I recently returned from an NEH-sponsored seminar on punishment at Amherst College. I learned an enormous amount and am full of ideas for papers on punishment. One moral issue surrounding punishment that has not received enough attention from moral philosophers is the somewhat perverse insistence […] Read More
Josh’s post about Russ Shafer-Landau’s moral nonnaturalism and a strand in Michael’s post about Mackie and disagreement brought back to me something that I have been thinking about for awhile: whether moral attitudes are (logically) complex. As far as I have been able to tell, […] Read More
Here at PEA Soup, Jason Kawall recently raised the possibility that moral realism might be open to a Euthyphro Dilemma kind of objection, which got me thinking about one of those papers that I write and then shelve for some reason or another. In this […] Read More
I thought I would point to two interesting ethics posts by Marc Moffett, master blogger at Close Range and Rational Hunter, philosopher of language at the University of Wyoming, and self-proclaimed hunter/gatherer. In this post, Marc wonders, assuming that a certain kind of compatibilism is […] Read More
Brian Weatherson points us blogaholics to Julie Van Camp’s piece on the female-friendliness of the Philosophical Gourmet Report and philosophy graduate departments. (The piece is in the Spring 2004 APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy.) She notes a broad phenomenon that many of us find […] Read More
I recently completed an independent study with a student interested in Mackie’s error theory, and we spent a good deal of time discussing Mackie’s argument from relativity or disagreement. For those unaware, the late Australian philosopher John Mackie favored an error theory of morality, according […] Read More
On behalf of all of us here at PEA Soup, I extend a warm welcome to Michael Cholbi, who has graciously accepted our invitation to be a contributor.
Since the Newsweek article was published last week, we’ve been getting more hits than usual. (Out of the roughly 8800 hits received in the last 5.5 weeks, 3100 were received in the last week alone). Overall, we’re very pleased that there’s so much interest. However, […] Read More
It seems that a life that gets progressively better (the Uphill Life or UHL) is often preferable to one that gets progressively worse (the Downhill Life or DHL), even where both lives contain qualitatively identical events and experiences, only in a different order — I […] Read More