PEA Soup

Do we have Vague Projects?

Tenenbaum and Raffman (2012) claim that "most of our projects and ends are vague." (p.99)  But I'm not convinced that any plausibly are.  On my own blog, I recently discussed the self-torturer case, and how our interest in avoiding pain is not vague but merely graded.  I think similar things can be said of other putative "vague" projects.

T&R's central example of a vague project is writing a book:

Suppose you are writing a book. The success of your project is vague along many dimensions. What counts as a sufficiently good book is vague, what counts as an acceptable length of time to complete it is vague, and so on. (p.99)

But it strikes me as strange for one's goal to be to reach some vague level of sufficiency.  When I imagine writing a book, my preferences here are graded: each incremental improvement in quality is pro tanto desirable; each reduction in time spent is also pro tanto desirable.  These two goals seem like they should be able to be traded off against each other -- perhaps precisely, or (if they are not perfectly commensurable goods) then perhaps not, but this sort of rough incomparability between two goods is (I take it) not the same as either good itself being vague.

 

I could imagine a cynical person who really doesn't care to improve the quality of their book above a sufficient level.  Perhaps they just want it to be of sufficient quality to earn a promotion, or some other positive social appraisal.  But these desired consequences are even more clearly not vague.

Objective and subjective akrasia

Suppose that there is both an objective ‘ought’ and a subjective ‘ought’. Which of these two kinds of ‘ought’ figures in the anti-akrasia principle that it is irrational to do something at the same time as believing that one ought not to do it?

There is a simple of way of understanding the relation between the objective and the subjective ‘ought’ on which the answer to this question is: Both! It is irrational to do something at the same time as believing that one objectively ought not to do it; and it is also irrational to do something at the same time as believing that one subjectively ought not to do it.

(Note: The original version of this post contained a terrible mistake, which was pointed out by Doug Portmore and Jamie Dreier in their comments below. This is an amended version, without the mistake.)

Conference: Practical Reason and Metaethics April 21-23

John Brunero and I are running a conference on Practical Reason and Metaethics, here in Lincoln, Nebraska on April 21st to 23rd. Speakers include Michael Bratman (Stanford), Stephen Darwall (Yale), Jonathan Drake (Texas), Amelia Hicks (Kansas State), Chris Howard (Arizona), Sarah McGrath (Princeton), Barry Maguire (UNC), and Sigrún Svavarsdóttir (Tufts). There were over 75 submissions for the refereed program and we expect it to be a very good conference.

There will be a free conference dinner Friday night and a party Saturday, so please register if you are coming by sending an email to [email protected] stating that you plan on attending. There's no fee to attend. 

The conference website is https://sites.google.com/site/practicalreasonandmetaethics/. Further information and the schedule is below the fold.

SLACRR 2016 Program

Registering for the St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality is free and easy: http://www.umsl.edu/~slacrr/registration.html

 

SLACRR 2016 Program

All talks are in the Moonrise Hotel. 

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SLACRR 2016: Call for abstracts

SLACRR: May 22-24, 2016 

Keynote Speaker: 
Paul Boghossian (NYU)

St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality provides a forum for new work on practical and theoretical reason, broadly construed. Please submit an anonymized abstract of 750-1500 words by January 15, 2016 to [email protected]. In writing your abstract, please bear in mind that full papers should be suitable for a 30 minute presentation. Please attach your abstract as a pdf file, the name of which should be based upon the title of your abstract.  (In other words, don't name your file FILE.pdf or ABSTRACT.pdf)

What to Submit

SLACRR includes papers in ethics, epistemology, and other areas of philosophy that deal with reasons, reasoning, or rationality. For instance, we would be interested in papers exploring such questions as:

• What is the relation between reasons for actions and reasons for beliefs?
• What are the sources of our reasons for belief?
• How are features of one's psychology relevant to reasons? 
• What is the relation between reasons and what we ought to do or believe?
• What is the relation between reasons and value?
• Are the requirements of practical and theoretical rationality normative? 
• What is the relation between individual rationality and collective rationality?
• Are actions or beliefs themselves structured by reasons?

Of course, this is just a small sample of questions. Further questions can also be directed to Eric Wiland, Julia Staffel, Kathryn Lindeman, or to [email protected]

 

Conference/CFP: Practical Reason and Metaethics

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln is hosting a conference on Practical Reason and Metaethics to be held April 22-23, 2016.  The invited speakers on the conference program are:

• Michael Bratman  (Stanford)

• Stephen Darwall  (Yale)

• Sarah McGrath  (Princeton)

• Sigrún Svavarsdóttir  (Tufts)

Call for Papers: Four additional papers will be selected though an anonymous review of submissions.  For each paper selected, the conference will contribute up to $800 to cover the travel and accommodations of the authors. Submissions are due December 1, 2015. More info below the fold.

Oxford Studies discussions at PEA Soup: John Brunero's "Cognitivism about Practical Rationality," with commentary by Kieran Setiya

Welcome to our first Oxford Studies discussion, on John Brunero's "Cognitivism about Practical Rationality" (in OSME 9). The essay is available through this link for a few months, courtesy of OUP. Kieran Setiya has kindly contributed a commentary, below the fold. Please join us!

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.  

 

Call for Abstracts: SLACRR 6

Call for Abstracts: SLACRR 6

I'm pleased to announce a call for abstracts for the next St. Louis Conference on Reasons and Rationality, sponsored by UMSL, Washington University, and Saint Louis University. Many PEA Soupers have participated the past five years.

May 17 – 19, 2015

Keynote Speaker:

Pamela Hieronymi (UCLA)

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.