The Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy, based at the Law School in Camden, is pleased to announce a two-day symposium on F. M. Kamm’s Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm (Oxford, 2007). The symposium will take place on Friday, February 22nd and Saturday, […] Read More
There’s an approach to a number of different domains in ethics, which we can call “specificationism”, that is seldom explicitly discussed but that I think warrants greater attention. Easily the most famous example of specificationism is found in the theory of rights and is owed […] Read More
I’d like to return to one of the favourite topics of Pea Soup for a bit, i.e., the Zombies. Couple of years ago we had great discussions about Zombies, well-being, and the notion of ‘good for’ (here, here, and here). We’ve even talked about whether […] Read More
Some philosophers are bold; they defend strong positions with few hedges or caveats. Others are cautious; they defend weak positions with many hedges and caveats. Which of these two approaches, bold or cautious, is better?
Price gouging seems like a rotten thing to do. There isn’t much written about it from a philosophic perspective, but most philosophers I’ve talked to think it’s a fairly nasty practice. President Bush thinks it’s morally analagous to looting. And it’s illegal in most states. […] Read More
Many of you will likely recall my post last fall on esoteric normative theories. That was a wonderfully provocative discussion, one I’d like to pursue further. In particular, I’d like to get a handle on the history of esotericism as an objection to normative theories, […] Read More
It seems the following is nowadays a popular view: Wide scope view: sentences of the form “If p, then it ought to be the case that q” have the logical form O(p -> q) where O is an “ought” operator and -> denotes a material […] Read More
Suppose that what ultimately matters is the objective goodness of what you do – where the objective goodness of an action is determined by the action’s actual outcome, not merely by the expected outcome. But suppose that you usually don’t know for certain what degree […] Read More
Classical decision theory is built around a central "representation theorem": so long as an agent’s preferences meet certain basic conditions of coherence, we can construct a function that represents the agent’s preferences — in the sense that the agent prefers one prospect X over a […] Read More