August 14, 2010

CFP: Reasons of Love
By S. Matthew Liao

International Conference, Institute of Philosophy,
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium),
30 May-1 June 2011

This conference’s title is ambiguous on purpose. The relationship between love and reasons for action is highly interesting and complicated. It is not clear how love is related to reasons. Love might be a response to certain normative reasons, since it seems fitting to love certain objects. However, love also seems to create reasons and not to be a response to certain appropriate reasons. Love’s relationship to morality is also complex. It is not clear how the normative reasons for acting morally are related to the reasons of love. It is sometimes argued that love is not a virtue because the reasons for acting morally are not the same as the reasons for acting lovingly. But the notion of ‘unprincipled virtue’ seems to make room for love as a motive of morally praiseworthy actions.

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Posted on August 14, 2010 at 3:26 am in Conference Announcement, Moral Psychology, S. Matthew Liao's Posts, Value Theory | Leave a Comment

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.

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Posted on April 25, 2010 at 8:12 pm in Antti Kauppinen's Posts, Experimental Ethics, Experimental Philosophy, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Normative Ethics | 3 Comments

March 4, 2010

Spindel Conference 2010 Emerging Scholar Prize
By Julia Driver

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.”

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Posted on March 4, 2010 at 6:47 pm in Julia Driver's Posts, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Normative Ethics | Leave a Comment

February 19, 2010

Krebs on Dialogical Love
By S. Matthew Liao

Professor Angelika Krebs (University of Basel) will be giving a talk on Monday, Feb. 22, at the Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar entitled “Dialogical Love.” A copy of Professor Kreb’s talk can be found here. Professor Krebs would welcome any comments/suggestions. Here’s an abstract of her talk:

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Posted on February 19, 2010 at 8:51 pm in Moral Psychology, S. Matthew Liao's Posts | Leave a Comment

February 10, 2010

Bias and Reasoning: Haidt’s Theory of Moral Judgment
By S. Matthew Liao

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:

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Posted on February 10, 2010 at 10:47 pm in Metaethics, Moral Psychology, S. Matthew Liao's Posts | Leave a Comment

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.

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Posted on November 14, 2009 at 2:06 pm in Applied Ethics, Bioethics, Experimental Ethics, Free Will, General Announcement, Legal Philosophy, Metaethics, Moral Epistemology, Moral Psychology, Normative Ethics, Philosophy of Action, Political Philosophy, Practical Ethics, Simon Kirchin's Posts, Thom Brooks's Posts | Leave a Comment

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.

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Posted on October 5, 2009 at 1:45 pm in Antti Kauppinen's Posts, Experimental Ethics, Moral Psychology, Normative Ethics | 6 Comments

September 15, 2009

Thinking About Reasons
By Antti Kauppinen

Expressivist accounts of normative judgment typically (always?) begin with all-things-considered verdicts: Hurrah (helping old ladies cross the road)! Boo (getting your little brother to murder)! But of course, many normative thoughts are not all-things-considered. I think there is some reason for me to go to bed early, and some reason for me not to do so. When I deliberate, I try to figure out which of these is stronger, and so arrive at an all-things-considered judgment.

Here is a partial list of things that an account of thoughts about reasons should explain:

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Posted on September 15, 2009 at 12:36 am in Antti Kauppinen's Posts, Metaethics, Moral Psychology | 12 Comments

May 7, 2009

The Vice of Procrastination
By Sergio Tenenbaum

Since it might take a while till I have a version of my contribution to the Moral Philosophy Seminar that is in reasonable shape, I am posting meanwhile a link to a “companion piece” to it. The piece is called “The Vice of Procrastination” and is forthcoming in a volume on procrastination (the contributors tried really hard to refrain from making the obvious jokes) entitled The Thief of Time edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark White.

Posted on May 7, 2009 at 6:25 pm in Moral Psychology, Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar, Sergio Tenenbaum's Posts | Leave a Comment

December 2, 2008

Should we all be sorry that we exist?
By Saul Smilansky

Things have been philosophically very quite over here, so I thought that some of you might like to ponder the question whether you should be sorry that you exist. Some background explanation: Jean Kazez has been posting on the paradoxes in my recent book “10 Moral Paradoxes” in the blog Talking Philosophy. So far she has covered chapters 1 through 6. Chapter 6 is “On Not Being Sorry About the Morally Bad”. The basic idea here is this:

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Posted on December 2, 2008 at 9:24 pm in Moral Psychology, Normative Ethics, Saul Smilansky's Posts | 14 Comments

October 11, 2008

A new problem for psychological hedonism?
By Toby Ord

Psychological hedonism (PH) is the view that each person is motivated so as to maximise his or her pleasure and minimise his or her pain. Thus, according to psychological hedonism, acts which appear to be altruistic are in fact performed for self interested reasons, such as making the agent feel less guilty, or giving the agent a ‘warm glow’. It is important to note that PH is a theory about motivation, rather than about ethics per se, but is of considerable relevance to ethical discussions.

Many people have attacked PH for not fitting the evidence: it seems that there are many situations when the benefits from the relief of guilt do not plausibly outweigh the actor’s sacrifice. For example, an atheist soldier choosing to die a painful death to protect his comrades. However, I wish to point out a different problem with PH which I have not heard before: that it has an incoherent conception of a person’s pleasure.

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Posted on October 11, 2008 at 8:56 pm in Moral Psychology, Toby Ord's Posts | 7 Comments

July 10, 2008

Journal of Moral Philosophy news
By Thom Brooks

Today, we have learned the news that the Journal of Moral Philosophy will be a quarterly publication from 2009. This is a major change that I have been hoping to achieve for some time. The JMP was launched in April 2004 and since this time we have published three issues per year. I am particularly delighted that we will be able to publish accepted work more quickly and provide more articles, review articles, discussion pieces, and book reviews to our readers.

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Posted on July 10, 2008 at 5:41 pm in Applied Ethics, General Announcement, Metaethics, Moral Epistemology, Moral Psychology, Normative Ethics, Political Philosophy, Practical Ethics, Thom Brooks's Posts | Leave a Comment

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.

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Posted on March 21, 2008 at 10:49 pm in Guy Kahane's Posts, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Neuroscience of Morality, Normative Ethics | 3 Comments

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

Posted on November 14, 2007 at 1:11 am in Gilbert Harman's Posts, Kamm Reading Group, Metaethics, Moral Epistemology, Moral Psychology | 7 Comments