In his recent Moral Realism: A Defence, Russ Shafer-Landau argues that “moral facts are themselves intrinsically reason-giving, i.e. supply reasons for action regardless of the content of specific moral demands and their relation to other intrinsically or necessarily reason-giving kinds of considerations” (204). While he […] Read More
It continues to be fairly quiet here at the Soup, and I suspect at least part of the reason is that the kind of posts that have been put up over the last couple months have been, for the most part, pretty sophisticated, longish, and […] Read More
Been a little slow here at the Soup, so I thought I’d let you know a little about what I’ve been reading, namely, Hilary Putnam’s Ethics Without Ontology. I’ll only be discussing the first half of the book, which are lectures that Putnam delivered in […] Read More
Here’s a news item (login required [free account]) that some readers might find interesting: the CDC has set up a permanent ethics panel on the distribution of vaccines and the sticky trade-off issues involved in rationing. According to The New York Times, it includes some […] Read More
There’s a new papers database, PhOnline, maintained by Richard Heck. It seems like it might be a useful thing.
Here’s another entry on the paradox of deontology (the first was here). Let a deontological restriction be what Jeffrey Brand-Ballard has appropriately called a nonminimizing restriction: put intuitively, these are duties that forbid performing some act even when doing so would minimize the overall number […] Read More
Hello everyone. My apologies for the belated report from Madison, where the First Annual Metaethics Workshop was held last weekend. For starters, tremendous props go out to Russ Shafer-Landau for organizing the event and to David Copp, Nick Sturgeon, and one other person whose name […] Read More
A couple of months ago, on Orangephilosophy, I posted descriptions of the following two lives: Baby. A three-week-old baby, Baby, dies in an accident. Had Baby not died then, he would have enjoyed a happy childhood and adolescence, gone to college, entered a PhD program […] Read More
Moral luck obtains wherever the moral evaluation of an agent is affected by circumstances beyond that agent’s control. But the judgment that the moral evaluation of an agent can be affected by such circumstances seems to conflict with the apparently plausible claim that agents who […] Read More