Readings
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Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament
Thomas Nagel
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Utilitarianism: A Guide for the Perplexed
Krister Bykvist
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The Global Justice Reader
Thom Brooks
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Well-Being and Death
Ben Bradley
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The Beloved Self: Morality and the Challenge from Egoisim
Alison Hills
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Ethics: The Fundamentals
Julia Driver
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Origins of Objectivity
Tyler Burge
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Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation
Michael Strevens
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The Case for Contextualism
Keith DeRose
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When Truth Gives Out
Mark Richard
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The Idea of Human Rights
Charles R. Beitz
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Willing, Wanting, Waiting
Richard Holton
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The Idea of Justice
Amartya Sen
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Harming Future Persons: Ethics, Genetics and the Nonidentity Problem
Melinda A. Roberts and David T. Wasserman
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What Is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being
Richard Kraut
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Content and Justification
Paul A. Boghossian
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Thoughts: Papers on Mind, Meaning, and Modality
Stephen Yablo
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Normativity
Judith Jarvis Thomson
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How We Get Along
J. David Velleman
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Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity
Christine M. Korsgaard
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Appearances of the Good: An Essay on the Nature of Practical Reason
Sergio Tenenbaum
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Principled Ethics: Generalism As a Regulative Ideal
Sean McKeever and Michael Ridge
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Killing in War
Jeff McMahan
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Experimental Philosophy
Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols
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Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought
Michael Thompson
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The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory
David J. Chalmers
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Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality
David Wiggins
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Disadvantage
Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit
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Reconciling Our Aims: In Search of Bases for Ethics
Allan Gibbard
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Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame
T. M. Scanlon
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The Philosophy of Philosophy
Timothy Williamson
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A Virtue Epistemology
Ernest Sosa
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Morality without Foundations
Mark Timmons
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Authority and Estrangement
Richard Moran
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Moral Psychology, Volume 1
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
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The Reflective Life
Valerie Tiberius
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Moral Literacy
Barbara Herman
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Ethics and the Environment: An Introduction
Dale Jamieson
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On Human Rights
James Griffin
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Experiments in Ethics
Kwame Anthony Appiah
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Reasons without Rationalism
Kieran Setiya
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Moral Realism: A Defence
Russ Shafer-Landau
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The Way We Eat
Peter Singer and Jim Mason
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Metaphysical Essays
John Hawthorne
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Knowledge and Practical Interests
Jason Stanley
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10 Moral Paradoxes
Saul Smilansky
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Normativity and the Will
R. Jay Wallace
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Ethics without Principles
Jonathan Dancy
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Neuroethics
Neil Levy
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Ideal Code, Real World
Brad Hooker
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The Nature of Normativity
Ralph Wedgwood
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Structures of Agency: Essays
Michael E. Bratman
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The Second-Person Standpoint
Stephen Darwall
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Ethics and the A Priori
Michael Smith
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The Practice of Value
Joseph Raz
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Weighing Lives
John Broome
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Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm
F. M. Kamm
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Reasons and the Good
Roger Crisp
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August 27, 2010
CFP: Morality and the Cognitive Sciences
By S. Matthew Liao
7th International Symposium of Cognition, Logic and Communication
6-8 May 2011, Riga, Latvia
INVITED ORGANIZERS: Michael Bishop (Florida State University), Stephen Stich (Rutgers University)
INVITED SPEAKERS include:
Michael Bishop (Florida State University)
Luc Faucher (Université du Québec a Montréal)
Joshua Knobe (Yale University)
Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh)
Dominic Murphy (University of Sydney)
Shaun Nichols (University of Arizona)
Jesse Prinz (City University of New York)
Adina Roskies (Dartmouth College)
Don Ross (University of Cape Town)
Stephen Stich (Rutgers University)
Valerie Tiberius (University of Minnesota)
July 19, 2010
Grant Opportunities at the Character Project
By S. Matthew Liao
Professor Christian Miller (Wake Forest) and his colleagues have recently been awarded a $3.67 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation for The Character Project, an exploration of the nature of character.
Christian asked me to let you know that $2 million will soon be devoted to three separate funding competitions, one of which will be for philosophers working on topics related to character broadly conceived, including but not limited to the recent work on the empirical adequacy of character traits.
You can learn more about the project here and the funding competitions here. Do feel free to contact Christian at character (at) wfu.edu for more information.
April 25, 2010
The Truth in Cultural Relativism
By Antti Kauppinen
Do moral judgments form a psychological natural kind? Lately, Stephen Stich and his colleagues have been arguing on the basis of empirical evidence that the features psychologists have identified as key to moral judgment do not, as a matter of fact, cluster together in a lawlike fashion. In particular, they argue that harm attributions do not always evoke the signature moral response pattern of authority-independence and generality, and conclude that since the purported nomological cluster breaks down, moral judgments do not form a natural kind. Their argument, of course, leaves open the possibility that there is some other cluster to be found. I am not a big believer in nomological clusters, but I will propose an alternative content feature that does seem to pair with the signature moral pattern in a lawlike fashion. Namely, it seems that whenever people take a piece of behaviour to express, in context, any of a set of attitudes that ranges from disrespect to debasement, the signature moral pattern is evoked. (As usual, I’ll just focus on wrongness judgments.) In short, people are intuitive deontologists, and for all that Stich says, there may be a psychological natural kind of moral judgment. My alternative model involves commitment to a commonsense cultural relativism, but one of an entirely innocuous kind that poses no threat to moral objectivism. To distinguish it from standard or deference relativism, I’ll call it significance relativism.
April 17, 2010
Workshop on Experimental Philosophy and Metaethics
By S. Matthew Liao
Date: May 1, 2010
Time: 10am to 5pm
Location: NYU Silver Center, Room 207
Hosted by the Metro Experimental Research Group (MERG)
(All details available at: http://www.yale.edu/cogsci/metaxphi.htm)
A series of recent experimental studies have examined people’s intuitions about metaethical issues. Participants in this workshop will discuss the implications of these studies both for questions about people’s ordinary folk views and for broader philosophical questions about moral realism, moral relativism and expressivism.
Invited Speakers: Stephen Darwall, Geoff Goodwin, Gilbert Harman, Jesse Prinz, Hagop Sarkissian and David Wong
I’ll be presenting with some colleagues and I look forward to seeing you there!
November 14, 2009
Continuum Ethics book series
By Thom Brooks
Continuum Ethics
A series of books exploring key topics in contemporary ethics and moral philosophy.
Continuum Ethics presents a series of books that will bridge the gap between new research work and undergraduate textbooks. They will provide close examination of key concepts in contemporary moral philosophy. Aimed largely at upper-level undergraduates and research students, they will also appeal to researchers in the field. Authors will be expected to combine philosophical sophistication with an accessible style that can engage the educated reader.
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.
January 13, 2009
Experimental Philosophy: NEH Summer Institute
By S. Matthew Liao
Experimental Philosophy is a new movement that uses experiments to address traditional philosophical questions. Although the movement is only a few years old, it has attracted prolific practitioners as well as ardent critics. (For more about Experimental Philosophy, see the recent article in the New York Times or the ongoing discussion at the Experimental Philosophy Blog.)
This summer, the NEH is sponsoring an Institute on Experimental Philosophy. The Institute will bring in over a dozen distinguished guest faculty, who will present their latest research across a wide range of issues and perspectives. The Institute will also provide participants with the opportunity to learn experimental methods that are used in Experimental Philosophy. The Institute will also provide participants with the opportunity to learn experimental methods that are used in Experimental Philosophy.
October 23, 2008
Workshop on Rational Choice and Moral Decision Making
By S. Matthew Liao
There is an upcoming workshop entitled “The Economy of the Soul: Rational Choice and Moral Decision-Making,” which is sponsored by the British Academy and the LSE Choice Group, and co-sponsored by the UCL Ethics of Risk Project, funded by the AHRC.
The location for registration, coffee and all talks is now: New Academic Building (NAB) Room 104, at the London School of Economics.
Organized by: Alex Voorhoeve, E-mail: a.e.voorhoeve@lse.ac.uk, Tel (Harvard office): +1-617-4951927. Due to space limitations, this event is open only to registered participants. Please e-mail a.e.voorhoeve@lse.ac.uk to register.
Draft Programme
Venue: New Academic Building (NAB) Room 104, LSE. Directions.
October 23, 2008
CFP: Philosophical Methodology Conference at Arché
By S. Matthew Liao
This looks like a fantastic conference especially for those who are interested in intuitions and thought experiments. The AHRC Project on ‘Intuitions and Methodology Project’ at the Arché Philosophical Research Centre is hosting a conference on Philosophical Methodology, 25-27 April, 2009, at the University of St. Andrews.
Invited keynote speakers:
David Chalmers (Australian National University)
Jonathan Schaffer (Australian National University, Arché)
Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University)
Tamar Szabó Gendler (Yale University)
The purpose of the conference is to explore questions about philosophical methodology. Potential topics include:
October 14, 2008
The Moral Sense Test for Philosophers
By Neil Levy
Many of you will be familiar with the Moral Sense Test, which has produced some valuable data on ordinary people’s intuitions about trolley cases and related dilemmas. Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher of mind (who does fascinating work on the unreliability of first person judgments) and Fiery Cushman, from Marc Hauser’s lab at Harvard, have now designed a version of the test especially for philosophers. They want to be able to compare the responses of people with graduate degrees in philosophy to those of the folk. I encourage everyone to take the test; it shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes.
April 28, 2008
Appiah’s Experiments in Ethics: Chapter 5
By Guy Kahane
Towards the end of the chapter Appiah remarks that the greatest works in ethics exhibit a deep, irrepressible heterogeneity, heterogeneity that reflects a richness and complexity of the ethical life he believes that many moral philosophers overlook in their quest for neat (even: intricate) theories. This last chapter is certainly heterogeneous: starting with remarks on happiness and flourishing, it shifts to a brief discussion of meta-ethics and different forms of naturalism, moves on to poke fun at ‘quandary ethics’ and its contemporary successors, and ends with, well, a reminder of the irreducible complexity of the ethical life, and a plea for pluralism, both evaluative and methodological.
April 17, 2008
Appiah’s Experiments in Ethics: Chapter 4
By Thom Brooks
First of all, it is a genuine pleasure to contribute to this forum: I only hope my comments will not lag too far behind the quality of previous posts! Now to Experiments in Ethics . . .
Chapter four is entitled “The Varieties of Moral Experience” and my discussion will follow the sections of this chapter in order in an effort to provide an outline of the argument and substantive points, before concluding with some reflections.
March 31, 2008
Appiah’s Experiments in Ethics: Chapter 3
By S. Matthew Liao
In this chapter, Appiah presents experimental studies that seem to challenge our use of intuitions. He then outlines some responses to these studies. I shall begin with a summary of the chapter, using Appiah’s subheadings for easy navigation. I shall then offer some commentaries on this chapter.
March 17, 2008
Appiah’s Experiments in Ethics: Chapter 2
By Steve Clarke
The second chapter of Experiments in Ethics (E in E) is entitled ‘The Case against Character’, and it focuses on a recent critique of virtue ethics due to Gilbert Harman, John Doris and some other philosophers. The inspiration for their attack on virtue ethics is a body of experimental work produced by ‘situationists’, members of an influential school of thought in social psychology.
March 3, 2008
Appiah’s Experiments in Ethics: Chapter 1
By Neil Levy
Chapter One is essentially a ground clearing exercise. Appiah’s aim is to argue that experimental philosophy is not the innovative and threatening enterprise that it might seem: instead, it is a return to philosophy’s roots. Philosophy has traditionally been closely informed by scientific work, and the best philosophers have often engaged in science themselves. It is the era of conceptual analysis divorced from mere empirical engagement that is the aberration, not the turn to the empirical.
February 14, 2008
Schedule for the Appiah Reading Group
By S. Matthew Liao
The Appiah Reading Group will start in early March. In each session, a commentator will provide a summary of a chapter and some points for consideration. The post will then be open for discussion, and we welcome your thoughts on any aspect of the chapter.
Some ‘off-line’ sessions will also be held in Oxford during this time. Please contact me if you are interested in attending the off-line sessions, as the numbers will be limited to ensure a smooth running of the reading group. ** Note: It is NOT necessary to have attended the off-line sessions in order to contribute to the online sessions. **
January 31, 2008
Appiah Reading Group
By S. Matthew Liao
Following the successful Kamm Reading Group, Ethics Etc will shortly be holding another reading group on Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book, Experiments in Ethics. Professor Appiah is Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University and the current President of the American Philosophical Association. The content of his book is as follows:
1. Introduction: The Waterless Moat
2. The Case against Character
3. The Case against Intuition
4. The Varieties of Moral Experience
5. The Ends of Ethics
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