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Readings
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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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Self to Self: Selected Essays
J. David Velleman
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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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The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life
Jeff McMahan
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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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May 7, 2008
Elstein on Is There a Normative Question?
By S. Matthew Liao
Daniel Elstein from University of Leeds gave a talk recently at the Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar on “Is there a normative question and if so, how can it be answered?” Here is an abstract of his talk:
A neglected debate in metaethics is between Kantian and Humean expressivists. Kantian expressivists like Korsgaard hold that there is a single normative question which metaethics must deal with, whereas Humeans like Blackburn hold that there are simply a slew of diverse normative questions, which are a matter for normative ethics rather than metaethics. I argue that that the counter-intuitive Kantian position can be defended by considering Copp’s normative regress argument, and I try to show how to understand Kant’s argument for the categorical imperative as a plausible response to this threat of normative regress.
April 28, 2008
Thick Concepts Conference - First CFP
By Simon Kirchin
Apologies for cross-posting.
THICK CONCEPTS
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
3rd-5th July, 2009
Invited Speakers:
Jonathan Dancy (Reading; Texas, Austin)
Daniel Elstein (Leeds)
Allan Gibbard (Michigan, Ann Arbor)
Chris Hookway (Sheffield)
Tom Hurka (Toronto)
Simon Kirchin (Kent)
Jerry Levinson (Maryland)
Adrian Moore (Oxford)
Michael Smith (Princeton)
Alan Thomas (Kent)
Pekka Vayrynen (Leeds)
Nick Zangwill (Durham)
Supported by The Mind Association, and The University of Kent.
April 28, 2008
Sayre-McCord on Metaethics for Blogginheads.tv
By S. Matthew Liao
Professor Geoff Sayre-McCord from UNC has recently recorded a chat with Will Wilkinson on metaethics for Bloggingheads.tv. Here’s the link to the diavlog: http://brainwaveweb.com/diavlogs/10593
Some of the topics covered are as follows:
* How to be a moral realist (03:36)
* What is metaethics? (04:38)
* What to do when your moral arguments fail to persuade (09:29)
* Can the fact that Hitler was evil help explain the Holocaust? (13:50)
* General moral principles in a world of diverse circumstances (17:04)
Enjoy :)
March 21, 2008
Utilitarianism and the Brain
By Guy Kahane
Everybody’s heard about Joshua Greene’s fMRI studies of moral judgement. Many have also heard about the study by Koenigs, Young, Adolphs, Cushman, Tranel, Cushman, Hauser and Damasio of patients with prefrontal damage. In a communication I co-authored with Nick Shackel and which has just come out in Nature, we criticise the methodology used in these studies.
February 12, 2008
Analysing Oughts in terms of Reasons
By Stephen Kearns
In “Reasons as Evidence” and “Reasons: Explanations or Evidence?”, Daniel Star and I argue that a normative reason to A is evidence that one ought to A. In “Reasons”, John Broome argues that a normative reason to A is (part of) an explanation of why one ought to A (this characterisation is only rough). What both analyses have in common is that reasons are analysed in terms of oughts and not vice versa. I just wanted to ask what people think the prospects are for analysing oughts in terms of reasons. Here are a few natural ways to do this:
February 6, 2008
Sinclair on Presumptive Arguments for Moral Realism
By S. Matthew Liao
Dr. Neil Sinclair from University of Nottingham gave a talk this past week at the Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar on “Presumptive arguments for moral realism.” An abstract of his talk is as follows:
February 1, 2008
CFP: 5th Annual Metaethics Workshop
By S. Matthew Liao
Professor Russ Shafer-Landau has issued a call for abstracts for the Fifth Annual Metaethics Workshop, to be held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on September 12-14, 2008.
Simon Blackburn (Cambridge/UNC) and Joseph Raz (Columbia/Oxford) will be the keynote speakers.
Abstracts (of 2-3 double-spaced pages) of papers in any area of metaethics are due by May 1. There is a limit of one submission per person. Speakers in the 2006 or 2007 workshop are not eligible to submit abstracts for this year’s event. A program committee will evaluate submissions and make decisions by early June.
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.
January 9, 2008
Realism and Semantics
By Guy Kahane
J. L. Mackie did a great service to metaethics by distinguishing, as previous philosophers hadn’t, between semantics and metaphysics.* He pointed out that it’s one thing to show that our normative concepts refer to objective properties, quite another to show that anything out there actually corresponds to these concepts. Defending normative realism therefore turns out to be harder than previously thought: winning the argument about the semantics only takes you halfway.
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
October 29, 2007
New issue on metaethics
By Thom Brooks
The latest issue of the Journal of Moral Philosophy has just been published and all articles are on the topic of ‘metaethics’. Papers were originally presented at a conference organized by Fabian Freyenhagen at King’s College, Cambridge. The issue can be found here. The contents are as follows:
October 22, 2007
Streumer on Irreducibly Normative Properties
By S. Matthew Liao
Presenters at the Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar are now encouraged and given the opportunity to post their papers and/or aspects of their argument here on Ethics Etc for further discussions by both those who have attended the seminar and those who were not able to do so.
To kick off, Bart Streumer gave a talk today on whether there are irreducibly normative properties. Here is an abstract of his paper:
October 11, 2007
Reasons: Explanatory and Normative
By Joseph Raz
Most writers think that there are two fundamentally different concepts of reasons, though some maintain that there is only one concept and the appearance of duality is misleading, and is due to a failure to properly analyse the role of reasons in our thought. Among those who accept the duality thesis, there are disagreement about the nature and relations between the concepts. It is not always easy to tell where terminological differences end and substantive ones begin.
July 4, 2007
Smith on motivation and fetishism
By Gerald Lang
I’ve been doing some thinking about Michael Smith’s argument against externalism about motivation. To remind you, externalists about motivation - henceforth, externalists - deny that there is any conceptual or internal connection between making a moral judgment and being motivated (to some extent) to act on it. Internalists about motivation - henceforth, internalists - assert that there is such an internal connection between judgment and motivation.
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