I once heard someone maintain something absolutely absurd: A life in prison is just the price for committing murder, he said, and you are "free" to commit murder as long as you are willing to pay that price. Clearly this is crazy. A life in […] Read More
The philosopher Kristen Bell has discovered a puzzling new asymmetry which has come to be known affectionately as ‘Bell’s Inequality.’ Probably the best way to explain the effect she uncovered is just to describe her original experiment.
Last weekend, several of us Soupers participated in a terrific conference in Boulder, CO, the first annual Rocky Mountain Ethics Conference. For the voyeurs among you, Alastair Norcross and Eric Chwang have set up websites with many pictures from the event. Alastair’s link is here, […] Read More
Many philosophy departments require a course in the history of (usually early) modern philosophy for their majors. My impression of the way such courses are usually taught is that they focus on metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind: the metaphysics of substances; the epistemology of […] Read More
Thanks to Simon Rippon’s urging and help, two different kinds of comment feeds have now been set up. Comments feed for the whole bowl of Soup: http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/comments.rdf The feed seems to be working well with Google Reader, NewsGator, Bloglines, Google personal homepages, and with the […] Read More
Here’s an announcement from Eva Feder Kittay for an upcoming conference in NYC that I’m proud to be participating in myself: CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT: The Stony Brook University Department of Philosophy presentsCognitive Disability: A Challenge to Moral Philosophy September 18 – 20, 2008Stony Brook Manhattan 401 […] Read More
I just read a chapter about slave reparations by my colleague David Boonin. David presents an interesting and surprisingly strong argument in favor of reparations. (This argument apparently has been advanced before, but this is the first time I heard it.) Here’s an abstract of […] Read More
Georgetown University is seeking applications for the full-time position of Managing Editor of Ethics beginning December 1, 2008. Now, we don’t usually post job announcements here at PEA Soup, but I wanted to make an exception in this case, because Ethics is one of the […] Read More
Ever since I first read Kant’s Groundwork, I have been struck by a puzzle that I have never seen adequately explained. In a footnote in Section 2 (G 430n), Kant makes some rather dismissive remarks about the Golden Rule (he calls it “the trivial quod […] Read More