January 29, 2008

Reasons: Explanations or Evidence or Neither?
By Daniel Star

John Broome thinks normative reasons are either explanations or parts of explanations of why you ought to F. Stephen Kearns and I think normative reasons are evidence that you ought to F (and we propose this as a unified analysis that applies across both reasons for action and reasons for belief). Many philosophers working on reasons would reject both of these views, often because they think the concept of a reason is not susceptible to deep analysis. In our most recent paper on this topic, Stephen and I compare our own view with Broome’s, and we do so in a way that should help with more general efforts to assess Broome’s view. This paper, “Reasons: Explanations or Evidence?” can be downloaded here.

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Posted on January 29, 2008 at 5:39 am in Metaethics, Daniel Star's Posts, Epistemology | 16 Comments

July 21, 2007

Kamm’s Intricate Ethics: Chapter 3
By Daniel Star

Chapter 3, “Intention, Harm and the Possibility of a Unified Theory” is focused on responding to Warren Quinn’s attempt to provide and ground accounts of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA) and the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) in two very interesting essays that were published as Chapters 7 and 8 of Morality and Action (CUP, 1993).

This chapter is split into three sections, which I will now summarise in turn, raising issues that invite further discussion as I go along.

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Posted on July 21, 2007 at 2:42 pm in Normative Ethics, Kamm Reading Group, Daniel Star's Posts | 24 Comments