Recent attempts to revive the Platonic thesis that moral knowledge is innate have attempted to piggy-back on the perceived success of the Chomskian arguments for the thesis that linguistic knowledge is innate. The most important of these arguments has been the Poverty of the Stimulus […] Read More
I’ve recently found myself having to deal more and more with the gnarly issue of souls in my work. My research focuses primarily on the relation between personal identity and ethics, but the metaphysical possibility of the existence of souls continually throws a monkey wrench […] Read More
I just finished reading Simon Keller’s “Welfare and the Achievement of Goals” for the second time. I had read it earlier when it was just a draft, but I decided that I should read it again now that it appears in the October 2004 issue […] Read More
It’s my pleasure to welcome David Sobel as a contributor to PEASoup. David’s currently the chair of the department of philosophy at Bowling Green State University, and he’s published several excellent articles over the years on welfare and practical reason. We’re very happy to have […] Read More
On behalf of all of us here at PEA Soup, I extend a warm welcome to Kyle Swan, who, happily, has accepted our invitation to be a contributor. Kyle is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota Duluth, specializes in ethical theory, […] Read More
Hello everyone. I’m moving Jamie’s pointer from several days ago to this post so the information doesn’t get buried in the comments. The program page can be found here. Thanks for the heads-up, Jamie. The program page now includes links to the papers. The keynote […] Read More
We should distinguish between a harmful state and a harmful event. A harmful state (sometimes called a harmed condition) is a state that it is prudentially bad to be in. A harmful event is an event that causes a person to be in a harmful […] Read More
Consider the following example from Parfit’s Reasons and Persons: When I was young what I most wanted was to be a poet. This desire was not conditional on its own persistence. I did not want to be a poet only if this would later still […] Read More
Ronald Dworkin argues, in two lengthy papers (“What is Equality? Parts 1 and 2”, P&PA 1981), that, if we care about equality at all, then we should care about equality of resources — as opposed to, in particular, equality of welfare. Central to his argument […] Read More