Readings
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From Normativity to Responsibility
Joseph Raz
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Ethics and Moral Philosophy
Thom Brooks
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Ethics and Humanity: Themes from the Philosophy of Jonathan Glover
N. Ann Davis, Richard Keshen and Jeff McMahan
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Reflective Knowledge
Ernest Sosa
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Know How
Jason Stanley
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New Waves in Ethics
Thom Brooks
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Ethics for Enemies: Terror, Torture, and War
F. M. Kamm
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On What Matters
Derek Parfit
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Semantic Relationism
Kit Fine
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All the Power in the World
Peter Unger
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Reliable Reasoning: Induction and Statistical Learning Theory
Gilbert Harman and Sanjeev Kulkarni
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Beyond Humanity?
Allen E. Buchanan
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Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality
Patricia S. Churchland
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Equality and Tradition
Samuel Scheffler
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Climate Ethics
Stephen Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson and Henry Shue
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The Character of Consciousness
David J. Chalmers
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Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament
Thomas Nagel
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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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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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Killing in War
Jeff McMahan
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Experimental Philosophy
Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols
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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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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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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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10 Moral Paradoxes
Saul Smilansky
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Normativity and the Will
R. Jay Wallace
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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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Weighing Lives
John Broome
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Reasons and the Good
Roger Crisp
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October 23, 2008
One-Day Kamm Workshop in Oxford
By S. Matthew Liao
The Programme on the Ethics of the New Biosciences and the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University, are hosting a one-day workshop on themes from Professor Frances Kamm’s work.
“Nonconsequentialism, Moral Responsibility, and Permissible Harm: Themes from Frances Kamm”
Saturday 29 November, 2008 , 11am to 7:00pm
Lecture Room, 10 Merton Street, Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University
Professor Kamm – the Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy as well as the Professor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at Harvard University, and this year’s Uehiro Lecturer – will attend, and presentations will be given by:
July 10, 2008
The Loop Case and Kamm’s Doctrine of Triple Effect
By S. Matthew Liao
Readers of Ethics Etc, especially participants of the Kamm Reading Group, might be interested in a paper of mine entitled “The Loop Case and Kamm’s Doctrine of Triple Effect,” which has recently been accepted for publication in Philosophical Studies. Participants of the Kamm Reading Group are gratefully acknowledged in the paper. The paper can be found here, and an abstract of the paper is as follows:
February 23, 2008
Live Blogging: Kamm Conference Day 2
By S. Matthew Liao
12:43PM Closing Remarks. Great conference! Great job by John Oberdiek, Jerry Vildostegui, and Jane Rhodes for putting this event together.
12:40PM Doug Husak: It’d be good to have a better account of responsibility, so that it is not being used to do so many things.
12:22PM Question: In Scan, Jim is actively finding out what the Captain is thinking. This is different from overhearing, as in Stated Intention Cases.
Frances: this distinction shouldn’t matter in terms of assigning responsibility.
February 22, 2008
Live Blogging: Kamm Conference at Rutgers
By S. Matthew Liao
5:42PM Reconvene tomorrow at 9:00AM. I’ll continue the live-blogging then. :)
5:31PM Tim Scanlon asks Frances: What is the motivation for ‘downstreamism’? If harm is downstream from greater good, then it’s ok. But the other way is not ok, according to Frances. Why?
Frances: harm is necessary to produce the good. (The word ‘downstreamish’ may someday end up in the Oxford English Dictionary). Why try to develop a theory at the start when five minutes later you may come up with another case that undermines the theory? It’s better to examine a variety of cases first before developing a theory.
February 19, 2008
Utilitas Special Symposium on Kamm
By S. Matthew Liao
The latest issue of Utilitas features three fantastic articles from a symposium on Frances Kamm’s Intricate Ethics and a reply from Frances. Kamm Aficionados especially should check them out :)
Off Her Trolley? Frances Kamm and the Metaphysics of Morality
ALASTAIR NORCROSS
Utilitas, Volume 20, Issue 01, March 2008, pp 65 – 80
Discerning Subordination and Inviolability: A Comment on Kamm’s Intricate Ethics
HENRY S. RICHARDSON
Utilitas, Volume 20, Issue 01, March 2008, pp 81 – 91
Double Effect, Triple Effect and the Trolley Problem: Squaring the Circle in Looping Cases
MICHAEL OTSUKA
Utilitas, Volume 20, Issue 01, March 2008, pp 92 – 110
November 14, 2007
Analogies between Linguistics and Moral Theory
By Gilbert Harman
Erica Roedder and I are writing about possible analogies between linguistics and moral theory. One such analogy is between the development of generative grammar and the approach to moral theory by Frances Kamm, which has received considerable discussion in Ethics, Etc. An early draft of our (highly speculative) paper is available online at http://www.princeton.edu/~harman/Papers/Moral%20Grammar%20Draft.pdf and Erica and I will be extremely grateful for any comments and suggestions.
Gil Harman
November 7, 2007
The Near-Then-Far Case Poll
By S. Matthew Liao
Here’s a case from Frances Kamm which we have discussed previously:
The Near-Then-Far Case: You are passing near a child drowning in a pond, a child whom you are able to help. But, through no fault of yours, all of the following are true: You do not know that you are near the person, you do not know that he is in danger, and you do not know that you can help. After you are far away, you learn that you were near him when he was in danger, and you could have helped. You can still save him from that danger, in the way you could have when near, by putting $500 in a device that will activate a machine to scoop him out (377-78).
October 28, 2007
Kamm’s Intricate Ethics: Chapter 16
By Rahul Kumar
Chapter 16 of Intricate Ethics turns to an examination of Scanlon’s Contractualist moral theory. Focusing on particular themes that Kamm has discussed in the previous chapters, the aim here is to consider whether contractualism, as a metaethical theory of wrongness, offers a way of getting at the kinds of normatively relevant non-consequentialist distinctions that Kamm has identified as important without recourse to the careful scrutiny of cases. In what follows, I won’t try and summarize all the points Kamm makes in this chapter; rather, I’ll stick to what I take to be the points that have the most direct bearing on contractualism’s non-consequentialist credentials, namely what role the appeal to ‘wrongness’ is playing in the contractualist account and the kinds of considerations that are meant to be relevant for the reasonable rejection of a principle.
October 14, 2007
Kamm’s Intricate Ethics: Chapter 15
By Mark Sheehan
Chapter 15, ‘Harms, Losses and Evils in Gert’s moral Theory,’ applies one of the upshots of the discussion in Chapter 14 to Bernard Gert’s moral theory. The chapter is very short and is perhaps best understood as a continuation of the discussion in Chapter 14 of the consequences of the distinction between harming/not-aiding and losses/no-gains for moral theory. In what follows I assume Kamm’s distinction as it is made out in Chapter 14.
October 5, 2007
Kamm’s Intricate Ethics: Chapter 14
By Mike Otsuka
Chapter 14, entitled ‘Moral Intuitions, Cognitive Psychology, and the Harming/Not-Aiding Distinction’, engages with well-known empirical studies by Kahneman and Tversky that are thought to cast doubt on the reliability of our judgments about what ought to be done in particular cases. Kahneman and Tversky argue that such judgments are unreliable because they are susceptible to ‘framing effects’. A person’s judgments are subject to a framing effect if he comes to a different conclusion about what ought to be done in a given set of circumstances when presented with a different true description (i.e., framing) of the available options. One and the same policy can, for example, be described as protecting against losses or as yielding gains. According to Kahneman and Tversky, people tend to regard the sacrifice that is justifiable for the sake of preventing losses as greater than the sacrifice that is justifiable for the sake of securing equivalent gains. Hence their judgments shift if one and the same policy is (accurately) described (a) as protecting from losses or (b) as yielding gains:
October 3, 2007
Kamm’s Intricate Ethics: Chapter 13 – A Rough Consequentialist Response
By Julian Savulescu
[This is intended as a rapid, rough blog response. It is unedited and unrevised and no doubt contains many errors of spelling, grammar and argument.]
In this chapter, Frances Kamm contrasts her own non-consequentialist ethical theory with Peter Singer’s version of consequentialism, utilitarianism. She examines his general ethical theory and its implications for killing/letting die, treatment of the disabled and animals, and famine relief. I will only offer a skeletal summary of the first half. I will focus on the second half, which for me is incredibly rich and stimulating and more oriented to practical ethics. I will attempt to give a consequentialist response to her arguments in the latter half of the chapter. The first half, however, is of great interest to those involved in normative theory and its foundations. For those interested in more detailed analysis and response to Kamm’s arguments, please move straight to the section 1. The Principle of Irrelevant Goods.
October 2, 2007
The Overseas Case Poll
By S. Matthew Liao
The Overseas Case is from Peter Singer, as is the
The Pond Case: I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it. If I wade in and pull the child out, my $500 suit will be ruined.
See, e.g., Singer, P. Practical Ethics. 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
These cases are here by popular demand (John Alexander and Tom Douglas). Comments on these cases are welcome here. See also Kamm Chapter 11 for some discussions of these cases. Happy voting.
September 21, 2007
Kamm’s Intricate Ethics: Chapter 12
By Thom Brooks
Intuitions are curious things. In chapter 12 as elsewhere, Kamm makes extensive use of hypothetical experiments meant to test our intuitions and lead us to particular results. Indeed, few are better than Kamm at providing so many illuminating imaginative cases. For the most part, I believe her efforts succeed. However, if I had a criticism to state up front, then it would be my worry that Kamm makes our intuitions do too much. For one thing, the hypothetical experiments are aimed at philosophers engaging with her book. What evidence do we have that (a) the intuitions academic philosophers hold are representative of the general public or (b) the intuitions academic philosophers hold are justified independently? What to do about those of us (like me) with very different, more consequentialism-friendly intuitions? And so on. Indeed, these issues of highly imaginative hypothetical cases and extensive uses of intuitions have creeped into a few of the previous discussions of Intricate Ethics. I simply wish to state up front that this issue appears to creep into the discussion here, too.
September 14, 2007
Kamm’s Intricate Ethics: Chapter 11
By Tom Douglas
In Chapters 11 and 12, Kamm considers whether and how distance affects the duties we have to aid others. In Chapter 11, she is predominantly interested in some methodological issues about how we can use hypothetical cases to answer this question, though she does also offer some preliminary substantive conclusions.
Rather than following Kamm’s section headings, I have summarized the chapter in four sections based on the four main methodological points that she makes, with two additional sections to cover her preliminary substantive conclusions. My own comments appear in square brackets.
September 12, 2007
Calling on all Kamm fans!
By Nir Eyal
Just got notice of this intriguing event on Kamm’s book:
The Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy, based at the Law School in Camden, is pleased to announce a two-day symposium on F. M. Kamm’s Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm (Oxford, 2007). The symposium will take place on Friday, February 22nd and Saturday, February 23rd, 2008.
Frances Kamm, Littauer Professor Philosophy and Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government and Professor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, will attend, and presentations will be given by Shelly Kagan (Yale), Jeff McMahan (Rutgers), Gideon Rosen (Princeton), T. M. Scanlon (Harvard), and Seana Shiffrin (UCLA).
September 7, 2007
The purpose of this chapter is to show that concerns focused on the agent can supplement concerns focused on victims in bolstering the conclusion that agents ought not to infringe negative rights, even when the consequences of doing so are clearly better than the consequences of not infringing negative rights. That is, agent-focused considerations can bolster the case against consequentialism.
The chapter focuses on examples originally due to Bernard Williams; Williams himself advanced them to a similar end. The first is the well-known case of Jim and the Indians:
August 31, 2007
Kamm’s Intricate Ethics: Chapter 9
By Rebecca Roache
I. INTRODUCTION
Chapter 9 builds on the topic, introduced in chapter 8, of what happens when there are conflicts between different rights. Previously, Kamm has considered what we (or, ‘an agent’) ought to do when faced with a conflict between different people’s negative rights, and has argued that we should minimise transgression of rights. The discussion of rights becomes more complicated in chapter 9, as she introduces consideration of positive rights, and also looks at the factors (including, but not limited to, interests) that should sway us in the direction of according one right rather than another.
August 24, 2007
Kamm’s Intricate Ethics: Chapter 8
By Nick Shackel
Chapter 8 is intended to give some account of rights based on an independent, and hence potentially explanatorily prior, account of non-consequentialism. Non-consequentialism is to be understood as Kamm defined it early in the book: the denial that right and wrong action is determined by the goodness and badness of states of affairs, where states of affairs need not be pure outcomes but may include acts which have value or disvalue. The chapter is very long, with arguments, examples and bare assertions of intuitively plausible claims densely interwoven. In places this makes it difficult to follow the precise dialectical role that is being played by the assembled components and to decide whether one is being offered a single argument that extends over several pages, or a number of distinct arguments all for the same conclusion. For these reasons, whilst I shall try to give some flavour of the direction of the chapter as a whole, it will be a severe abbreviation, with significant omissions, and the arguments I extract may only partially represent the considerations that Kamm assembles.
August 20, 2007
The Switches and Skates Case Poll
By Nir Eyal
The Switches and Skates Case:
By sheer accident, an empty trolley, nobody aboard, is starting to roll down a certain track. Now, if you DO NOTHING ABOUT the situation, your FIRST OPTION [sic], then, in a couple of minutes, it will run over and kill six innocents who, through no fault of their own, are trapped down the line. (So, on your first option, you’ll let the six die).
August 17, 2007
Kamm’s Intricate Ethics: Chapter 7
By Guy Kahane
This chapter on moral status is very short, and also mercifully short on intricate imaginary examples. Kamm quickly takes us through a number of relatively familiar normative distinctions and I will try to be brief in recounting them here.
In the broadest sense, moral status simply refers to, roughly, an entity’s moral properties:
Moral status in the broad sense X’s moral status = what is morally permissible/impermissible to do to X
Now in this broad sense, rocks also have moral status: we’re permitted to do to them whatever we like. In common use, moral status refers to something narrower. Kamm thus turns to:
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