As Brian Leiter reports, Robert Solomon passed away suddenly on January 2nd. Solomon’s philosophical interests were jaw-droppingly broad, even within ethics alone–virtue ethics (Aristotle’s and Nietzsche’s versions), business ethics, emotions, existentialism, happiness. But his interests were all motivated, from what I could tell, by a […] Read More
Al, Betty, Carla, Dan, and Ed accept the claim, “Utilitarianism is true.” They accept it because they have been told it by their revered professor, Dr. Black. In fact, their reverence for Dr. Black is so great that they would revise any other claim they […] Read More
We are pleased to announce that Valerie Tiberius has accepted our invitation to become the latest contributor to PEA Soup. Valerie is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. She specializes in Ethical Theory and Metaethics, especially issues involving well-being and practical reason. […] Read More
The great discussion on the previous posting got so much off the topic that I thought I’d start another threat just on the interesting issue we were discussing. This is Parfit’s account of state and object given reasons. I’m sure we’ve touched in this in […] Read More
Here’s an interesting quote from Stephen Darwall’s entry on “Normativity” in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: On one popular view, morality is normative for action by its very nature, so that to say that an action is wrong is to imply that one ought not […] Read More
As everyone knows, I ‘Reealy’ like Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other. One good thing about the book is that every time you read it (and I’ve read it quite a few times) you find something new that’s usually both interesting and puzzling. Here’s […] Read More
Lately I’ve been thinking about taxonomy of philosophical views, especially in the area of normative ethics. Here’s a fragment of a common taxonomy of ethical theories. (This will be a bit rough; but the details aren’t important here.) To begin, we distinguish consequentialist from non-consequentialist […] Read More
The standard view of Kantianism has been that it firmly denies that the right is grounded in the good.
Does anyone hold the following view? If so, who? Where? When? Why? The notion of desire is to be understood/analyzed in terms of the notion of preference, perhaps along the following lines: S wants that P =df. S prefers P to not-P. (The basic idea […] Read More