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).

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Posted on September 12, 2007 at 5:31 pm in Conference Announcement, Kamm Reading Group, Nir Eyal's Posts | 1 Comment

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).

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Posted on August 20, 2007 at 10:25 pm in Kamm Poll, Kamm Reading Group, Nir Eyal's Posts, Normative Ethics | 8 Comments

August 10, 2007

Kamm’s Intricate Ethics: Chapter 6
By Nir Eyal

Chapter Six presents Kamm’s response to Peter Unger’s Living High and Letting Die. According to Kamm, “Unger has tried to show that relying on intuitive judgments in cases is a worthless methodology for finding principles.” (p. 190). Therefore, for him, “when there is a conflict between the theses supported by general reflection (e.g., reduce suffering) and judgments about particular cases, we should stick with the results of general reflection, for our intuitions about cases are unreliable and manipulable by morally irrelevant factors.” (p.192).

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Posted on August 10, 2007 at 12:02 am in Kamm Reading Group, Nir Eyal's Posts, Normative Ethics | 6 Comments