PEA Soup

Featured Philosopher: Sharon Street

Hi all -

 

Very happy to have Sharon Street joining us at PEA Soup for a stint in the Featured Philosophers chair!  Sharon is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Philosophy at NYU.  She provides a very helpful introduction to her work below the fold.  Please join me in welcoming Sharon!

-dd

Featured Philosopher: Elizabeth Anderson

Hi all -

I'm very pleased to welcome Elizabeth Anderson to PEA Soup for a round of featured philosophizing.  Liz is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, and is an extremely exciting figure in political philosophy and ethics more generally.  We're very happy to have her here!  Her post is below the fold.

-dd

Featured Philosopher: Sally Haslanger

Hi all!  It's a great pleasure to welcome Sally Haslanger to the Soup for a stint as Featured Philosopher.  As Sally does a great job summarizing some of her recent work below, I'm going to lay off here.  Suffice it to say, we're all very excited, and looking forward to a lively discussion!

 

-dd

Featured Philosopher: David Enoch

Hi all,

I'm pleased to introduce the next Featured Philosopher: David Enoch!  We're all very excited that David agreed to participate.  I'm going to let him talk for himself after the jump, so without further ado, please welcome David!

-dd

Featured Philosopher: T.M. Scanlon

Hello all,

It's very exciting for all of us at the Soup, and a true honor for me, to introduce T.M. Scanlon as this week's featured philosopher.  Tim certainly needs no introduction to the PEA Soup crowd, as his work in moral philosophy has been truly agenda-setting.  Therefore, I think I'll simply get out of the way, and let his post---which begins below the fold---speak for itself.  Without further ado, then, please welcome T.M. Scanlon!

dd

Featured Philosopher: Tom Hurka (Part 1)

Hello all.  It's my supreme pleasure to introduce our inaugural featured philosopher: Tom Hurka!  I'm especially pleased because Tom has agreed to do not one but TWO posts on his current thinking.  His first starts below the fold.  (Second to follow on Friday.)

Tom certainly needs no introduction, but just a cursory glance at his body of work shows that he's clearly one of the top moral philosophers of our time.  His work on value theory, including Perfectionism; Virtue, Vice, and Value; and The Best Things in Life have certainly influenced the thinking of countless Soupers and others, including myself.  I'm tempted to say a lot more, but I don't want to dilute his post with my blathering.  So, without further ado, I'm very happy to introduce our first featured philosopher, and one of my philosophical heroes: Tom Hurka.

-dd

The Two Desire-Satisfaction Views

I've recently been mulling over what seems to be a disagreement between desire-satisfaction view theorists about the proper way to formulate a desire-satisfaction view about well-being.  (This thought has been inspired by discussions I've had on this blog with Chris Heathwood and Doug Portmore, and my recent unhealthy obsession with Ben Bradley's book "Well-Being and Death" which I recommend to any and all.)  Briefly, I thought I'd lay out the two proposed options and the plusses and minuses of both and ask everybody for some input: which one do you prefer?  Are there other arguments in favor of either side that I'm missing?

Well-being and Coherence

I'm attracted to a view of well-being with (roughly) the following structure: x is intrinsically good for y if and only if y believes that x is intrinsically good for y (under the right conditions, such as a coherent belief set).  In other words, there is nothing more to something's being good for x than for x to believe that it is good for her.  The closest cousin of this view is a desire-satisfaction view, which holds (again, very roughly, and leaving out all sorts of bells and whistles) that x is intrinsically good for y if and only if y desires x (under the right conditions, such as full-information, say).  I think the belief formulation can plausibly respond to several worries that plague desire accounts (such as the so-called "paradox of desire" and the problem of welfare-irrelevant desires, etc.).  But the view to which I'm attracted (call it, for lack of anything better, "belief-ism") faces an immediate and substantial hurdle: semantic circularity.  It looks as though the analysis of "intrinsically good" or "prudentially valuable", etc., is given in terms of the concept it purports to be analyzing.  Below the fold, I want to try out one possible response to this worry.

Personal Constraints?

A personal constraint is a constraint on action that arises from certain associative relations, such as kinship, friendship, etc. Typically, they are injunctions to treat one's personal relations with a certain form of priority over strangers even if, for instance, not doing so would promote more good overall. One could construe this as a constraint on rational action, viz., that any action that disobeyed such a constraint is all-things-considered irrational, or as a moral constraint, that any action that disobeyed such a constraint is all-things-considered immoral. (I'll leave this question open.) Personal constraints differ from personal options. I might have an option to treat my wife with a certain priority in the face of a greater good elsewhere, but I need not do so--in a conflict case I could also be justified in acting for the greater good. Personal constraints deny that one can be justified in refusing to act with priority to one's associates. Do such constraints exist? I want very briefly to run an argument up the flagpole that they do not.

Perfectionism, Hedonism, and Hume

Dale Miller's recent post on Mill's theory of value (and subsequent discussion) was quite enlightening. And it set me thinkin' about qualitative hedonism and perfectionism, and in particular the relationship between them. During our previous discussion, we appeared to be treating "Mill is a hedonist" and "Mill is a perfectionist" as mutually exclusive (or, at least, I was). I wonder if this isn't a mistake. And I wonder if it isn't possible to read one of Mill's sentimentalist forbears, viz., David Hume, as a person who holds both views. (Sorry, this post might be a little long. And sorry also if it reads like a collection of notes scribbled on a napkin; basically, it is.)