PEA Soup

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Edward Slingerland’s “The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics” with commentary by Rachana Kamtekar

We are pleased to present our next 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 121, Issue 2, is Edward Slingerland’s “The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics” open access copy here).  We are very grateful to Rachana Kamtekar for starting our discussion; her commentary follows beneath the fold...

 

SLACRR 2 Program

St. Louis Annual Conference on Reason and Rationality
UM-St. Louis
May 22-24, 2011
Moonrise Hotel

The Department of Philosophy at UM-St. Louis is pleased to announce the program for SLACRR 2.  PEA Soupers on this year's program include Jamie Dreier (Keynote), Brad Cokelet, Jussi Suikkanen, Mark van Roojen, and Robert N. Johnson.  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].  More information about the conference is available at  http://www.umsl.edu/~slacrr/ 
 
The full program is below the break --->

Experiment and Intuition in Ethics--Georgetown University--April 8-10

Georgetown University's Department of Philosophy and Georgetown University Law Center, in cooperation with the editors of Ethics, will host a symposium, "Experiment and Intuition in Ethics," April 8-10.  (It looks great!)  The current schedule and a registration link appear below the fold.

Call for Proposals: "Advancing Publicly Engaged Philosophy"

The Public Philosophy Network is sponsoring a conference that I imagine will interest many PEA Soup readers. Details, and the call for proposals, below:

Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Edward Slingerland’s “The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics”

We are pleased to announce the next 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 next featured article is Edward Slingerland’s “The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics” (Volume 121, issue 2).  The article is now available here.  We are also very pleased that Rachana Kamtekar has agreed to provide a précis to kick off the discussion.  Professor Kamtekar 's précis will appear, and discussion of the article will begin, on Wednesday, March 30, 2011.

Three Senses of ‘End’

Ever since Aristotle, the terms that are translated ‘end’ (e.g. the Greek word telos and the Latin finis) have played a starring role in ethical theory. But in fact there are three crucially different things that can be meant by speaking of the “end for the sake of which” an agent is acting.

1. In one sense, this “end” is the ultimate goal or end result that the agent is trying or intending to bring about.
2. In a second sense, this “end” is the object of the fundamental wish or desire that motivated the action.
3. In a third sense, this “end” is a state of affairs that the agent believes to be good, such that the agent believes the goodness of this state of affairs to explain what is good about the action.

RIP Birmingham Workshop: Free Will and Moral Responsibility

I'm helping to put together a Royal Institute of Philosophy workshop on Free Will and Moral Responsibility here at the Philosophy department of the University of Birmingham. It will from 1pm to 6pm on Saturday the 7th of May - at University of Birmingham Campus, ERI building. The workshop is free but please book a place by emailing me at [email protected]. The speakers are Veronica Rodriquez-Blanco (Birmingham), Raymond Tallis (Manchester), and Kevin Timpe (Northwest Nazarene University). More info below.

Exploitation and Unfairness

According to what is now probably the standard view of (transactional) exploitation, it is a matter of someone taking unfair advantage of another (Wertheimer 1996). There have been various attempts to cash out the notion of unfair advantage, but I haven’t found a satisfactory one. I will propose a simple liberal theory, according to which taking unfair advantage is, in a slogan, taking advantage of unfairness. On this view, exploitation is a matter of degree: I exploit someone the more the more their willingness to engage in a transaction on my terms depends on what I will call structural injustice.

Petition: Philosophy of Race in the PGR

For those of you who have not yet seen it, I'd like to encourage you to consider signing this petition, advocating for the inclusion of the Philosophy of Race as a specialty in the Philosophical Gourmet Report.  There is some discussion of the petition here, at Feminist Philosophers.  One note I'd add is that a number of departments that are already highly esteemed by the PGR -- including, by my count, six of the top seven programs in the overall rankings, which says something -- have people doing interesting and important work in this area, as do a number of other departments.  In any event, it is a thriving, important field, which anecdotal evidence suggests has increasing interest for potential graduate students and hiring schools.

A Bleg for Help with Deontic Logic

I know that many deontic logicians would consider the following argument to be valid:

1. If you’re going to behead Jones, then you ought to behead him using the sharp sword.
2. You ought to behead Jones.
3. Therefore, you ought to behead Jones using the sharp sword.