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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 2, 2008
Why do ethicists write such long papers?
By Saul Smilansky
I’ve been looking through the recent issue of Analysis. It has 13 papers, of which one is on meta-ethics, and there’s nothing in either normative or applied ethics. This is a fairly typical showing. There are occasional papers on free will (which is a distinct topic, combining metaphysics and ethics), but very little ethics as such, and (my focus here) hardly any normative or, indeed, applied ethics. Why? And why does this matter?
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.
March 15, 2008
CF: Raz on Value, Respect and Well-being
By S. Matthew Liao
Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT)
Value, Respect, and Wellbeing: Themes from the Work of Joseph Raz
Friday 9 May 2008
Time: 9.30am - 5.15pm
Venue: The Boardroom, Arthur Lewis Building, University of Manchester
Provisional Programme:
9.30 - 10.00 registration
10.00 - 11.15 session 1: Steven Wall (Bowling Green State University)
11.15 - 11.30 coffee
11.30 - 12.45 session 2: Leslie Green (University of Oxford)
12.45 - 1.30 lunch
1.30 - 2.45 session 3: Brad Hooker (University of Reading)
2.45 - 3.00 tea
3.00 - 4.15 session 4: Stephen Darwall (University of Michigan)
4.15 - 5.15 session 5: Discussion with replies by Joseph Raz (University of Oxford and Columbia University)
February 27, 2008
James Griffin’s On Human Rights
By S. Matthew Liao
Professor James Griffin’s outstanding and important book, On Human Rights, has now been published by Oxford University Press. Professor Griffin is the White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, Emeritus, at Oxford University, and currently holds appointments at Oxford, Rutgers University and Australian National University.
Dr. John Tasioulas (Oxford) has some wonderful remarks regarding Professor Griffin’s book, which he presented at Professor Griffin’s book launch on January 23, 2008, and which can be found here.
Professor Griffin’s address to the audience at the book launch, in which he shares his motivation for writing the book, can also be found here.
February 27, 2008
Brown on A Life Worth Living
By S. Matthew Liao
Dr. Campbell Brown from University of Edinburgh gave a talk recently at the Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar on “How to Live a Life Worth Living.” An abstract of his talk is as follows:
Although ubiquitous in population ethics, the notion of a “life worth living” resists easy analysis. Intuitively, one wants to say that a life is worth living just in case living it is better than living no life at all. On reflection, though, this seems mysterious. To live no life at all is simply not to exist, to be nothing. But then it seems we have an instance of the “better than” relation in which one of the relata is absent; we’re trying to compare something, a life, with nothing. This paper proposes an analysis of lives worth living that avoids such mysterious comparisons.
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.
January 4, 2008
ROME
By Andrew Reisner
There’s a new and interesting looking ethics conference being held in beautiful Colorado. Information below:
Please post widely.
RoME
First Annual
Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress
University of Colorado, Boulder
August 8-10, 2008
Boulder, Colorado
an international conference geared to offer the highest quality, highest altitude discussion of ethics, broadly conceived
Call For Papers
December 5, 2007
If I may be allowed a chance to make a brief announcement, I am delighted to say that my new monograph, Hegel’s Political Philosophy: A Systematic Reading of the Philosophy of Right, is hot off the press. It is published by Edinburgh University Press and distributed in the United States by Columbia University Press.
For a taster:
November 21, 2007
Pettit on the Second Person Frame
By S. Matthew Liao
Professor Philip Pettit from Princeton University gave a talk entitled “the Second Person Frame” this past Monday at Oxford’s Moral Philosophy Seminar. In a nutshell (if I understood him correctly), he argues that Stephen Darwall’s idea of the second person demands in The Second Person Standpoint, is plausible and similar to what he (Pettit) and Michael Smith have elsewhere called ‘co-reasoning.’ Pace Darwall though, Pettit argues that consequentialists can also explain the second person demands. A copy of his powerpoint presentation is here. He would welcome any comments/suggestions.
November 16, 2007
2nd Annual Conference of Northwestern Society for Ethical Theory and Political Philosophy
By Andrew Reisner
I have no affiliation with Northwestern, but I thought this might be of interest to readers of Ethics Etc.:
Theme: Ethical theory and political philosophy
Keynote speakers: Susan Wolf (UNC Chapel Hill) and David Velleman (NYU)
Dates: May 15th - 17th, 2008
November 11, 2007
Some Questions About Moral Paradoxes 5
By Saul Smilansky
What can we learn from moral paradoxes?
While each of the questions of my four previous posts in this series could be answered fairly decisively, this question is naturally more open. So I will be able to give only some indication as to why moral paradoxes matter, and why investigating them further should be worthwhile. But there is another reason why it is difficult to speak here with confidence: moral paradoxes, in the strict sense (as we explicated their nature in the first post) have been almost completely neglected. To the best of my knowledge, my recent book 10 MORAL PARADOXES is only the third book ever on this topic, at least within analytic philosophy (the predecessors, in a broad sense, being Derek Parfit’s REASONS AND PERSONS which introduces various paradoxes, and the late Gregory Kavka’s MORAL PARADOXES OF NUCLEAR DETERRENCE; both of them from the 1980s).
November 8, 2007
In our political philosophy reading group yesterday, we read Samuel Scheffler’s new essay “Immigration and the Significance of Culture” published in Philosophy & Public Affairs 35(2) (2007). It can be downloaded here.
There was quite a lot that colleagues objected to in the essay, but a major worry concerns a summary of his views at the end of his essay. Scheffler says:
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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 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 28, 2007
Some Questions About Moral Paradoxes 4
By Saul Smilansky
What should we do about moral paradoxes?
By now we should have a reasonably good idea of what a moral paradox is, of how a moral paradox differs from other things that might seem like it but are not, and of (some of) the sources of moral paradoxes. But what should we do about moral paradoxes? Some of the answers here will be surprising.
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.
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