PEA Soup

Criminal and Legal Responsibility

Fellow PEA Brains: I have a quick question for those in the know.  The terms "criminal responsibility" and "legal responsibility" are often used interchangeably in what little of the literature I know in legal theory dealing with the concepts.  I'm wondering, though, if there are some theorists who think these terms pick out different concepts.  And independently of whether or not some theorists actually do so, are there good reasons to do so?  I have my suspicions about a possible reason to distinguish talk of legal from criminal responsibility, but I'd rather hear from experts on the topic.  (And I'm thinking of distinctions where both legal and criminal responsibility refer to a type of responsibility for something, rather than merely referring to a particular sort of status, i.e., being a responsible agent).

2010-2011 Visiting Fellowships, Institute for Philosophy and Public Life

Applications for 2010-2011 Visiting Fellowships at the Institute for Philosophy in Public Life are now being accepted.

The deadline for applications is July 1, 2010.  Current and previous fellowships appear to have been kind to those wishing to pursue work in ethics and cognate areas.

More information can be found below the fold. 

Call for Abstracts: Bowling Green Workshop in Applied Ethics and Public Policy

“Freedom, Paternalism and Morality”

April 1-2, 2011

The Bowling Green Workshop in Applied Ethics and Public Policy will take place in Bowling Green, Ohio on April 1-2, 2011. Keynote speakers will be Gerald Dworkin (University of California at Davis) and Douglas Husak (Rutgers University).

Those interested in presenting a paper are invited to submit a 2-3 page abstract (double-spaced) by September 1, 2010. We welcome submissions in all areas in applied ethics and philosophical issues relevant to public policy.  Special consideration will be given to papers relevant to this year’s conference theme: Freedom, Paternalism, and Morality.  Only one submission per person is permitted. Abstracts will be evaluated by a program committee and decisions made in early October 2010. Please direct all abstracts and queries to:  [email protected]

Further information about the Workshop will be available soon on the workshop website.

An Argument for Non-Cognitivism?

I’ve been thinking of new ways to make progress in the cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism debate.  Suppose that I sincerely judge that eating meat is wrong (call the result ‘a moral thought’).  Is my moral thought then a belief that eating meat is wrong, or am I in some other kind of a mental state? To solve this question we need some way of classifying mental states as beliefs and non-beliefs. The traditional way to do this is to think of the different functional roles which different kinds of mental states have. Once we have figured them out, we can then think of what sorts of roles moral thoughts have – whether they have more belief-like roles or not. I want to try to think about whether the debate could go into a new direction from this starting-point.

Workshop on Theoretical and Practical Reasons

Anyone doing the UK summer conference tour should consider stopping at a great-looking workshop on Theoretical and Practical Reasons which Ulrike Heuer has put together at Leeds. It's on 24th and 25th of June. The program and registration details are HERE (this one's cheap too). Speakers include Daniel Elstein, Daniel Star and Stephen Kearns, Nishi Shah, Kieran Setiya and many others. I'm hoping to make it here too!

Welcome, Mark van Roojen!

We're pleased to announce that, after much unreasonable recalcitrance, Mark van Roojen has finally agreed to become an official contributor to PEA Soup.  Mark is a professor of philosophy at the University of Nebraska, specializing in ethics, metaethics, and political philosophy, and he's been a regular commentator on PEA Soup since its early days.  Welcome aboard, Mark!

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Elizabeth Brake’s “Minimal Marriage: What Political Liberalism Implies for Marriage Law”

We are pleased to announce the second 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 available (for a limited time) to our participants. 

Our featured article is Elizabeth Brake's "Minimal Marriage: What Political Liberalism Implies for Marriage Law" (Volume 120, issue 2).  The article is now available here. 

Elizabeth Brake  is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. Her book, tentatively entitled Rethinking Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and Law, is under contract with Oxford University Press.

We are also very pleased that Cheshire Calhoun has agreed to provide a précis of the article to introduce the discussion.  Professor Calhoun's précis will appear, and discussion of the article will begin, on Tuesday, June 1, 2010.

Cheshire Calhoun is Professor of Philosophy at Arizona State University. She edits the Oxford University Press series Studies in Feminist Philosophy, and she is an associate editor for the journals Ethics and Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.

The 2010 conference of the British Society for Ethical Theory

Registration is now open for the 2010 conference of the British Society for Ethical Theory, to be held at the University of Nottingham, Wednesday 7th to Friday 9th July. (This is the period directly before the 2010 Joint Session, in Dublin.)

Details of the programme and registration forms are available here: http://www.bset.org.uk/nextconference.html

Objective Consequentialism and the Wiland/Howard-Snyder Objection

Suppose that you know that your opening a certain safe is what would maximize the good. But suppose that you don’t know what the correct combination is. Some critics (e.g., Wiland 2005 and Howard-Snyder 1997) allege that, despite your ignorance of the correct combination, objective consequentialism (OC) implies that you are morally required to open the safe – OC being the view according to which S’s performing x is morally permissible if and only if there is no alternative, y, that would in fact produce better consequences than x would. This implication, they claim, is absurd. Contrary to OC, it’s permissible for you to fail to open the safe even though this amounts to your failing to maximize the good. Thus, they conclude that we should reject OC. Here’s the example in greater detail:

The Virtue Responsive Evil Demon

Suppose you are an ordinary virtuous agent. Up until now, you haven’t lived the kind of life that involves making any huge life or death decisions, but you are kind to your friends and acquaintances, charitable to distant strangers in need, honest to everyone except those you can’t trust etc. Now an evil demon comes to you and tells you that, for the rest of your life, he will kill 5 people (randomly selected strangers in another country) every time you act virtuously, and won’t kill any people every time you act non-virtuously. He makes it impossible for you to commit suicide (if this were an option, you might think you should immediately take it – although doing so would, quite plausibly, lead to the death of 5 people, the killing would stop there). (Alternatively, one could simply specify that the demon tells you that whenever you happen to die, but not before, he will move on to present some other ordinary virtuous person with the same problem.) On the assumption that the evil demon will keep his word, what are you to do? Given that you start off virtuous, what might we predict you do in this situation? And what might we predict the demon does in response to your subsequent acts?