PEA Soup

'Have' and the reason relation

Clayton posted here and linked from there. I'll post there and link from here.

CEPA Fellowship Deadline Extended

The Murphy Institute's Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at at Tulane University has extended its  deadline to December 8, 2009 for 2010-2011 Faculty Fellowships.

Survey on Publishing In Philosophy

All professional philosophers are invited to participate in a survey on publishing in philosophy.  It should take about 10 minutes.  It will be useful to have your CV handy as you fill it out.  Please go here to find it:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=TXA9uBYCaq4MtU_2bwLhLADQ_3d_3d

If all goes well, Sally Haslanger will report on the results at the December APA in the symposium on philosophy publishing (Wednesday December 30th, 11:15-1:15).

Justified Normative Judgments

Sometimes we believe we ought to do things.  Sometimes we then do them.  I'd love to know how the normative status of normative judgments (which I'm taking to be beliefs about what ought to be done all things considered) are related to the normative status of the things we do.  I think that this is right: if your belief that you ought to Φ is justified, Φ-ing is justified.  (If you ought to believe that you ought to Φ, you really ought to Φ.)  I've written up a short little piece attacking a view (a.k.a., 'The View') that uses some principles I like but uses them for nefarious purposes (attacks on epistemic purism, attacks on views of the ontology of practical reasons that identify them with states of the world or worldly facts).  I've attacked The View before (in 'The Myth of the False, Justified Belief' (here)), but my argument rested on intuitions about the moral significance of facts that an agent is non-culpably ignorant of that some people think are dodgy.  (Fwiw, I've found much better rhetoric to use to get people to have the right intuitions than I used in that paper.)  It can't be that facts you're non-culpably ignorant of determine what your obligation is, if you fail to take account of them, that's just bad luck.  Or something like that.  I'll try something different here and try to hit The View where it hurts.  (Because I know the targets and we seem to be on reasonably friendly terms, I'm a bit more glib than I would be otherwise.  Since they seem to be rather glib in attacking the views I cherish, I hope they'll forgive me as it's clearly not intended to be disrespectful.)

The Next Chapter: Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup

We are very pleased to announce a new partnership between PEA Soup and the distinguished journal, Ethics.  In addition to our regular postings, PEA Soup's editors will select one article from each issue of Ethics to be the focus of a featured discussion on our blog.  Ethics, in turn, will make an on-line copy of the featured article available to our readers for free (for three months).  At the time of the article's publication, we will post a link to the open-access copy, and then a week later an open discussion of it will be introduced with a critical précis by an invited discussant.

We expect that this partnership will give rise to a series of lively and productive conversations.  Stay tuned for details on the first featured article, which will be selected from the next issue of Ethics (Volume 120, Number 1).

Special thanks to everyone at Ethics, especially its Editor, Henry S. Richardson, and Managing Editor, Catherine Galko Campbell, for their help and participation.

Student Involvement in Social Ethics Courses

After teaching mostly theoretical ethics and narrowly focused applied ethics courses for a number of years, I'm now considering developing a syllabus for a course in "Social Ethics."  The standard practice in such courses, and the approach I'm considering adopting, is to pick a number of different issues of social controversy such as abortion, sweatshop labor, etc., and have the students read articles 'pro' and 'con.'  

Such a course seems to present a lot of opportunities for student involvement.  The issues are interesting to them, and the readings tend to be more accessible than, say, Kant's Groundwork.  But what's the best way to incorporate such involvement into the syllabus?  One possibility is to structure the week so that we read a 'pro' article on Monday, a 'con' article on Wednesday, and then have some kind of student discussion or debate on Friday.  Perhaps certain students can even be in charge of presenting the 'pro' and 'con' arguments on Monday and Wednesday.  

I'm curious to hear what other people have tried in a course like this.  What's worked well, and what hasn't?  I'm especially interested in the question of how to get students involved in classroom activity in a pedagogically useful way, but as a secondary matter I'd also be interested in particular topics/articles that have worked well or poorly for you in such a course.

Hyperplans and vagueness

We’ve been having a reading group on Gibbard’s Thinking How to Live. It’s been really interesting to go back to it after there having been so much discussion about it recently. At the heart of Gibbard’s expressivist semantics lie ‘the hyperplans’. This is a technical notion that is supposed to be helpful in elucidating the content of our normative judgments. I’ve started to become worried about whether there are or could be any hyperplans as Gibbard understands them. I’m uncertain about how big of a worry this would be for him. So, after quickly explaining my worry, I’ll leave you with some options about how he might proceed.

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.