Ethics Alert

I’ve really missed OPP
while it’s been on hiatus. And it looks like we’re not going to get many, if any,
updates until the end of August. In any case, I’ve been toying with the idea
that it would be good to have a weekly or biweekly post announcing any ethics
papers that have been posted on the web. So I’ve tentatively decided to give
this idea a try. Unfortunately, I don’t have the kind of software that Jonathan
uses over at OPP (nor do I
want to go to the trouble of learning how to use it). So, for now, I’ll be
announcing only those ethics papers that I hear about through e-mail. I get
e-mail alerts of the contents of most journals, but I would also like to post
papers that academics have posted to their respective home pages. So please let
me know if you’ve recently posted a paper online and would like me to link to
it in my next “Ethics Alert.” Send me
an email message in which you provide the relevant information in a form
suitable for cutting and pasting into a post. That is, please follow exactly
the form used below, including the relevant links.

Below I’ve cut and pasted from those PEA Brains who
have links to their research on their home pages. I’ve also included two
articles that recently came out in journals. This will, hopefully, get things started.

Procurable from the author:

Ben Bradley, The Worst
Time to Die. At what stage of life is death worst for its victim?  I
hold that, typically, death is worse the earlier it occurs.  Others,
including Jeff McMahan and Christopher Belshaw, have argued that it is worst to
die in early adulthood.  In this paper I show that McMahan and Belshaw are
wrong; I show that views that entail that Student’s death is worse face fatal
objections.  I focus in particular on McMahan’s Parfitian time-relative
interest account (TRIA) of the badness of death.

Campbell Brown, Two Kinds of
Holism about Values. This brief paper compares two kinds of holism about
values: G. E. Moore’s ‘organic unities’, and Jonathan Dancy’s ‘value holism’. I
argue that Moore’s
view is preferable. (Note: this is a substantially revised version of ‘Two Waysto be
Holistic About Value’, which was posted here before.)

Chris Heathwood, The Reduction of Sensory
Pleasure to Desire. Philosophical
Studies, forthcoming.

Dan Boisvert, Review
of Hilary Putnam’s Ethics Without Ontology.

David
Sobel (co-authored with David Copp), Morality
and Virtue. Ethics 114 (April 2004): 514-54.

Douglas W. Portmore, Dual-Ranking
Act-Consequentialism. Dual-ranking act-consequentialism (DRAC) is a rather peculiar
version of act-consequentialism. Unlike more traditional forms of
act-consequentialism, DRAC doesn’t take the deontic status of an action to be a
function of some evaluative ranking of outcomes. Rather, it takes the deontic
status of an action to be a function of some non-evaluative ranking that is in
turn a function of two auxiliary, evaluative rankings. I argue that DRAC is
promising in that it can accommodate certain features of commonsense morality
that no single-ranking version of act-consequentialism can: supererogation,
agent-centered options, and the self-other asymmetry. I also defend DRAC
against two objections: (1) that its dual-ranking structure is ad hoc and (2)
that it denies (putatively implausibly) that it is always permissible to make
self-sacrifices that don’t make things worse for others.

Jason Kawall, Virtue
Theory and the Supererogatory.

Josh Glasgow,
On
the Methodology of the Race Debate: Conceptual Analysis and Racial Discourse.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
forthcoming.

Joshua Knobe, The Concept of Intentional
Action: A Case Study in the Uses of Folk Psychology. Philosophical Studies, forthcoming.

Kyle Swan, A Metaethical Option
for Theists. Journal of Religious
Ethics 34:1 (2006), 3-20.

Michael Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism, chapter 5.
This is the chapter on moral knowledge from my book. Discusses what intuition
is, why intuitive beliefs are justified, how they can be reliable, and what is
wrong with the most common objections to the use of intuition.

Robert N. Johnson, Good Will and the Moral
Worth of Actions from Duty. A Draft for Blackwell’s
Guide to Kant’s Groundwork T. E. Hill, ed. (NY: Blackwell’s, forthcoming).

Stephen
Finlay, Motivation
to the Means. Forthcoming in David Chan (ed.) Values, Rational Choice, and the Will.

Troy Jollimore, Why is Instrumental Rationality
Rational? Canadian Journal of
Philosophy 35:2 (June 2005), pp. 289-307.

Procurable from the publisher:

David
Shoemaker, Personal
Identity and Ethics. The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Kris McDaniel (co-edited with
Richard Feldman, Jason Raibley, and Michael Zimmerman), The
Good, The Right, Life and Death. Ashgate Press, forthcoming.

Laurie Shrage, Abortion and Social Responsibility: Depolarizing the Debate,  Oxford UniversityPress, 2003.

Michael Cholbi, Suicide. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
2004.

Scott Wilson, Animals and Ethics. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Michael Ridge, Saving
the Ethical Appearances. Mind
2006 115:633-650.

Dan Moller, Should
we let people starve – for now? Analysis;
Volume 66, Issue 291, Page 240.