description

Ethics and aesthetics share a long history and often a common fate, largely because they both involve subjective values that still lay claim to some measure of objectivity.  Each field studies the relations among judgments, emotional states, representational states, art, rationality, motivation, behavior, history, language, ontology, and culture.  The symposium -- with participants from philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive science, and related fields -- will focus on how neuroscience is contributing to these studies and, in turn, how ethics and aesthetics are contributing to neuroscience.

R.S.V.P. Michael Kelly: [email protected]
Funded by the National Science Foundation (award # 0726341)

For more information, click here.

Schedule Below the Fold

Welcome Elizabeth Brake

We are pleased to announce that Elizabeth Brake has accepted our invitation to be a contributor at PEA Soup. Elizabeth Brake is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. Her areas of specialization include ethics, political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and philosophy and literature. Welcome Elizabeth!

Animal welfare and Kant's unconditioned/conditioned good distinction

Inspired a bit by Ralph's post critiquing Kant's view of unconditioned or fundamental goods, I've been investigating why Kant arrives at his (in my opinion) dissatisfying view that we have only indirect duties to non-human animals. Here's my tentative analysis and conclusion.

How much do moral philosophers disagree?

At the end of this month, I am due to respond to Brian Leiter's essay "Moral Skepticism and Moral Disagreement in Nietzsche", on the National Humanities Center's web site On the Human. In this essay, Leiter develops a Nietzsche-inspired argument, according to which moral scepticism is strongly supported by the kind of moral disagreement that exists among moral philosophers.

This made me wonder, To what extent do moral philosophers disagree about moral questions? Of course, they disagree about the abstract foundational principles of ethics: Aristotelians, Kantians, consequentialists, and the like, all have different answers to these foundational questions. But to what extent do they disagree in their moral verdicts on concrete cases or types of case?

Reasons as Evidence and Holism

As most of you know, Daniel Star and Stephen Kearns have recently made an interesting, original proposal of what reasons are generally speaking (see, for instance, their ‘Reasons as Evidence’ in OSME 4).On their view, to be a reason is to be evidence for an ought. I’ve started to wonder how compatible this view would be with Dancy’s reasons-holism which attracts me. So, I want to start from a triad of claims that seem inconsistent to me in the light of certain plausible empirical and normative assumptions. I then want to ask what should be given up.

Welcome Jeremy Fantl!

We are pleased to announce that Jeremy Fantl has accepted our invitation to be a contributor at PEA Soup.  Jeremy is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary and specializes in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and mind.  Welcome Jeremy!