PEA Soup

The Asymmetry Challenge for Expressivism

I'm in the midst of writing for a general audience about what I'm calling the 'Asymmetry Challenge' for (pure, noncognitivist) expressivism. The Challenge is to jointly solve the Sentential Mood, Truth-Aptness, and Asymmetric Embedding problems. These three problems are often recognized individually, though I think that jointly solving them is more difficult than many appreciate.

The source of the Asymmetry Challenge lies in the expressivist view that the moral sentences we typically use to express desire-like states or to prescribe behavior have important features that other kinds of sentences lack, even though these latter kinds of sentences paradigmatically express desire-like states or prescribe behavior. Moral sentences, unlike these other kinds of sentences, are declarative, truth-apt, and embeddable into a wider array of complex, linguistic constructions. But what feature could moral sentences have that these others sentences lack—again, especially when moral sentences function so much like these other types of sentences—that warrants this asymmetry? I'm hoping some of you may have suggestions or questions that might help me as I write my way through the Challenge.
 

The Quark Philosophy Prize: Call for nominations

This prize is given out by 3 Quarks Daily. For more info, clikc here.

Call For Abstracts: SLACRR 4

I'm pleased to announce a call for abstracts for the next St. Louis Conference on Reasons and Rationality, sponsored by UMSL and Washington University. Many PEA Soupers have participated the past three years.

May 19 – 21, 2013
Moonrise Hotel in St Louis, MO

Keynote Speaker:
Michael Smith (Princeton)

St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality (SLACRR) provides a forum for new work on practical and theoretical reason, broadly construed. Please submit an abstract of 750-1500 words by December 31, 2012 to SLACRR (at) gmail.com. In writing your abstract, please bear in mind that full papers should suitable for a 30 minute presentation.

What to Submit

SLACRR includes papers in ethics, epistemology, and other areas of philosophy that deal with reasons, reasoning, or rationality. For instance, we would be interested in papers exploring such questions as:

• What is the relation between reasons for actions and reasons for beliefs?
• What are the sources of our reasons for belief?
• How are features of one’s psychology relevant to reasons?
• What is the relation between reasons and what we ought to do or believe?
• What is the relation between reasons and value?
• Are the requirements of practical and theoretical rationality normative?
• What is the relation between individual rationality and collective rationality?

For more information, see http://www.umsl.edu/~slacrr/

Metaethics Flowchart

I am teaching a graduate-level metaethics survey course this semester and would like to give my students a flowchart to help them keep track of the field. I've seen a couple around but none were quite what I was looking for. So I'm making my own. I'm posting it here in the hopes that (selfishly) I get feedback and (somewhat less selfishly) others will be able to make use of it. The current draft is here:

http://filebox.vt.edu/users/faraci/metaethics.pdf

Call for Abstracts: Deontic Modality Workshop at USC, May 2013

Deontic or normative modality is a subject of common interest for researchers in several fields,
including moral philosophy, linguistics, formal logic, and metaethics.  However, over the last three decades, research in these different fields has largely been conducted independently, and researchers have often ignored work in the other fields as having no bearing on the concerns of their own field.  But recent work has begun to bring these fields together in fruitful ways.  This conference is motivated by the view that ethical, linguistic, logical, and metaethical enquiry into deontic modality can all profitably learn from one another.  It aims to bring together leading and creative thinkers in each field in the belief that we may all benefit from each others’ expertise, advancing our collective understanding of this subject.

The conference will be held in Los Angeles on May 20-22, 2013, at the University of Southern California.  The Keynote Speaker will be Angelika Kratzer (University of Massachusetts-Amherst).  Invited speakers include John Broome (Oxford), Jeff Horty (University of Maryland College Park), Frank Jackson (Australian National University/Princeton University), and Paul Portner (Georgetown University).  Seven additional speakers will be selected on the basis of submitted abstracts.

No Pro Tanto Duty to Keep A Promise

I have a very short argument to the effect that the promising-relevant pro tanto moral obligation is not a pro tanto moral obligation to keep one's promises but, rather, a pro tanto moral obligation to not break one's promises.

[The argument crucially depends on the notion of a conditional release from a promise. Whereas an unconditional release (or a simple release) is a promisee's saying to a promisor something like "You don't have to phi", where phi-ing is something the promisor had promised the promisee to do, a conditional release is a promisee's saying to a promisor something like "If C, then you don't have to phi". I take it that both simple and conditional releases are altogether ordinary moral phenomena.]

Here's the argument: Suppose that on Monday A says to B "I promise to lend you my recording of Don Giovanni on Wednesday" and on Tuesday, B says to A "If you let me hold onto this copy of Cosi fan Tutte which you lent me the other day and were planning to take back today, then you don't have to lend me your Don Giovanni tomorrow." In this case, it seems that the following two courses of action are both permissible: (1) A takes back his Cosi fan Tutte on Tuesday and on Wednesday lends B his Don Giovanni, and (2) A does not take back his Cosi fan Tutte and on Wednesday does not lend B his Don Giovanni. However, option (1) involves the keeping of a promise and the breaking of no promises and option (2) involves neither the keeping nor the breaking of any promises. If there were a pro tanto moral obligation to keep a promise, as opposed to merely not breaking one, in this case (1) should be obligatory and (2) impermissible. If, on the other hand, the only promising-relevant pro tanto moral obligation were to not break one's promises, then, as neither involves the breaking of a promise, both courses of action would be permissible, which, I contend, is in fact the case. 

Welcome Peter A. Graham!

We are pleased to announce that Peter A. Graham has accepted our invitation to be a contributor at PEA Soup. Pete is a professor of philosophy at UMass Amherst. His current research concerns arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism, theories of moral blameworthiness, the relation between ability and obligation, and subjective and objective moral obligation. Welcome Pete!

New Edinburgh Research Centre

Eidyn: The Edinburgh Centre for Epistemology, Mind and Normativity is a new research centre at the University of Edinburgh. Drawing on Edinburgh's past success in the fields of epistemology, ethics (particularly meta-ethics), and philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the centre will be home to a number of funded and pilot research projects within these areas, including the AHRC-funded project Emerging Themes in Meta-Ethics. There will also be postgraduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting professorial fellows attached to the centre; further details will be posted in due course.

For more information: http://www.eidyn.org

Welcome Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder!

We are thrilled to welcome Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder to PEA Soup! Nomy, whose research interests include ethics, moral psychology, action theory, metaethics, and free will, is Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. She is the author of Merit, Meaning,and Human Bondage: An Essay on Free Will (Princeton U.P., 2006) and Unprincipled Virtue (Oxford U.P., 2002). Tim is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ohio State University. He works broadly in the areas of moral psychology and philosophy of mind and is author of Three Faces of Desire (Oxford, U. P., 2004).  His current project is tentatively titled Reasons from Atoms. It's wonderful to have you both aboard!