PEA Soup

New Methods of Ethics 1 Programme

HERE is the programme of the first New Methods of Ethics Conference, which will be held here at the University of Birmingham in September (15th and 16th). The conference is free and open to all, but please book a place by emailing me ([email protected]) as there are limited places available.  If you have any questions about attending the conference, feel free to email me at any point. The programme for the second conference in January will follow shortly.

CfA: The New Methods of Ethics

I am organising two conferences here at Birmingham on the methods of moral philosophy. The first one of these will take place on the 15th and 16th of September 2016 and the keynote speakers at this conference will be Antti Kauppinen (Tampere), Shaun Nichols (Arizona), and Catherine Wilson (York). The second conference will be on the 4th and 5th of January 2017 with the keynotes from Tristram McPherson (Ohio State), Valerie Tiberius (Minnesota), and Ralph Wedgwood (USC). In addition to the keynote speakers, four speakers for both conferences will be selected on the basis of the submitted abstracts. More information about the conferences and the call for abstracts can be found from below. The deadline for the abstracts will be on the 15th of May.

CFA: Topics in Global Justice: Agency, Power and Policy

The second annual conference of the Centre for the Study of Global Ethics in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham welcomes submissions on any topic related to global ethics, but will prioritize work focusing on the 2016 theme of agency, power, and policy. The conference itself will be on 26.-27. 5. 2016, and the deadline for abstracts 1 November, 2015. Full details below.

JESP discussions at PEA Soup: Matt King's "Manipulation Arguments and the Moral Standing to Blame" with a Critical Précis from Patrick Todd

Welcome everyone to PEA Soup's second JESP discussion. The target article this time is Matt King's (University of Alabama, Birmingham) recent "Manipulation Arguments and the Moral Standing to Blame", which is a very interesting exploration of when we (and God) are in a position to blame other people and what implications such considerations have for more general debates about moral responsibility. To kick things off, below is Patrick Todd's (Edinburgh) helpful critical introduction. It is very illuminating especially because the target article itself is in part a critical discussion of Patrick's 2012 Phil Imprint article "Manipulation and Moral Standing: an Argument for Incompatibilism". 

Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy Discussion - 24 August

I'm pleased to announce the second discussion of a Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy (JESP) article here at PEA Soup. The article in question will be Matt King's (University of Alabama at Birmingham) "Manipulation Arguments and the Moral Standing to Blame". It is, of course, freely available from JESP's website (just follow the previous link in the article's title). This article investigates what types of considerations can undermine our standing to blame other people and it also argues that the general truth of determinism would not belong to these considerations. To start off the discussion, Patrick Todd (University of Edinburgh) has promised to write a short critical summary, which will be available here on PEA Soup on Monday the 24th of August, 2015. This response will be especially interesting because King's paper is largely a critical investigation of Todd's own 2012 Philosophers' Imprint paper "Manipulation and Moral Standing: an Argument for Incompatibilism". We are all very much looking forward to this discussion and we hope that you can take part in the discussion too!

Smith's Objection to Buck-Passing

I very much love Michael Smith’s recent paper “A Constitutivist Theory of Reasons: Its Promise and Parts” (Law, Ethics and Philosophy 2013, also available on his website). One thing that strikes me about this paper is that, whilst discussing Parfit’s views on practical reasons, Smith seems to also create a powerful objection to the buck-passing views of value, which at least to me seems original and something that hasn’t been discussed in the vast buck-passing literature before. So, what I want to do below is to outline this argument briefly and then introduce some of the ways this argument could be resisted. For what it’s worth, my own commitment to buck-passing might be getting weaker because of this argument.

Normative Beliefs and Epistemic Norms

As a part of a paper I am working on (very early stages and so the rest will be very sketchy), I would like to argue that different epistemic norms govern normative beliefs and other beliefs with ordinary, purely naturalist contents. By epistemic norms I mean norms that describe what type of evidence and defeaters are canonically relevant for when you can hold the beliefs in question with warrant. It seems to me that there is an interesting asymmetry between the evidence and defeaters that are relevant for holding normative beliefs with warrant and the ones that are relevant for other beliefs with ordinary, purely naturalist contents. I’ll briefly explain this asymmetry below. I would like some help from the readers of this blog with regards to questions about whether this asymmetry is plausible, whether these norms could be different in some other ways and especially whether there is any literature I could draw from.

Climate Change, Broome and the Third Alternative

I’m preparing a course on climate change ethics and as a part of this I am reading again John Broome’s fascinating Climate Matters – Ethics in a Warming World book. One thing Broome does in this book is to offer a new third alternative in addition to the familiar options of doing nothing and bearing the costs of climate change mitigation and adaptation. He claims that this alternative is not morally ideal, but it is possible and perhaps more likely to gain political support for the efforts that are needed for avoiding catastrophic climate change outcomes. Here I want to quickly explain all of this and then ask a question about this possibility.

Call for Abstracts: Second Workshop on Ethics and Adaptation

Ken Shockey from the University of Buffalo asked me to post the following call for abstracts for a workshop on Loss, Damage and Harm. This workshop will be held on 8th and 9th of May 2015 at the University of Buffalo, and the deadline for 500 word abstracts is on the 15th of November, 2014. There is more information about the workshop below.

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.