ETHICS ALERT

If one of your papers (or a new draft) has recently become
available online and you would like me to link to it in the next Ethics Alert,
then please send me an email or
an email attachment (.doc or .rtf) with the relevant information. The relevant
information should be properly formatted so that it can be simply cut and
pasted into a post. Thus it should look like this:

 
Richard J. Arneson,
Luck
Egalitarianism: An Interpretation and Defense, forthcoming in Philosophical
Topics.

 
Not like this:

 
<a href=
“http://philosophy2.ucsd.edu/~rarneson/index.html”> Richard J.
Arneson </a>, <a
href=“http://philosophy2.ucsd.edu/~rarneson/luckegalitarianism2.pdf”> Luck
Egalitarianism: An Interpretation and Defense </a>. forthcoming in
<i>Philosophical Topics</i>.

 
Procurable
from the author:

 
Richard
J. Arneson, Luck
Egalitarianism: An Interpretation and Defense, forthcoming in Philosophical
Topics. 

Richard
J. Arneson, Joel
Feinberg and the Justification of Hard Paternalism, forthcoming in Legal
Theory.

Neil
Levy, Frankfurt
Enablers and Frankfurt Disablers In this paper, I introduce the notion of
a Frankfurt Enabler, a counterfactual intervener poised, should a signal for
intervention be received, to enable an agent to perform a mental or physical
action.  Frankfurt enablers demonstrate, I
claim, that merely counterfactual conditions are sometimes relevant to
assessing what capacities agents possess. Since this is the case, we are not
entitled to conclude that agents in standard Frankfurt-style cases retain their
responsibility-ensuring capacities. There is no principled rationale for
bracketing counterfactual interveners in standard Frankfurt-style cases, but
admitting their relevance when they areFrankfurt enablers. I argue that the intuition that we ought to bracket counterfactual
interveners is, at bottom, an expression of a mistaken internalist view about
the mental.

 
Neil Levy, Restrictivism
is a Covert Compatibilism. Libertarian restrictivists hold that agents are
rarely directly free. However, they seek to reconcile their views with common
intuitions by arguing that moral responsibility, or indirect freedom (depending
on the version of restrictivism) is much more common than direct freedom. I
argue that restrictivists must give up either the claim that agents are rarely
free, or the claim that indirect freedom or responsibility is much more common
than direct freedom. Focusing on Kane’s version of restrictivism, I show that
the view holds people responsible for actions when (merely) compatibilist
conditions are met. Since this is unacceptable by libertarian lights, they must
either accept that compatibilist conditions on moral responsibility are
sufficient, or make their restrictivism more extreme than it already is.

 
Neil
Levy, Doxastic
Responsibility. Forthcoming in Synthese. Doxastic responsibility matters,
morally and epistemologically. Morally, because many of our intuitive
ascriptions of blame seem to track back to agents’ apparent responsibility for
beliefs; epistemologically because some philosophers identify epistemic
justification with deontological permissibility. But there is a powerful
argument which seems to show that we are rarely or never responsible for our
beliefs, because we cannot control them. I examine various possible responses
to this argument, which aim to show either that doxastic responsibility does
not require that we control our beliefs, or that as a matter of fact we do
exercise the right kind of control over our beliefs. I argue that the existing
arguments are all wanting: in fact, our lack of control over our beliefs
typically excuses us of responsibility for them.

 
Douglas W.
Portmore, Are
Moral Reasons Morally Overriding? I present an argument that poses the
following dilemma for moral theorists: either (a) reject at least one of three
of our most firmly held moral convictions or (b) reject the view that moral
reasons are morally overriding, that is, reject the view that moral reasons
always defeat non-moral reasons in the determination of an act’s deontic status
(e.g., morally permissible or impermissible). I then argue that we should opt
for the second horn of this dilemma, in part because we should be loath to
reject such firmly held moral convictions, but also because doing so allows us
to dissolve an apparent paradox regarding supererogation. If I’m right, if
non-moral reasons are relevant to determining what is and isn’t morally
permissible, then it would seem that moral theorists have their work cut out
for them. Not only will they need to determine what the fundamental
right-making and wrong-making features of actions are (i.e., what moral reasons
there are), but they will also need to determine what non-moral reasons there
are and which of these are relevant to determining an act’s deontic status. And
moral theorists will have to account for how these two very different sorts of
reasons—moral and non-moral reasons—“come together” to determine an act’s
deontic status. I will not attempt to do this work here, but rather only to
argue that the work needs to be done.

 
Mark
Schroeder, How
Expressivists Can and Should Solve their Problem with Negation. More or
less what it says – I claim to have the first successful expressivist
explanation of why ‘murder is wrong’ and ‘murder is not wrong’ are
inconsistent, and try to draw some further lessons – for example, as a
corollary I claim to give the first successful expressivist explanation of the
validity of Geach’s original modus ponens argument.

Mark Schroeder, Teleology,
Agent-Relative Value, and ‘Good’. I argue, very roughly, that agent-relative
teleology is not good.  Not even agent-relatively.

 
Nishi
Shah, How
Action Governs Intention. Elsewhere I have argued that the hypothesis that
the concept of belief includes a standard of correctness best explains the fact
that the
deliberative question whether to believe that p (where p stands for an
arbitrary proposition) can only be settled by answering the question whether it
is the case that p (i.e. whether p). In this paper, I argue that the hypothesis
that the concept of intention includes a standard of correctness best explains
the fact that in order to settle the deliberative question whether to intend to
A one must answer the question whether to A.

 

Procurable
from the publisher:

 
Erin M. Cline, Review of Jiwei Ci, The Two Faces
of Justice, Harvard University Press, 2006, 252pp., $39.95 (hbk). Notre
Dame Philosophical Reviews.

 
Frances Howard-Snyder, “Cannot”
Implies “Not Ought”, Philosophical Studies 130: 2 (August 2006).

 
Joshua Knobe, The
Concept of Intentional Action: A Case Study in the Uses of Folk Psychology,
Philosophical Studies 130: 2 (August 2006).

 
Martin Peterson, Indeterminate
Preferences. Philosophical Studies 130: 2 (August 2006).

 
————————————————————————
The Ethics of War: State of the Art

DAVID RODIN
Journal of Applied Philosophy;
Volume 23, Issue 3, 2006Aug1, Page 241

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-5930.2006.00351.x?ai=2k5&ui=gfy1&af=T

————————————————————————
Luck, Evidence and War

ROB LAWLOR
Journal of Applied Philosophy;
Volume 23, Issue 3, 2006Aug1, Page 247

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-5930.2006.00335.x?ai=2k5&ui=gfy1&af=T

————————————————————————
Defending the Common Life: National-Defence After Rodin

DEANE-PETER BAKER
Journal of Applied Philosophy;
Volume 23, Issue 3, 2006Aug1, Page 259

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-5930.2006.00340.x?ai=2k5&ui=gfy1&af=T

————————————————————————
Humanitarian Intervention: Closing the Gap Between Theory and Practice

GILLIAN BROCK
Journal of Applied Philosophy;
Volume 23, Issue 3, 2006Aug1, Page 277

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-5930.2006.00332.x?ai=2k5&ui=gfy1&af=T

————————————————————————
Iraq: A Morally Justified Resort to War

DAVID MELLOW
Journal of Applied Philosophy;
Volume 23, Issue 3, 2006Aug1, Page 293

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-5930.2006.00342.x?ai=2k5&ui=gfy1&af=T

————————————————————————
Moral Tragedies, Supreme Emergencies and National-Defence

DANIEL STATMAN
Journal of Applied Philosophy;
Volume 23, Issue 3, 2006Aug1, Page 311

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-5930.2006.00337.x?ai=2k5&ui=gfy1&af=T

————————————————————————
Assassination and Targeted Killing: Law Enforcement, Execution or
Self-Defence?

MICHAEL L. GROSS
Journal of Applied Philosophy;
Volume 23, Issue 3, 2006Aug1, Page 323

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-5930.2006.00347.x?ai=2k5&ui=gfy1&af=T

————————————————————————
Torture – The Case for Dirty Harry and against Alan Dershowitz

UWE STEINHOFF
Journal of Applied Philosophy;
Volume 23, Issue 3, 2006Aug1, Page 337

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-5930.2006.00356.x?ai=2k5&ui=gfy1&af=T

————————————————————————
Torture, Terrorism and the State: a Refutation of the Ticking-Bomb
Argument

VITTORIO BUFACCHI, JEAN MARIA ARRIGO
Journal of Applied Philosophy;
Volume 23, Issue 3, 2006Aug1, Page 355

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-5930.2006.00355.x?ai=2k5&ui=gfy1&af=T