• 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).

From Ben Bradley:

The Philosophy Department at Syracuse University invites applications from senior figures to assume the Guttag Professorship of Ethics and Political Philosophy following the retirement of Guttag Professor Michael Stocker in May 2011.

Duties normally include both graduate and undergraduate teaching, research, advising, and committee service. Salary and exact balance of duties negotiable. Applications from women and minority candidates are particularly encouraged. Informal expressions of interest may be sent to Robert Van Gulick, Chair, Guttag Search Committee, Department of Philosophy (rnvangul (at) syr.edu). For formal consideration, candidates must complete an online Dean/Senior Executive/Faculty application (https://www.sujobopps.edu), and attach a CV and contact information for three letters of recommendation.

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/

Rational Choice Contractarianism 25 Years After Morals By Agreement

Celebrating the project of rational choice contractarianism with its most influential proponent: David Gauthier.
Location: York University, Toronto Ontario Canada
Date: Friday May 13- Sunday May 15, 2011
Abstract Deadline: January 15, 2011 (abstracts will be reviewed as they arrive, so early submissions are welcome and encouraged)

Abstract Submission Instructions: Send a substantial abstract (approximately 500-750 words) to Professor Susan Dimock, McLaughlin College, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto ON Canada M3J 1P3 or to dimock (at) yorku.ca. The conference will combine a series of plenary sessions, invited presentations from the abstract submissions, and workshops. Submitted papers should be suitable for presentation in a maximum of 45 minutes, to be followed by a 30 minute Q&A/discussion period.

From Professor Sandra Laugier (Sorbonne):

This conference is meant as an homage to Cora Diamond’s work in ethics, and focuses on its European reception. Her work has been translated in French and Italian in the recent years.

“Ethics, Imagination, and Forms of Life”
13-15 September 2010, Amiens, France
Pôle cathédrale, Placette Lafleur
Amphithéâtre Carré de Malberg
Admission free – open to graduate students and researchers
Contact : sandra.laugier (at) noos.fr

Monday, September 13th
Amphithéâtre Carré de Malberg

Opening
Sandra Laugier, Emmanuel Halais (UPJV, CURAPP)

1. ETHICS AND OBJECTIVITY
Chair : Vincent Descombes (EHESS)

Sometime ago, Mike Otsuka (UCL) mentioned here that Derek Parfit will be responding to an article by him and Alex Voorhoeve entitled ‘Why It Matters That Some Are Worse Off Than Others: An Argument against the Priority View’ here on Ethics Etc, with further responses from Mike and Alex, once Derek’s book, On What Matters, is published. In the meantime, the Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT) has put together a really nice one day conference to discuss Mike’s and Alex’s paper.

Date: 19th November 2010
Time: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Location: University of Manchester, UK

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.

The Second Annual Arizona Workshop in Normative Ethics will be held at the Westward Look Resort, Tucson, Arizona from January 6 through January 8, 2011.

Normative ethical theory addresses general questions about the right and the good and attempts to answer such questions as: What sorts of actions are right or wrong and why? What sort of person ought one to become and why? Normative ethical theories, including, for instance, versions of consequentialism, deontology, contractualism, natural law theory, and virtue ethics address such questions.

Keynote Speakers:
Robert Audi – David E. Gallo Professor of Business Ethics in the Mendoza College of Business and Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame

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.”

Professor Saul Smilansky (University of Haifa) will be giving a talk on Monday, March 1, at the Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar entitled “Should We Be Sorry that We Exist?” A copy of Saul’s talk can be found here. Saul would welcome any comments/suggestions. Here’s an abstract of his talk:

JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY:
An International Journal of Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy
(ISSN 1740-4681)

Volume 7, Number 1 (2010)

ARTICLES

William Sin, ‘Trivial Sacrifices, Great Demands’, pp. 3-15

Lina Papadaki, ‘What is Objectification?’ pp. 16-36

M. B. E. Smith, ‘Does Humanity Share a Common Moral Faculty?’ pp. 37-53

Jonathan Seglow, ‘Associative Duties and Global Justice’, pp. 54-73

Miriam Ronzoni, ‘Constructivism and Practical Reason: On Intersubjectivity, Abstraction, and Judgment’, pp. 74-104

Kenneth R. Westphal, ‘From “Convention” to “Ethical Life”: Hume’s Theory of Justice in Post-Kantian Perspective’, pp. 105-32

REVIEW ARTICLE

JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY:
An International Journal of Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy
(ISSN 1740-4681)

Volume 6, Number 4 (2009)

ARTICLES

Ty Landrum, ‘Persons as Objects of Love’, pp. 417-39

Elizabeth Tropman, ‘Renewing Moral Intuitionism’, pp. 440-63

David Alm, ‘Deontological Restrictions and the Good/Bad Asymmetry’, pp. 464-81

Carl Knight, ‘Egalitarian Justice and Valuational Judgment’, pp. 482-98

Geoffrey Scarre, ‘The “Banality of Good”?’ pp. 499-519

REVIEW ARTICLE

Sean Coyle, ‘The Ideality of Law’, pp. 521-34

BOOK REVIEWS

Stefan Bird-Pollan on The Founding Act of Modern Ethical Life: Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Moral and Political Philosophy by Ideo Geiger, pp. 535-37

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.

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.

The British Academy, in association with the Centre de recherche en éthique de l’Université de Montréal, will be hosting an international conference on the work of Onora O’Neill, entitled “Ethics and Politics Beyond Borders: The Work of Onora O’Neill.

24-26 SEPTEMBER 2009
10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1
Convenor: Professor David Archard (Lancaster University)

Thursday, 24 September 2009
12.00 Registration

1.30 Session 1: The ethics and politics of global justice
Welcome and opening remarks

Harming Future Persons: Ethics, Genetics and the Nonidentity Problem, edited by Melinda Roberts and David Wasserman, just came out!

From the back cover:
This collection of essays investigates the obligations we have in respect of future persons, ranging from our own future offspring to distant future generations. What are our obligations to persons who have not yet, but eventually will, come into existence? Can we harm them? Can we wrong them? Can the fact that our choice means that a worse off person will exist in place of a better off but “nonidentical” person make that choice is wrong?

This First Annual Arizona Workshop in Normative Ethics takes place at the Westward Look Resort in Tucson, Arizona, from January 7 to January 9, 2010. Here is the program for it, which looks great:

Thursday January 7

5:00–6:30 pm KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Holly M. Smith (Rutgers)
The Moral Clout of Reasonable Beliefs
Chair: David Schmidtz (University of Arizona)

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