PEA Soup

Commonsense Consequentialism: A Bleg for Comments

Currently, I’m working on a book entitled Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality. (Click on the link to be taken to a web site where you can download individual chapters.) The book is on morality, rationality, and the interconnections between the two. In it, I defend a version of consequentialism that both comports with our commonsense moral intuitions and shares with other consequentialist theories the same compelling teleological conception of practical reasons. I have a complete draft of the book finished, but I’m still in the process of revising it. I have promised to submit it by the end of this coming January. I would be very grateful, then, to those who have the time to read it (or any portion of it) and give me comments before then, as this would be of tremendous help to me in revising it. Comments, questions, and/or criticisms can be posted here or sent to me at douglas.portmore@asu.edu. Below the fold, I include the table of comments followed by a brief synopsis of each chapter.

Moral discourse, speech acts, and the "by" relation

Jamie and Mark have already had some very helpful things to say about this in email correspondence. I wanted to open up the discussion and see what others think.

The proposal is to understand moral utterances along the following lines, what we might call the "layered speech-act model" of moral discourse. There are at least two versions of it:

• (V1) When you say 'X is good', you assert that X is good by approving (or: expressing approval) of X.
• (V2) When you say 'X is good', you express approval of X by asserting that X is good.

You perform one speech act by performing another.

Details remain to be worked out, but the initial hope is two-fold. First, that by layering assertion and approval this way, it integrates the intuitive truth-aptness and motivational dimension of moral discourse. Second, that it avoids embedding problems, because it can rely on the logical properties of the propositions asserted.

Any such proposal faces at least three serious questions initially.

• (Q1) Is it ad hoc?
• (Q2) Does it reinvent the wheel?
• (Q3) Can it deliver on the anticipated benefits?

I think the answer to Q1 is clearly 'no'. Elsewhere the "by" relation does indeed layer speech acts as posited here. Answering Q3 will require actually filling in the details, making it clear how either V1 or V2 (or some other layered pair) delivers the goods. I've only indicated in the sketchiest terms how that might go. As for Q2, as best I can tell, no one has explicitly framed matters the way I have here. But perhaps it's appropriate to interpret others as saying basically the same thing in other words.

Anyway, I'd be very pleased to hear what you think about any of the proposals or questions.

Stanford Post-Docs

The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society and the Program on Global Justice seek up to three post-doctoral fellows for 2010-11.

Subjective Utilitarianism: What is it good for? – Absolutely Nothing

Suppose that a subject, S, is in some less-than-ideal epistemic position with respect to both the relevant normative facts and the relevant non-normative facts – that is, assume that S faces both normative uncertainty (i.e., uncertainty about the relevant normative facts) and non-normative uncertainty (i.e., uncertainty about the relevant non-normative facts). Yet S must still choose which of the mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive act alternatives available to her to perform. Call this S’s choice situation.

Theories about what S ought to do in her choice situation fall into one of the following three categories:

Postdoc opportunity

Liz Harman asked me to post the following announcement:

To those on the job market, and those with students on the job market:

Anyone who does ethics should seriously consider applying for the Harold T. Schapiro Postdoctoral Fellowship in Bioethics at Princeton. The ad says (and we really mean it) "an applicant may have a background in any area of ethical studies, not necessarily in bioethics." The application requires a 1,500-word research proposal, so you do have to have in mind a serious research project in bioethics. But you do not have to already be doing bioethics! Princeton is a wonderful place to spend one to three years! Please feel free to email me if you have specific questions about the postdoc.
Best,
Liz

Elizabeth Harman

eharman@princeton.edu

Smilansky's non-punishment paradox

Saul Smilansky's 10 Moral Paradoxes is a delightful book. The paradoxes are easy to appreciate and though it's written in a light and accessible style, it still has plenty of philosophical heft.

I'm intrigued by the paradox Smilansky labels the non-punishment paradox. Here's the gist:

CFP: SLACRR

John Brunero and I are organizing an annual workshop on Reasons and Rationality to be held at the University of Missouri - St. Louis.   This will take place right after your spring semester is over, and right before your summer vacation begins.  I hope some PEA Soupers can come!

CALL FOR PAPERS

St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality

The first St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality (SLACRR, pronounced (slăk΄ r)) will take place May 23-25, 2010 at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.  The conference is designed to provide a forum for new work on practical and theoretical reason, broadly construed.  Please submit an abstract of 500-1000 words by December 31, 2009 to SLACRR@gmail.com. (In writing your abstract, please bear in mind that full papers should suitable for a 30 minute presentation.) We are also interested in finding commentators for papers, so please let us know if you would have an interest in commenting.   

 

The Conference will include 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 (desires, intentions, etc.) 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?

Of course, this is just a small sample of questions; we hope to include a wide variety of papers on the Conference Program that deal in some way with reasons, reasoning or rationality.   Further questions can also be directed to either John Brunero (bruneroj@umsl.edu) or Eric Wiland (wiland@umsl.edu).

Faculty Fellowships

“The Murphy Institute’s Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at Tulane University is pleased to announce residential Faculty Fellowships for the 2010-2011 academic year. These fellowships, made possible by funds from the Tulane Murphy Foundation, are available to support outstanding faculty whose teaching and research focus on ethics, political philosophy, or questions of moral choice in areas such as, but not restricted to, architecture, business, government, law, medicine and environmental policy.” Get the application (due 11/17/09) and read the full announcement here, and see my post from last year for some further details of which I have first-hand knowledge.

Arguments from Disagreement

There is a powerful argument that is frequently used in metaethics (and elsewhere). It’s based on the idea that disagreement requires shared concepts. Thus, by looking at who we can intuitively disagree with we can determine who we share our concepts with. And, in when it comes to morality, it seems we can disagree with people who classify very different things under moral terms. As a result, it is argued, ethical terms cannot have ‘descriptive content’. I used to think that this great argument works. Today I’m feeling less certain about this and I’d like to hear about your thoughts. Here is why.

Virtue Ethics and the Analysis of Right and Wrong Action

Five years ago I was up-to-date on virtue ethics.  I've been ignoring it for a few years, so please forgive me if what I'm about to say is old news.

Rosalind Hursthouse argues: "An action is right iff it is what a virtuous agent would characteristically do in the circumstances, except for in tragic dilemmas, in which a decision is right if it is what the agent would choose, but the action decided upon may be too terrible to be deemed right or good."

One traditional worry with this is a variation of the Euthyphro problem: Does the virtuous agent perform the action because it's right or is it right because the virtuous agent would do it.  Hursthouse takes the first horn of the dilemma and tries to argue that this is not a problem for virtue ethics.

However, I think that the analysis of right action is mistaken.  There are (I think) counterexamples.