PEA Soup

The Morality of Library Fines

My local library fines its patrons ten cents per overdue book per day. They will let you continue to borrow books as long as your fine balance is less than $10. As an academic, I sort of think of library fines as a cost of doing business, and I frequently carry a balance in library fines of a few dollars. (To be clear: I mostly incur these fines on books taken out for pleasure reading. What I mean is that I don’t have a moralistic attitude about my library fines.) Since there are no interest charges or time limits, I can carry such a balance for months on end. I’m following the rules, not cheating anyone, and I have never felt bad about my habit of being a few bucks in debt to the library.

New Videos on Character and Virtue

As one of the final outputs of the Character Project at Wake Forest University (www.thecharacterproject.com), we have produced a number of new videos featuring researchers in philosophy, theology, and psychology.

One set of videos is from our final conference in May, 2015. Speakers include Neil Levy, Valerie Tiberius, Gopal Sreenivasan, Tanya Chartrand and Korrina Duffy, William Fleeson, Dan Batson, Christian Miller, Andrea Glenn, Daryl Cameron, and Jen Wright and Thomas Nadelhoffer. See http://www.thecharacterproject.com/videos.php?y=2015

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.  

 

New Videos on Character

The Character Project at Wake Forest University (http://thecharacterproject.com/) is pleased to announce five new videos by researchers in philosophy, psychology, and theology describing their latest work on character as part of our "In Character" series. In philosophy specifically, Professors Jessica Wolfendale and Matthew Talbert discuss situationism, moral responsibility, and war crimes. Professors Nathan King and Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij discuss several important issues in virtue epistemology.

The Self, Motivation & Virtue Project

(Posted on Behalf of Nancy Snow)

Request for Proposals: The Self, Motivation & Virtue Project

Marquette University, with a generous grant from the Templeton Religion Trust, is pleased to announce a new research initiative on the topics of the self, motivation, and virtue. Approximately ten research proposals at $190,000 each will be funded through this initiative.

Korsgaard's Good Dog

Happy Bastille Day! One more post for N and M month.

Some Kantians make a lot of the fact that often, when we are being moral, we don’t feel like we want to do the right thing, but we do it. Korsgaard openly ridicules the view that a good person actually wants to do the right thing,  calling it “the good dog” picture of the virtuous person. Suppose we want to say desire is the source of all worthy motivation. We then need to explain why doing the right because you desire the right can feel so damn different from drinking coffee because you desire coffee.

I’ll try and sketch an explanation, and incidentally defend both happy, doglike good-doing (sometimes) and dour good-doing (sometimes).

Announcing the Developing Character Project

Thanks to a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation, we are pleased to announce the launch of the Developing Character Project. The project builds on the work during the past three years of the Character Project based at Wake Forest University. The primary goal of the Developing Character Project is to disseminate the results of our previous work to a larger academic and popular audience. More details can be found here:

http://news.wfu.edu/2013/11/05/character-study/
http://www.thecharacterproject.com/

Please feel free to send any questions or comments to [email protected].

Character Project's Essay and Book Prize Winners

The Character Project (www.thecharacterproject.com) is happy to formally announce the winners of our Essay and Book Prize Competition. In philosophy the winners included Tom Hurka and Iskra Fileva. Please be sure to congratulate them!

http://news.wfu.edu/2013/06/18/a-good-character-summer-reading-list/

 

Silence as a virtue?

Hello all. In the spirit of more spontaneous posts on PEA Soup, I'd like to share some thoughts and ask some questions about virtue ethics, an area in which I have little expertise but which I've been wanting to get to know better, and ancient philosophy, also not an area of specialization but one which I've just now dabbled in (but not in the way or in the area most would expect).