PEA Soup

On Rage As a Moral Emotion

It is not rare to see groups of enraged people engaged in destructive behavior when you turn on the news these days. Such behavior is puzzling when we think of the agents as rational choosers, since it is often obviously counterproductive. The agents end up in many respects worse off – the neighborhoods that get damaged in riots tend to be the ones rioters live or work in, above all, and violent resistance often invites a brutal response from those who hold the power and control the drones. So what’s the deal with rage? Does it make sense to act out of rage? Can rage be warranted? In this tentative exploration of the issue (I haven’t come across any philosophical literature on it), I’ll argue that it can be, and that when it is, much of the moral responsibility for the wrongful harm that results from acting out of rage belongs to those who have created the rage-warranting situation.

CFP: Ethical Underpinnings of Climate Economics

I was asked to post the following call for papers for a climate change ethics conference that looks very interesting. This is a workshop in Helsinki, Finland (the good old days...) from 11th to 13th of November, 2014. The confirmed keynotes are John Broome (Oxford) and John O'Neill (Manchester). The deadline for abstracts is on the 17th of August. More information below.

Political Utopia: Promise or Peril? Ideal Theory Conference, April 25th-26th, 2014

For those of you interested in nonideal/ideal theory debates in political philosophy, I thought I’d let you know that Bowling Green State University is hosting a conference on the subject in three weeks. Registration is still open if you’re able to attend. We’re hoping to collect the papers in a volume following the conference. The line-up is great, and I expect the papers to advance the discussion.

Conference website here.

Conference flier here.

Two Conferences at Birmingham

My collegue Jeremy Williams is organising two cracking conferences this summer here at Birmingham. The first one of these, Ethics, War and Intervention, will be on Friday the 30th of May. The keynote at this conference will be Jeff McMahan (Rutgers) who will be talking about ‘The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention: With Comments on Syria’. There's also a call for abstracts for this conference (deadline: 21st of March; see more information about this conference HERE). The second conference is called New Directions in Public Reason and this one will be on Monday the 16th and Tuesday the 17th of June. The speakers at this conference include Gerald Gaus (Arizona) and Fabienne Peter (Warwick) amongst others. If you are interested in this conference, please see HERE.

A worry regarding the necessity of defensive force

I've got, well, a worry regarding the "necessity" requirement on the legitimacy of self- or other-defensive force. I don't really work on this stuff, so it's entirely possible that there's an easy, pat answer to this worry. Anyway, I'd be interested to hear what you all think.

Politics Philosophy & Economics Discussions at PEA Soup: AJ Julius's 'The Possibility of Exchange' with précis by Victor Tadros

We are pleased to present our first Politics Philosophy & Economics discussion of AJ Julius's paper 'The Possibility of Exchange'.  Julius's paper is available on open access here.

Victor Tadros, professor at the School of Law, the University of Warwick, is kicking off the discussion with a critical précis. Here now is Victor Tadros:  

What Mary Can Expect When She's Expecting

It is an interesting fact about many of our most important choices, such as the choice of what kind of education to pursue, whether and whom to marry, and whether to have children – for short, life choices – that they transform us in ways we can’t fully anticipate, so that the person who lives with the consequences of the choice won’t be quite the same as the person who makes the choice. Recently, L.A. Paul has argued in a stimulating paper that the existence of such transformative experiences causes serious trouble for rational decision-making. I’ll grant here that her argument is more or less successful to the extent that the phenomenal quality of our experiences is central to the value of a choice or preference among options.

Applied Ethics Journals

This is merely a request for information. I know that there are lots and lots of applied ethics journals covering bioethics, health care ethics, global ethics, environmental ethics, business ethics, health care ethics, ethics of war and conflict and many other types of applied ethics and applied political philosophy, and there are of course general applied ethics journals too. Would anyone know of a somewhat comrehensive list of all these journals? I tried to look for one but couldn't easily find one. Also, is there any kind of ranking of how prestigious and widely read these journals are? The reason I ask is that I see quite a lot of CVs with publications in these journals I never even knew existed and it would be pretty handy to have more information of these venues. It would be useful for many of our students too. Thanks for help in advance if anyone has more information. 

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). 

Schmucks and Philosopher Kings: A Dilemma for Well-Being Policy

It’s fashionable to call for supplementing traditional economic measures with measures targeting the impact of policies on well-being. Leaving aside worries about measuring well-being and implementing policies, a more basic question remains: should the state be in the business of monitoring and promoting people’s well-being in the first place? Call this the Question. I’m going to argue that there’s good reason to answer in the negative: either well-being policy is paternalistic towards the beneficiaries, or it imposes an undue burden on the benefactors. Insofar as we have positive duties toward each other, paternalism is the lesser evil.