The latest ethics alert appears below the fold.
Publicly Available:
John Broome, “Ought.”
Mark Schroeder, ‘Means-End Coherence, Stringency, and Subjective Reasons.’
(214k .pdf file – 26 pages with references) NEW – First posted 9/4/06. Something
goes wrong when an agent intends some end and fails to carry out the means she
believes to be necessary for it, and something goes right when, intending the
end, she adopts the means she thinks are required. This has even been claimed
to be one of the only uncontroversial truths in ethical theory. But not only is
there widespread disagreement about why this is so, there is widespread
disagreement about in what sense it is so. In this paper I explore an
underdeveloped answer to the question of in what sense it is so, and
show that resolving an apparent difficulty with this view leads to an
attractive picture about why it is so.
Mark Schroeder, ‘Teleology, Agent-Relative Value, and ‘Good’.’ (223k .pdf
file – 35 pages with references) Revised paper posted 9/4/06. Agent-Relative
Teleology is widely supposed to be a theory that can yield the deeply
attractive features of consequentialism without being subject to deep
structural counterexamples like those having to do with predictions about
agent-centered constraints and special obligations. But this, I think, is
deeply mistaken. Though ART has the right structural features to be
consistent with constraints and special obligations, it is not at all obvious
that it retains the deeply attractive features of consequentialism. That it
does so has been taken for granted, but as I demonstrate in this paper, it is a
thesis whose defense would require substantial footwork. In this paper I show
not only that such footwork is needed, but that it has not been done, and that
it is highly plausible that it cannot be done. Among other things, I
show that it is unpromising to think that the ART-ists’ claims about what is good-relative-to
whom are independently plausible, and that there is no uncontroversial
distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral value to which ART-ists
can appeal in explaining why their theory is attractive. Most surprisingly, I
provide a general argument that ART cannot avoid the putative paradox of
deontology, the very feature for which ART has always been generally assumed to
be deeply attractive.
Available by Subscription Only:
Philosophy, Volume 81 – Issue 03 – July 2006.
This issue includes:
The
Nonindividuation Argument Against Zygotic Personhood
Louis Guenin
Published Online: 19-SEP-06
[ abstract ] pp 463 – 504
Kantian Duties to the Self, Explained and Defended
Jens Timmermann
Published Online: 19-SEP-06
[ abstract ] pp 505 – 530
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NOTICE: If you have, or know of, an
ethics paper (or a new draft of one) that has recently become available online
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Richard
J. Arneson, Luck
Egalitarianism: An Interpretation and Defense, forthcoming in Philosophical Topics.
Not like
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<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>.