February 1, 2010

Leeds Value Concepts Workshop, March 5-6
By Antti Kauppinen

Value Concepts Workshop
University of Leeds
March 5-6, 2010

Matti Eklund (Cornell)
“Misevaluation, Moral Semantics, and Moral Realism”

Janice Dowell (Nebraska)
“A Flexible, Contextualist Account of ‘Ought’”

Antti Kauppinen (Amsterdam)
“A Defence of Moral Invariantism”

Simon Kirchin (Kent)
“Determinables, Determinates, and Thick Concepts”

Daniel Elstein (Leeds)
“Why There Can Be No Good Reason to Accept the Shapelessness Hypothesis”

Debbie Roberts (Reading)
“Evaluation and Variability: Why Thick Concepts Are Not Determinates of the Thin”

More information is available at http://leedsvalueconcepts.wordpress.com/. Registration is free.

Posted on February 1, 2010 at 12:29 pm in Antti Kauppinen's Posts, Metaethics | Leave a Comment

October 5, 2009

Sentimentalism and Moral Grammar
By Antti Kauppinen

In this post, all too long and speculative, I will examine how a sentimentalist theory of moral thinking could exploit and improve recently popular theories of universal moral grammar, developed by John Mikhail, Susan Dwyer, Marc Hauser’s group, Gilbert Harman and Erica Roedder, and others. I’ll be drawing mostly on Mikhail’s 2009 ‘Moral Grammar and Intuitive Jurisprudence’, in Psychology of Learning and Motivation 50, 27–100 for moral grammar. The sentimentalist theory I sketch is my own, though heavily inspired by Adam Smith. It is independently motivated, but I believe it does a better job of explaining our intuitions than other views that highlight the role of emotions.

Read the full post here

Posted on October 5, 2009 at 1:45 pm in Antti Kauppinen's Posts, Experimental Ethics, Moral Psychology, Normative Ethics | 6 Comments

September 19, 2009

Surveying Loose Talk
By Antti Kauppinen

This is the first in a series of posts about recent work in experimental philosophy. I will be examining some persistent general issues with the different experimental approaches by way of looking at particular papers in some detail. I’ll begin with ‘Two Conceptions of Subjective Experience’ by Justin Sytsma and Edouard Machery. The problem that the study highlights is that everyday language is often vague, ambiguous, or just spoken loosely, so that we can’t draw conclusions about people’s concepts just by looking at what they say in response to prompts. We first need to tease out just what people mean, and this can’t be done in a survey that doesn’t allow for a back-and-forth between the researcher and the subject. This would be a problem even if experimentalists solved all the other problems raised by myself and others.

Read the full post here

Posted on September 19, 2009 at 8:59 pm in Antti Kauppinen's Posts, Experimental Philosophy, Philosophical Methods, Philosophy of Mind | 5 Comments

September 15, 2009

Thinking About Reasons
By Antti Kauppinen

Expressivist accounts of normative judgment typically (always?) begin with all-things-considered verdicts: Hurrah (helping old ladies cross the road)! Boo (getting your little brother to murder)! But of course, many normative thoughts are not all-things-considered. I think there is some reason for me to go to bed early, and some reason for me not to do so. When I deliberate, I try to figure out which of these is stronger, and so arrive at an all-things-considered judgment.

Here is a partial list of things that an account of thoughts about reasons should explain:

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Posted on September 15, 2009 at 12:36 am in Antti Kauppinen's Posts, Metaethics, Moral Psychology | 12 Comments

February 8, 2009

Sweating Hard and Hanging Out: The Case for Diachronic Perfectionism
By Antti Kauppinen

Let us loosely define perfectionism as the view that well-being consists in the (enjoyable) exercise of the capacities that are distinctive of one’s biological species. A dog does well when it does the sort of things that exemplify dogness, and we people do best when we make use of our various human capacities – rational, emotional, social, physical, and so on. As Richard Kraut points out in his The Ethics of Well-Being, this need not involve any sort of dubious inference from ‘x is natural’ to ‘x is good’. Rather, perfectionism should be thought of as a theory that best unifies the phenomena we are trying to understand. We have a bunch of intuitions about cases, and perfectionism captures the ones that withstand scrutiny, the argument goes:

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Posted on February 8, 2009 at 1:51 pm in Antti Kauppinen's Posts, Normative Ethics, Value Theory | 19 Comments

January 19, 2009

On Human Shields and Excuses
By Antti Kauppinen

The recent war in Gaza has stimulated a lot of popular discussion about the moral implications of the use of so-called ‘human shields’, non-combatants who are in close proximity to combatants, either voluntarily or involuntarily. Much of this discussion has been very simplistic and transparently rhetorical. Nevertheless, there are interesting ethical issues arising in the context of asymmetrical warfare that we should be able to examine at a degree of abstraction from the contested facts.

Read the full post here

Posted on January 19, 2009 at 8:54 pm in Antti Kauppinen's Posts, Normative Ethics, Political Philosophy | 9 Comments