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
Expressivism holds that moral judgments are, at least in part, expressions (in some appropriate sense of ‘express’) of pro- or con-attitudes. Since it is typically thought that a person’s sincere judgment (of any kind) requires that person to at least have the attitudes one is […] Read More
We are very happy to welcome to Ben Bradley as a contributor to PEA Soup. Ben is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University, specializes in ethical theory and environmental ethics, and has commented regularly on the blog since its inception. We’re very happy […] Read More
In a recent review essay, “Morality and Virtue: An Assessment of Some Recent Work in Virtue Ethics“, David Copp and PEA Soup’s own David Sobel present what I take to be a common understanding of the relationship between right action and virtuous people: It is […] Read More
Mackie’s queerness argument (QA), in its metaphysical part, goes something like this. Putative facts about our moral obligations supposedly involve objective values that carry normativity – they give us reason to do things. But any such facts would be metaphysically strange, so it’s hard to […] Read More
A number of philosophers have argued that there can be actions that are at one and the same time immoral and admirable. These philosophers sometimes take the existence of admirable immorality (AI) to show that there must be nonmoral values that are at least sometimes […] Read More