PEA Soup

Conference: Practical Reason and Metaethics April 21-23

John Brunero and I are running a conference on Practical Reason and Metaethics, here in Lincoln, Nebraska on April 21st to 23rd. Speakers include Michael Bratman (Stanford), Stephen Darwall (Yale), Jonathan Drake (Texas), Amelia Hicks (Kansas State), Chris Howard (Arizona), Sarah McGrath (Princeton), Barry Maguire (UNC), and Sigrún Svavarsdóttir (Tufts). There were over 75 submissions for the refereed program and we expect it to be a very good conference.

There will be a free conference dinner Friday night and a party Saturday, so please register if you are coming by sending an email to [email protected] stating that you plan on attending. There's no fee to attend. 

The conference website is https://sites.google.com/site/practicalreasonandmetaethics/. Further information and the schedule is below the fold.

Conference/CFP: Practical Reason and Metaethics

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln is hosting a conference on Practical Reason and Metaethics to be held April 22-23, 2016.  The invited speakers on the conference program are:

• Michael Bratman  (Stanford)

• Stephen Darwall  (Yale)

• Sarah McGrath  (Princeton)

• Sigrún Svavarsdóttir  (Tufts)

Call for Papers: Four additional papers will be selected though an anonymous review of submissions.  For each paper selected, the conference will contribute up to $800 to cover the travel and accommodations of the authors. Submissions are due December 1, 2015. More info below the fold.

More than Words Can Say: On Inarticulacy and Normative Commitment (by Kyla Ebels-Duggan)

In The Possibility of Altruism Thomas Nagel introduces a distinction between motivated and unmotivated desires that has since become standard in discussions of action theory and moral psychology.  But what, exactly, are these categories?  Many uses of the term, arguably including Nagel’s own, treat a desire as unmotivated if one has no reason for it.  So conceived, unmotivated desires are mere urges, whims or unintelligible dispositions.  It would be out of place to ask an agent to justify these states in the same way that it would be out of place to demand reasons for a headache.  But Nagel introduces the idea differently, calling a desire unmotivated if one does not reason to it, that is does not engage in explicit practical reasoning resulting in the motivation to act.

Regret

Consider the question “Can regret be appropriate even apart from any belief that one’s choice was misguided or irrational if a monistic theory of the good is true?”  According to the relevant notion of regret, regretting is to be understood, roughly, as mourning the loss of a forgone good.  This notion of regret leaves room for the possibility that there may be cases of rational regret that do not involve the agent seeing her prior choice as in some way misguided.  It is commonly held that this can easily occur when there is a plurality of distinct kinds of goods at stake.  More controversial is the suggestion (which can be found in Hurka’s work) that this can also easily occur when there is only one distinct kind of good at stake.  According to Hurka (“Monism, Pluralism, and Rational Regret”), goods with different “intrinsic properties” can be distinct “in the way that matters for rational regret” without being goods of distinct kinds, and so monistic theories of the good can accommodate “rational regret” as well as pluralistic theories.  But it might be, and indeed has been, argued (by, in particular, Stocker (Plural and Conflicting Values)) that, insofar as different intrinsic properties can be distinct in the way that matters for rational regret, we can think of the different properties as tied to different values, and so we do not have a case of rational ‘monistic’ regret.  And here we seem to reach a stalemate grounded in what seems to be something like a terminological issue, namely whether to count a theory of the good that takes say, pleasure, as the only good as monistic, if it also allows for distinct kinds of pleasure that make room for rational regret.  I am trying to develop a position that gets beyond this stalemate, but am now wondering whether my characterization of stalemate seems fair or if there is a better interpretation of the dynamic of the debate that makes the dispute seem more substantial.  

 

Call for Abstracts: Tennessee Value and Agency Conference

Tennessee Value and Agency “TVA” Conference

2014 Conference – November 6-9, 2014
Practical Reason, Moral Judgment and Moral Sense, Sensibility and Sentiment in the Moral Life

Call For Abstracts

The 2014 Tennessee Value and Agency “TVA” Conference will take place November 6-9, 2014, on the University of Tennessee Campus, 1210 McClung Tower.  The conference will focus on (rethinking) the relationships between practical reason, moral judgment and moral sense, sensibility and sentiment in the moral life, with an eye toward bringing structure and clarity to the aims and ambitions of current work in moral psychology and moral theory.  Keynote speakers will be Amelie Rorty (Tufts) and Talbot Brewer (UVA). 

A Bleg: Normative Requirements regarding Intention

Many philosophers (such as J. H. Sobel, R. J. Wallace, G. Harman, M. Bratman, and J. D. Velleman) endorse something along the lines of the following normative requirement regarding intention:

R1: It is impermissible/irrational for S both to intend to X and to believe that she will not X (even if she intends to X).

And I think that most (all?) philosophers endorse something along the lines of this requirement of instrumental rationality:

R2: It is impermissible/irrational for S to intend to Y, believe that X-ing is a necessary means to Y-ing, but not intend to X.

But are there any philosophers who endorse the following requirement?

The Self-Torturer and Instrumental Rationality

Warren Quinn’s puzzle of the self-torturer is supposed to show that cyclic preferences can be rational, and that, in cases where they are, rationality can require resoluteness so that the agent does not end up with an alternative that is worse than the one with which s/he started. 

As Quinn makes explicit, his concern is with instrumental rationality.  It is thus natural to interpret Quinn’s use of “worse” as “worse, relative to the agent’s preferences.”  But how is “X is worse than Y, relative to the agent’s preferences” to be understood when X and Y are part of a preference cycle?

A Possibly New Take on Newcomb’s Problem

Consider Newcomb’s Problem: “A psychology professor at your school has a reputation for being brilliant as well as possessed of an enormous fortune she has dedicated to her research. One day you get a request to report to her office at a certain hour. On a table are two boxes. One of them, labeled A, is transparent; in it you can see an enormous pile of $100 bills. The other, labeled B, is opaque. She tells you that there is $10,000 in transparent box A and that in box B there is either $1,000,000 or nothing. She tells you that she is going to give you a choice between:"

Moral Uncertainty and Motivation

Brian Weatherson has posted a new paper in which he argues against "moral hedging" -- roughly, refraining from A-ing on the grounds that there's a non-zero probability that A-ing is wrong and a zero probability that not A-ing is wrong. I'd like to explain why I think his central argument fails, and hear what y'all have to say both about that argument and about the issue in general. 

The argument is that one cannot hedge without exhibiting unseemly motivations in so doing, and so one ought not to hedge. Specifically, Weatherson says, one cannot hedge without thereby being motivated to avoid wrongdoing as such. He asks us to imagine a person who has some credence that eating meat is wrong, and so refrains from eating meat. The content of her ultimate motivation cannot be to refrain from subsidizing the killing of cows, since she does not (fully) believe that this is wrong; rather, it must be to refrain from doing what's morally wrong (whatever that happens to be). 

Options, Actions, and Indeterminism

It is fairly common to give a conditional analysis of an option, e.g.:

(CAO) Performing an act X at a future time t1 is an option for a subject S at the present time t0 if and only if S would perform X at t1 if S were to intend (to try, to decide, or to choose) at t0 to perform X at t1.

I know that there are a host of problems with such conditional analyses, but let’s set those aside for the moment, for I want to address what seems to be an unappreciated worry concerning the possibility of indeterminism.