• Contributors

  • Alastair Norcross
  • Alison Hills
  • Allen Wood
  • Andrew Reisner
  • Antti Kauppinen
  • Bart Streumer
  • Brian McElwee
  • Dan Moller
  • Daniel Star
  • David Enoch
  • David Owens
  • David Wasserman
  • Fiona Woollard
  • Frances Kamm
  • Gerald Lang
  • Gilbert Harman
  • Guy Kahane
  • Hagop Sarkissian
  • Helen Frowe
  • Iwao Hirose
  • James Morauta
  • Japa Pallikkathayil
  • Jeff McMahan
  • John Broome
  • John Oberdiek
  • Jonas Olson
  • Joseph Raz
  • Julia Driver
  • Kimberley Brownlee
  • Krister Bykvist
  • Laura Franklin-Hall
  • Matthew Smith
  • Matthew Silverstein
  • Melinda Roberts
  • Mike Otsuka
  • Neil Levy
  • Nicholas Southwood
  • Nick Shackel
  • Nir Eyal
  • Rahul Kumar
  • Rebecca Roache
  • Richard Ashcroft
  • S. Matthew Liao
  • Saul Smilansky
  • Sergio Tenenbaum
  • Shlomi Segall
  • Simon Kirchin
  • Stephen Kearns
  • Thom Brooks
  • Toby Ord
  • Tom Douglas
  • Tom Hurka
  • Ulrike Heuer
  • Wlodek Rabinowicz

• Readings

  • 
    Rethinking the Good: Moral Ideals and the Nature of Practical Reasoning
    Larry S. Temkin
    
  • 
    From Normativity to Responsibility
    Joseph Raz
    
  • 
    Ethics and Moral Philosophy
    Thom Brooks
    
  • 
    Ethics and Humanity: Themes from the Philosophy of Jonathan Glover
    N. Ann Davis, Richard Keshen and Jeff McMahan
    
  • 
    Reflective Knowledge
    Ernest Sosa
    
  • 
    Know How
    Jason Stanley
    
  • 
    New Waves in Ethics
    Thom Brooks
    
  • 
    Ethics for Enemies: Terror, Torture, and War
    F. M. Kamm
    
  • 
    On What Matters
    Derek Parfit
    
  • 
    Semantic Relationism
    Kit Fine
    
  • 
    Reliable Reasoning: Induction and Statistical Learning Theory
    Gilbert Harman and Sanjeev Kulkarni
    
  • 
    Beyond Humanity?
    Allen E. Buchanan
    
  • 
    Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality
    Patricia S. Churchland
    
  • 
    Equality and Tradition
    Samuel Scheffler
    
  • 
    Climate Ethics
    Stephen Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson and Henry Shue
    
  • 
    The Character of Consciousness
    David J. Chalmers
    
  • 
    Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament
    Thomas Nagel
    
  • 
    Well-Being and Death
    Ben Bradley
    
  • 
    The Beloved Self: Morality and the Challenge from Egoisim
    Alison Hills
    
  • 
    Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation
    Michael Strevens
    
  • 
    The Case for Contextualism
    Keith DeRose
    
  • 
    When Truth Gives Out
    Mark Richard
    
  • 
    The Idea of Human Rights
    Charles R. Beitz
    
  • 
    Willing, Wanting, Waiting
    Richard Holton
    
  • 
    The Idea of Justice
    Amartya Sen
    
  • 
    Harming Future Persons: Ethics, Genetics and the Nonidentity Problem
    Melinda A. Roberts and David T. Wasserman
    
  • 
    What Is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being
    Richard Kraut
    
  • 
    Content and Justification
    Paul A. Boghossian
    
  • 
    Thoughts: Papers on Mind, Meaning, and Modality
    Stephen Yablo
    
  • 
    Normativity
    Judith Jarvis Thomson
    
  • 
    How We Get Along
    J. David Velleman
    
  • 
    Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity
    Christine M. Korsgaard
    
  • 
    Appearances of the Good: An Essay on the Nature of Practical Reason
    Sergio Tenenbaum
    
  • 
    Killing in War
    Jeff McMahan
    
  • 
    Experimental Philosophy
    Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols
    
  • 
    Disadvantage
    Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit
    
  • 
    Reconciling Our Aims: In Search of Bases for Ethics
    Allan Gibbard
    
  • 
    Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame
    T. M. Scanlon
    
  • 
    The Philosophy of Philosophy
    Timothy Williamson
    
  • 
    Authority and Estrangement
    Richard Moran
    
  • 
    Moral Psychology, Volume 1
    Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
    
  • 
    The Reflective Life
    Valerie Tiberius
    
  • 
    Moral Literacy
    Barbara Herman
    
  • 
    On Human Rights
    James Griffin
    
  • 
    Experiments in Ethics
    Kwame Anthony Appiah
    
  • 
    Reasons without Rationalism
    Kieran Setiya
    
  • 
    Moral Realism: A Defence
    Russ Shafer-Landau
    
  • 
    The Way We Eat
    Peter Singer and Jim Mason
    
  • 
    Metaphysical Essays
    John Hawthorne
    
  • 
    10 Moral Paradoxes
    Saul Smilansky
    
  • 
    Normativity and the Will
    R. Jay Wallace
    
  • 
    Ideal Code, Real World
    Brad Hooker
    
  • 
    The Nature of Normativity
    Ralph Wedgwood
    
  • 
    Structures of Agency: Essays
    Michael E. Bratman
    
  • 
    The Second-Person Standpoint
    Stephen Darwall
    
  • 
    Ethics and the A Priori
    Michael Smith
    
  • 
    Weighing Lives
    John Broome
    
  • 
    Reasons and the Good
    Roger Crisp
    
• 
  This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
  

5th Annual Conference of the Society for Ethical Theory and Political Philosophy
Northwestern University
May 19–21, 2011

Keynote speakers: Philip Pettit and R. Jay Wallace

Conference website (with call for papers): http://www.philosophy.northwestern.edu/conferences/moralpolitical/

Submissions from both faculty and graduate students are invited. Essay topics in all areas of ethical theory and political philosophy will be considered, although some priority will be given to essays that take up themes from the works of Philip Pettit and R. Jay Wallace. The submission deadline is February 15, 2011.

University of Colorado, Boulder
August 4-7, 2011

The Center for Values and Social Policy in the Philosophy Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder is pleased to invite paper proposals for the fourth annual RoME congress. Papers from all areas of ethics and political theory are invited. To encourage the participation of junior scholars, the University of Colorado will be awarding a Young Ethicist Prize of $500 for most meritorious submission. The prize competition is open to any participating untenured philosopher (including, but not limited to, tenure-track faculty, instructors, and graduate students).

Moral philosophers disagree about a lot of stuff.  They disagree, for example, on whether moral properties exist and, if so, what the heck they are and how we have knowledge of them; on whether one can derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ and, if not, whether this really matters or not; on whether moral judgments are the deliverances of affective or purely cognitive faculties; on whether moral omissions have the same status as moral comissions; and a whole lot besides.

One particular claim, though, seems to have widespread endorsement—the claim that ordinary folk are objectivists when it comes to morality.  According to this view, ordinary folk believe moral issues admit of a single correct answer, and reject the idea that two people with conflicting positions on a moral issue may both be right.  This claim of  ’folk objectivism’ enjoys a surprising degree of consensus, and can be found in the works of a diverse range of moral philosophers with disparate theoretical commitments (e.g. Blackburn 1984; Brink 1989; Gibbard 1992; Mackie 1977; Shafer-Landau 2003).  It is a datum that most metaethical theories try to vindicate or accommodate.  But is this claim correct?  The answer would seem to be important, as the claim of folk objectivism has played a significant role in theorizing about the nature of ethics.

Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders” at Frankfurt University

Cluster Lecture Series Winter Semester 2010/11:
The Nature of Normativity

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt a.M. / Campus Westend / Hörsaalzentrum / HZ5

Programme

Wednesday, 1 December 2010, 6pm
Professor Robert Pippin (University of Chicago)
Reason’s Form

Wednesday, 8 December 2010, 6pm
Professor Christine Korsgaard (Harvard University)
The Normative Constitution of Agency

Wednesday, 15 December 2010, 6pm
Professor Joseph Raz (Columbia University)
Normativity: what is it and how can it be explained?

Wednesday, 12 January 2011, 6pm
Professor Thomas M. Scanlon (Harvard University)
Metaphysical Objections to Normative Truth

Michael Smith: “Meta-Ethics, Action Theory, Consequentialism”
Location: Bielefeld, Germany
Date: November 16th – 18th 2010

Tuesday, November 16th: META-ETHICS
9.00 – 12.00: In Defence of The Moral Problem
14.00 – 17.00: Beyond the Error Theory

Wednesday, November 17th: ACTION THEORY
9.00 – 12.00: The Possibility of Philosophy of Action
14.00 – 17.00: Scanlon on Desire and the Explanation of Action

Thursday, November 18th: CONSEQUENTIALISM
9.00 – 12.00: Two Kinds of Consequentialism
14.00 – 17.00: On Normativity

More detailed information is available at
http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/philosophie/smith/

The program for the 7th Annual Metaethics Workshop has been finalized and can be found here. It looks fantastic! The workshop will be held on Sept 24-26, 2010 in Madison, WI. Registration is free and all are welcome. If you would like to attend, please email Professor Russ Shafer-Landau (shaferlandau -at- wisc.edu).

Professor Nishi Shah (Amherst) recent gave a paper, which he co-wrote with Matt Evans (NYU), at the Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar entitled “Mental Agency and Metaethics.” A copy of Nishi’s talk can be found here. Professor Shah would welcome any comments/suggestions. Here’s an abstract of his talk:

Professor Alan Thomas (Tilburg University) will be giving a talk on Monday, June 7, at the Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar entitled “Practical Reasoning, the First Person and Impartialism about Reasons.” A copy of Professor Thomas’s talk can be found here. Professor Thomas would welcome any comments/suggestions. Here’s an abstract of his talk:

The Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT will host a one day conference on Judy Thomson‘s recent book Normativity. All are welcome.

Date: Friday 11 June 2010
Location: Stata Center (map), MIT. Room 32-d461 (take the elevator in the Dreyfoos Tower to the Fourth Floor; map)

Schedule:
10.30 – 12.00
Peter Railton (Michigan)
1.00 – 2.30
Gideon Rosen (Princeton)
3.00 – 4.30
Michael Smith (Princeton)
4.45 – 5.45
Round-table discussion with the speakers and Judy Thomson

http://web.mit.edu/holton/www/confs/Judyconf/judyconf.html

Organizer: Richard Holton – holton (at) mit.edu

Registration is now open for the 2010 conference of the British Society for Ethical Theory, to be held at the University of Nottingham, 7th-9th July. (This is the period directly before the 2010 Joint Session.)

Details of the programme and registration forms are available here:

http://www.bset.org.uk/nextconference.html

Keynote speakers:
Jamie Dreier (Brown)
Tim Mulgan (St. Andrews)

Submitted Papers:
“Value Incomparability and Indeterminacy” – Cristian Constantinescu (Cambridge)

“A New Theory of Well-Being” – Jennifer Hawkins (Duke)

“Sentimentalism and Deontological Intuitions” – Antti Kauppinen (Amsterdam/Trinity College Dublin)

“Faith in Humanity” – Ryan Preston-Roedder (Chapel Hill)

Stockholm June Workshop in Philosophy 2010:
Ethics and Epistemology
Thursday 3 June, 10 am – 5 pm,
Room D207, Frescati
Stockholm University

10.00 Welcome
10.05 Brian McElwee (Oxford): ‘The Structure of Demandingness Objections’. Commentator: Katharina Berndt (Stockholm).
11.05 Coffee
11.20 Åsa Wikforss (Stockholm): ‘What Justifies Beliefs about One’s Own Beliefs?’ Commentator: Sara Packalén (Stockholm).
12.20 Lunch
13.40 Karl Karlander (Stockholm): ‘The Varieties of Pain’. Commentator: Jonas Olson (Stockholm).
14.40 Break
14.45 Jonas Åkerman (Stockholm): ’Referential Intentions’. Commentator: Emma Wallin (Stockholm).
15.45 Coffee
16.00 Chris Heathwood (UC Boulder): ‘Could Morality Have a Source’? Commentator: Jens Johansson (Stockholm).

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.

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!

At the Centre for Ethics and Metaethics (CEM), University of Leeds

Programme

24th June
2-3:30 Daniel Elstein: ‘Can We Do Without Epistemic Value?’

3:30-3:45 Coffee break

3:45-6:30 Symposium on Reasons and Evidence: Daniel Star, Stephen Kearns and Kieran Setiya

3:45-4:30 Daniel Star & Stephen Kearns: ‘Weighing Reasons’
4:30-5:15 Kieran Setiya: ‘What Is A Reason to Act?’
5:15-6:30 Discussion

from 7pm Drinks and Dinner

25th June
9:30-11 Anna-Sara Malmgren: ‘Sub-Personal Reasons’

11-11:15 Coffee break

11:15-12:45 Selim Berker: ‘Epistemic Teleology and the Separateness of Propositions’

12:45-2 Lunch

We are very pleased that Professor Matthew Silverstein has joined us as a Contributor. Matty is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is interested in the foundations of ethics—the question of what, if anything, we can we say on behalf of our most basic ethical commitments? His secondary philosophical interests include the philosophy of action, political philosophy, early modern philosophy, and the history of ethics. He is the author of In Defense of Happiness: A Response to the Experience Machine, published in Social Theory and Practice. Welcome aboard, Matty!

We are very pleased that Professor Laura Franklin-Hall has joined us as a Contributor. Laura is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at New York University, and specializes in the philosophy of biology. She has published numerous articles in Philosophy of Science and also has an active interest in the implications of evolutionary theories for metaethics. Welcome aboard, Laura!

Hi all, I just wanted to call your attention to the following:

Call For Papers
Spindel Prize for Emerging Scholar in Philosophy
2010 Spindel Conference Topic: Empathy and Ethics
Conference Director: Remy Debes

The University of Memphis Department of Philosophy is proud to announce that the topic for the 29th annual Spindel Conference will be “Empathy and Ethics.”

I just finished a draft of a paper called “Bias and Reasoning: Haidt’s Theory of Moral Judgment.” Eventually, the final version of the paper will go into an edited collection called New Waves in Ethics, edited by Thom Brooks. In the meantime, I’d be really interested to learn what some of you think of this paper. An abstract of the paper is as follows:

Roger Crisp had an article in Mind in 2008 entitled “Goodness and Reasons: Accentuating the Negative.” Mind just published a piece discussing Crisp’s 2008 article by Philip Stratton-Lake, as well Crisp’s response to Stratton-Lake, both of which look very interesting. I also have a piece called “The Buck-Passing Account of Value: Lessons from Crisp,” which also discusses Crisp’s 2008 article and which is available via Philosophical Studies’ Online First, or here for a penultimate version. I had a quick look at Stratton-Lake’s piece and Crisp’s response, and as far as I can tell, the points I make in my paper are different from Stratton-Lake’s. I’ll be reading Stratton-Lake’s and Crisp’s papers more closely soon, but in the meantime, I’d be very interested to learn what other people think of them.

Professor Joseph Raz (Columbia and Oxford University) will be giving a talk on Monday, Feb. 8, at the Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar entitled ‘On the Guise of the Good.’ A copy of Professor Raz’s talk can be found here. Professor Raz would welcome any comments/suggestions. Here’s an abstract of his talk:

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