First, thanks to Doug and the other editors for the invitation! I'm happy to be here. For my first post, I wanted to share an issue that has been puzzling me. Ultimately, this relates back to issues in voting ethics, but I want to submit […] Read More
We're pleased to announce that Jason Brennan has accepted our invitation to become a contributor. Here's a brief biography, which I borrow from his web site: "JASON BRENNAN (Ph.D., 2007, University of Arizona) is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Research, at Brown University, and a member […] Read More
Thanks to everyone for sharing their intuitions about the cases in my previous post. Here I’m going to back up and say something about my interest in the cases. Among linguists, the canonical view about modal expressions like “might”, “may” and “must” is that they […] Read More
I’ve just been reading Christine Korsgaard’s new book Self-Constitution – Agency, Identity, and Integrity. It’s a marvelous book, one of the best I’ve read in long time. It presents an appealing picture of actions, agency, practical deliberation, normativity, morality, and interpersonal relations, it draws from […] Read More
… returns, thanks to Simon Rippon. You can find the feed link in the top Navigation Bar. Thank you, Simon, for getting this global comments feed back up and running for us!
My most compelling intuition is that the effective freedom to achieve a state I could want, even if I don't actually want it, makes me better off so that even if I don't actually want something I'm still worse off for not being able to […] Read More
Right now I’m thinking about the proper descriptive semantics for bare, normative modal statements, statements that use expressions like “must”, “ought”, and “may” normatively but don’t contain explicit restrictor phrases like “legally”, “morally”, or “given what I know”. I’m developing my own account of their […] Read More
Tim Scanlon's new book Moral Dimensions provides an elegant account according to which an agent's mental states are relevant to the question as to whether that agent is blameworthy but not to the question as to whether the agent's behavior itself is morally wrong. As the philosopher […] Read More
Thank you all—contributors, commentators, and readers—for another great year in the Soup! This month marks PEA Soup's fifth "birthday" on the blogosphere, and because of all of you, it was clearly the best. Thank you! To celebrate, we've introduced a new design theme—Lone Tree Green!—and […] Read More