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
Some questions I had been thinking about came up at the Wisconsin Metaethics Workshop, and I wondered if people had any thoughts about them. As a moral irrealist, and indeed someone tempted by the error theory, I am inclined to say that I don’t believe […] Read More
Many philosophers believe that suicide is permissible in at least some circumstances. Others go further and claim that there are circumstances in which suicide is morally obligatory — that there’s sometimes a "duty to die." While I accept that suicide may be morally permissible in […] Read More