PEA Soup

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.

Explaining Blame and Forgiveness (by Featured Philosopher Miranda Fricker)

I am pleased to introduce the next PEA Soup Featured Philosopher, Miranda Fricker.  Profesor Fricker is currently the Director of the Mind Association, the author of the insightful and very influential book, Epistemic Injustice, and she is posting today about her next book project.  Please feel free to add comments or questions below!

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Thanks for inviting me to contribute! I’d like to put forward one or two of the main lines of thought for a book project I’m working on—Explaining Blame and Forgiveness. My main point will be about the surprisingly close relation between two apparently very different kinds of forgiveness; but first I need to say something about philosophical method, and to summarise a view of blame that I’ve put forward elsewhere.[1]

Virtue and Right Revisited (by Featured Philosopher, Robert N. Johnson)

Some time ago I argued that a problem with a certain sort of virtue ethics might not be fixable (in “Virtue and Right”). The banner ‘virtue ethics’ covers a variety of views united by not much more than the thought that ethics is in some way or other best approached through the idea of good character and virtue. My arguments set aside many of those views, especially those that, while giving pride of place to virtue, adopt a ‘no theory’ or ‘anti-theory’ stance toward the right. If you are anti-theory, then my train didn’t leave the station. Indeed, perhaps the best version of virtue ethics is one that turns its back on a theory of the right. But the sorts of views I was interested in thinking about were those that aspire to such a theory in order to create an alternative to deontological or consequentialist theories of right action.

Second-Personal Attitudes of the Heart (by Featured Philosopher, Steve Darwall)

Over the last decade, I have been developing an interconnected set of claims and arguments concerning the second-personal character of central moral phenomena.  My focus has been the deontic moral notions of obligation, duty, right, wrong, rights, and so on, which I have argued are distinguished by their conceptual connection to accountability and to the Strawsonian reactive attitudes through which we hold one another and ourselves answerable (Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment”).  Two central tenets are, first, that it is a conceptual truth that an act is wrong if, and only if, it is an act of a kind that it would blameworthy to perform without excuse.  (Since all other deontic notions can be defined in terms of wrongness (and wronging), this means that all deontic ideas are tied to blameworthiness.)  Second, blame is a reactive attitude that implicitly addresses a demand to its object, presupposes the authority to do so, and bids for its object to acknowledge this authority and hold himself accountable for his action.  It is the implicit element of address that makes reactive attitudes second personal (or, as Strawson says, “interpersonal”).  Reactive attitudes are felt from a presupposed perspective of relationship (better, relating) to their objects.

More recently, I have begun to do some work on a group of reactive attitudes that have the same second-personal, reciprocation-seeking structure, but that are unlike accountability-seeking deontic reactive attitudes like blame, resentment, and guilt. 

Next Featured Philosopher: Charles Mills

I am happy to announce that our next featured philosopher, Charles Mills, will have a post up on PEA soup a week from today.  Professor Mills is the John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern and his post will be titled "Black Radical Liberalism (and why it isn't an oxymoron)."  Please stop by next Monday to read the post and join the discussion!

Coming Featured Philosophers

Happy New Year!

I am happy to share the planned Spring/Summer line up of Featured Philosophers you can look forward to on PEA Soup.  One goal is for the series to reflect diverse people and topics and this list includes people working on (at least!) history, political philosophy, normative ethics, meta-ethics, criticial race theory, and at the intersection of ethics and epistemology. If you have any suggestions for future additions to the series, please don't hesitate to email me at bradcokelet [at] gmail [dot] com

 

Jan 15ish  Terence Cuneo (U Vermont)

Feb 16      Charles Mills (Northwestern)

Mar 15      TBA

Apr 5        Steve Darwall (Yale)

Apr 27      Robert Johnson (U Missouri)

May 15      Miranda Fricker (Sheffield)

June 15     Stephen Macedo (Princeton)

July 5       John Deigh (U Texas)

July 30     Kyla Ebbels-Duggan (Northwestern)

Aug 15      Pamela Hieronymi (UCLA)

CFP on Eudaimonia and Virtue

Call for Papers

Eudaimonia and Virtue: Rethinking the Good Life

University of Miami, February 25th-27th, 2011

Many ancient philosophers argued that our thinking and behavior should be grounded in a conception of eudaimonia, or human flourishing and virtue, instead of, for example, a hedonistic conception of happiness or a subjective conception of well-being. A growing number of contemporary psychologists and philosophers think that there is something deeply correct about this general eudaimonist approach, even if we may not fully accept all of the specific arguments and views propounded, for example, by Aristotle and the Stoics. 

CFP: Philosophic Methodology Conference

The UT-Austin philosophy department is pleased to announce a week-long graduate student workshop on philosophical methodology, August 12 – August 16.

Possible workshop subtopics include (but are not limited to) intuition, conceptual analysis, reflective equilibrium, reduction, and ontological commitment.

Already confirmed speakers include Julia Driver (Dartmouth), Marc Moffett (Wyoming), Roy Sorensen (Dartmouth), Ernest Sosa (Rutgers), and a number of UT faculty.

We hope to accept around 10 outside graduate student participants.  If you are interested in applying, please see the website for details.