PEA Soup

Second Annual Theistic Ethics Workshop

This workshop will be held October 6-8, 2016 at Georgetown University. Invited speakers include Robert and Marilyn Adams, Russ Shafer-Landau, Chris Tucker, and Candace Vogler. The call for abstracts and further details can be found at: http://users.wfu.edu/millerc/Theistic%20Ethics%20Workshop%20Two.html

CFP: Policing and Prisons (November 1st Deadline)

Policing and Prisons: Ethical and Political Questions about Law Enforcement and Incarceration 

The Bowling Green Workshop in Applied Ethics and Public Policy will take place in Bowling Green, Ohio, March 11^th-12^th, 2015. Our keynote speaker is Douglas Husak (Rutgers). Those interested in presenting a paper are invited to submit a 2-3 page abstract (double-spaced) by November 1^st, 2015. 

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.

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.  

 

Do cover letters for journal submissions make any difference?

I'm curious to know whether cover letters that accompany journal submissions make any difference — whether editors read them, whether the letters influence publication decisions, etc. I've always treated this as pro forma: "Dear Editors, Please consider this manuscript for a future issue ofthe journal," etc. But I've had scientists tell me that significant effort goes into crafting their cover letters because the significance of the work may not be obvious. Is that so in philosophy — that explaining the significance of a submission will help its publication chances?

Some thoughts on constructing and justifying semantic and metasemantic theories

Hi, everyone.  Meena Krishnamurthy has very generously allowed me to post a few prelimary thoughts on the above topic and I thought I'd shard the link here to maximize the likelihood that I have a chance to benefit from your comments.  Here's the introduction to the post, as well as the opening paragraph.  For the rest, see here:

http://politicalphilosopher.net/2014/10/10/featured-philosop-her-janice-dowell/

These are a few early-stage thoughts on how we might best construct and justify semantic and metasemantic theories.  My own immediate interest in this topic stems from my interest in assessing rival semantic theories for modal expressions in English, especially deontic ones.  But my hope is that these thoughts are of some interest to those interested in semantic and metasemantic theorizing more broadly, including metaethicists interested in understanding the semantics of normative and evaluative expressions in English.  Comments, questions, and suggestions very welcome.

Constructing and Justifying Semantic and Metasemantic Theories

Recently, there’s been a lot of really interesting work done by philosophers of language and linguists on understanding what sorts of meanings a semantic theory for some natural language, L, should assign the expressions of L. Is the content of a sentence at a context a set of worlds, a set ‘centered’ worlds, a set of probability spaces, a structured proposition, or what? In related debates, metaethicists wonder what sorts of meanings such a theory should assign L’s normative or evaluative expressions. How might we best approach these questions? What constraints, if any, do a plausible metasemantic theory place on good answers to them?  Here are some preliminary thoughts about some of the constraints on constructing plausible semantic and metasemantic theories. (NB: Some of these thoughts are expressed in a forthcoming paper, The Metaethical Insignificance of Moral Twin Earth.  The issues here, though, are not narrowly metaethical, but more broadly methodological ones for semantic and metasemantic theorizing.)

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?

From Ought to Is

Dear Soupers,

Do you enjoy puzzles? Yeah? Well then, let me share one with you.  John Basl (Northeastern University) and I have had some fruitful conversations about it; and we have some views about how to address it (and some views about how not to); but in the spirit of collective inquiry and intellectual theft let me take this opportunity to solicit your initial responses.

The puzzle might be construed either in terms of rationality or theoretical justification, but it is roughly as follows:

 Why are we permitted to revise our moral/normative/evaluative beliefs in light of non-moral beliefs but not vice versa?

Indeed, while it’s clear we are often guilty of sub-consciously shaping the facts to fit our evaluative commitments (e.g. the powerful correlations between political ideology “climate skepticism”, 911 conspiracy theories, and beliefs about the president’s religion and birthplace), we all disavow this a proper way to form our non-moral beliefs.As obvious as this may seem, the puzzle is how to best explain why this is so and then sorting out what the implications may be for meta-ethics, moral epistemology, and even epistemology more generally.... 

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). 

SLACRR 3 - Program

Here are the main speakers at the next St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality, May 20-22, 2012.

Keynote:  Jonathan Dancy (Texas/Reading), "More Right than Wrong"