PEA Soup

New Blog: Normlessness and Nihilism

Hi everyone. I've started a blog to workshop some ideas connected to my manuscript-in-progress, which I'm currently calling Normlessness and Nihilism. I'm at the very early stages of writing, and would very much welcome your comments and suggestions. My plan is to write 1-2 posts per week. The blog is HERE.

Expressivism, Subjectivism and Reasons

This post will be difficult to write as I’ll have to reign in my frustrations (I was thinking of calling this ‘Must Do Better’ or ‘All Souls Night, Part II’…). I’ve been reading Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek’s and Peter Singer’s The Point of View of the Universe – Sidgwick & Contemporary Ethics. Chapter 2 (sections 2–4) of this book contains a ‘Parfit-inspired’ criticism of expressivism and Blackburn, which I find quite upsetting. It makes me feel sad for Simon Blackburn (he really must get tired of objections like this) and it also makes me wonder about OUP’s editorial processes (I don’t see how this section could pass a peer-reviewed journal). In any case, here I want to start from a very basic distinction and then go through quickly some of the fairly outrageous claims de Lazari-Radek and Singer make about expressivism.

Character Project's Essay and Book Prize Winners

The Character Project (www.thecharacterproject.com) is happy to formally announce the winners of our Essay and Book Prize Competition. In philosophy the winners included Tom Hurka and Iskra Fileva. Please be sure to congratulate them!

http://news.wfu.edu/2013/06/18/a-good-character-summer-reading-list/

 

Philosophy in Novels

I know that a lot philosophers I have met and a lot of you who read this blog are avid readers of novels. Because of this, I wanted to post a 'bleg' ('an entry on a blog requesting information or contributions' according to Wiktionary...). I'd like to know of novels that feature philosophers (fictional or actual), philosophical texts and books, or philosophical theories in them. If these are moral philosophers or texts or theories in moral philosophy, even better. You can also post good examples from novels as illustrations of philosophical views if you have come across cool ones recently, or cases in which philosophical views have influenced novels too. I'm more interested in more direct connections however. I'm just going start this off with one example I recently happened to come across. This is Justin Cartwright's 2004 novel The Promise of Happiness in which one of the central characters picks up in the middle of the novel Bernard Williams' Morality: an Introduction to Ethics. After this, he considers events in the novel through discussions of reasons-internalism and utilitarianism. Anyway, I would very interested to hear about other novels like this.

Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism Bleg

Ben Eggleston and I are putting the final touches on the manuscript for The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism, forthcoming from... well, you know. Now that most of the writing and editing is done, we're facing the real hurdle to getting a book published... the marketing questionnaire. One question on this questionnaire asks about courses/modules in which the volume might be used. I'm writing to ask if any SOUPers can volunteer names and numbers of undergraduate or graduate courses/modules at their universities in which this volume might be assigned in full or in part, as either a required or a recommended reading.

Books Received in November

Authors and/or their presses kindly sent at least one of the editors the following books.

Announcing the Character Essay and Book Prize

The Character Project at Wake Forest University is pleased to announce The Character Essay and Book Prize. This prize is aimed at essays or books on character which are accessible to non-academic audiences in venues with a wide readership. The competition will award $3,000 to each winning submission. We aim to make nine awards total. Three awards will be for submissions which address themes related to the psychology of character, three for submissions related to the philosophy of character, and three for submissions related to the theology of character. Winners will be invited (all expenses paid) to the Character Project’s Final Research Conference in June 2013 at the Graylyn International Conference Center in Winston-Salem, NC (http://www.graylyn.com), and awards will be presented at this event. Deadline for submission is February 1, 2013. For further details, please visit: http://www.thecharacterproject.com/prizes.php . The Character Project is funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

APA Book Prize

Congratulations to PEA Soup's Simon Keller for winning this year's APA book prize, for The Limits of Loyalty!  Details here.

Smilansky's non-punishment paradox

Saul Smilansky's 10 Moral Paradoxes is a delightful book. The paradoxes are easy to appreciate and though it's written in a light and accessible style, it still has plenty of philosophical heft.

I'm intrigued by the paradox Smilansky labels the non-punishment paradox. Here's the gist:

Does Benatar's asymmetry argument generalize?

Coming to exist is always a harm. Or so argues David Benatar in his provocative book, Better Never to Have Been.

A central pillar of Benatar's defense of this offputting 'anti-natalist' thesis is what he calls the asymmetry argument (BNHB, p. 30):
Pleasure benefits us and pain harms us.
(1) The presence of pain is bad.
(2) The presence of pleasure is good.
So far, pleasure and pain are symmetrical in their goodness and badness. But they are not symmetrical with respect to their absence.  More specifically:
(3) The absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone, but
(4) The absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody (an actual somebody) who is deprived by its absence.