David Faraci, from Bowling Green State University, has asked me to run the following post on his behalf (he’ll be responding to comments directly): I want to argue that expressivism is incapable of making sense of certain kinds of nihilistic utterances. Much of this argument […] Read More
I’ve been recently reading Gibbard’s and Schroeder’s new books (both brilliant) on expressivism. I’ve started to wonder whether there is a connection between expressivism and the so-called buck-passing views. I’m sure others have thought about this before, but, if there is such a connection, it […] Read More
Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman are running a new version of the Moral Sense Test and they are especially interested in collecting responses from moral experts – those with graduate training in ethical or political theory. Given the readership of this Blog, that probably includes […] Read More
Judgment internalism (which holds that a necessary condition on a judgment of the form “x has reason to y”, when stated by x, is that x have some motivation to y) is often used as a crucial plank in arguments for noncognitivism. Very roughly speaking, […] Read More
Steve Campbell from Michigan kindly directed my attention to a new paper that uses the methods of experimental philosophy to investigate the objectivity-question in metaethics. This paper by Geoffrey Goodwin and John Darley is entitled ‘The Psychology of Metaethics: Exploring Objectivism’ (downloadable from HERE). I […] Read More
“The Murphy Institute’s Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at Tulane University is pleased to announce residential Faculty Fellowships for the 2009-2010 academic year. These fellowships, made possible by funds from the Tulane Murphy Foundation, are available to support outstanding faculty whose teaching and research […] Read More
The poll question was: If someone holds both (a) that an act is morally permissible if and only if it maximizes aggregate pleasure and (b) that nothing whatsoever (not even pleasure) is good, then s/he is what type of theorist? And, as of 9:20 a.m. […] Read More
The poll question was: Assuming that you’re a consequentialist (if you’re not one, then please don’t take this poll), do you believe that the best outcome available to a given agent is always the one that she ought to prefer to all other available alternatives? […] Read More