Unlike many other readers, I am inclined to read Kant as a kind of realist (rather than a “constructivist”) about goodness. Nonetheless, Kant holds a distinctive view of goodness: In his view, the fundamental kind of goodness can only be instantiated by the will itself. […] Read More
We are pleased to announce the first installment of our collaboration with Ethics, where we will host a discussion of one article from each issue of the journal, and the journal will make a copy of that article freely accessible (for a limited time) to […] Read More
Many people teach their small children the myth of Santa Claus: that a magical being who lives at the North Pole brings presents on Christmas Eve. Secondary aspects of the myth are that whether one receives presents is a function of one’s behavior, and that […] Read More
Princeton University 9-10 April 2010 The Committee for the Graduate Conference in Political Theory at Princeton University welcomes papers concerning any period, methodological approach or topic in political theory, political philosophy, or the history of political thought. Approximately eight papers will be accepted.
As a first pass, we may think of Consequentialist moral theories as those that specify the right in terms of the good. But these terms occlude some important structure that can be brought out by further analysis. In particular, I take it that to say […] Read More
We are pleased to announce that Richard Chappell has accepted our invitation to be a contributor here at PEA Soup. Richard is a graduate student in Philosophy at Princeton University. He is the author of Philosophy, et cetera. He specializes in ethical theory with a primary interest in rational normativity, or the […] Read More
As I argued in my previous post, I think that ‘ought’ implies ‘securable’, and, from that, it follows that agents can only be required to perform securable acts. I am, however, a bit unsettled about how best to define ‘securable’. Below, I list the three […] Read More
I used to think that we ought to do the best we can. After debating the issue with Richard Chappell, doing some more research, and rereading some articles that I hadn’t read in awhile, I’ve changed my mind. The idea that we ought to do […] Read More
In Sir P.F. Strawson’s brilliant 1949 paper ‘Ethical Intuitionism’, I came across a short and seemingly powerful argument for the buck-passing accounts of value and other ethical words that I haven’t seen elsewhere. Even if I am a buck-passer, I do think that this argument […] Read More