Some philosophers opposed to consequentialism think that one of the basic mistakes that consequentialists make is to think that all value is located in states of affairs. (E.g., there are remarks to this effect in T. M. Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other; in […] Read More
For people in the Bay Area, or those interested in making a trip to it, there will be a small conference entitled "Mind, Agency, and Emotion: New Perspectives on Moral Psychology" held at the University of San Francisco on November 9th and 10th. Speakers will […] Read More
There’s a debate rumbling away on Brian Leiter’s Legal Philosophy blog about whether or not American legal philosophers are remiss for paying so little attention to deontic logic. This reminded me of something that bugs me about contemporary metaethics — viz., that so few contemporary […] Read More
I’m a contractualist. There – I’ve said it. My supervisor Brad Hooker is the rule-consequentialist. You might think that we have endless debates about which of the closely resembling views is right. Unfortunately we have better things to do. But, I do want to explain […] Read More
The “Open Question Argument” is supposed to establish something important for (meta)ethics; namely, that the property of being good (or value, or of what one ought to do, etc.) is not entailed by, and thus not identical to, any natural property like pleasure or knowledge. […] Read More
According to some (but not all) ‘hybrid’ metaethical theories, moral sentences like ‘stealing is wrong’ express both beliefs and desires, but different beliefs for different speakers. I think Paul Edwards was a forebear of this position, but it has recently been defended by Stephen Barker […] Read More
In case you haven’t seen it, there is an article on Black women in philosophy in the Chronicle of Higher Ed today:http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=rVDdSShyYzsDdqdVtrhbFS234msgNfm3
In case you missed it, Don Loeb has accepted our invitation to be a contributor here at PEA Soup. Don is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont, and specializes in ethics, philosophy of law, and political philosophy. And he’s very funny. It’s […] Read More
It’s taken to be a platitude of folk morality that I can only be morally responsible for my own actions. Call this The Platitude. Sometimes The Platitude is presented in a more expansive form: (a) I can be responsible for my own actions; and (b) […] Read More