I’m currently working on a paper about terrorism, and I decided my first post would concern one of the main issues in that paper. It might seem to be common sense that what is wrong with terrorist acts like the attack on the World Trade […] Read More
The title of this post is a bit overstated; what I’m really wondering is whether Virtue Ethics and Contractualism are not viable. I take it as a piece of contemporary philosophical commonsense that Divine Command Theory is not a viable ethical theory, because it succumbs, […] Read More
A quick news alert: The July 26 issue of Newsweek has a brief article (by the very nice Jordana Lewis) highlighting the recent boom in philosophy blogs, including mention of PEA Soup, the Garden of Forking Paths, and The Leiter Reports. It’s always good to […] Read More
The series on “The Embedding Objection” continues. The first post explained what I take expressivism to be. The second post distinguished four main kinds of expressivism: Simple non-truth-evaluable expressivism (e.g., Ayer’s emotivism), Simple minimalist expressivism (e.g., Blackburn’s projectivism), Complex minimalist expressivism (e.g., Stevenson’s emotivism), and […] Read More
The program for the First Annual Metaethics Workshop, which will be held October 15th-17th at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been posted here. Russ Shafer-Landau and the other organizers have selected from over 100 submissions to put together what promises to be a terrific program. […] Read More
On behalf of all of us here at PEA Soup, I extend a warm welcome to Scott Wilson, who has graciously accepted our invitation to be a contributor. We’re still hoping to add other new contributors in the near future. So stay tuned.
Ben at OrangePhilosophy and Jonathan at Fake Barn Country have been discussing whether it’s more harmful to the victim if (1) a three-week-old baby is murdered or (2) a 23-year-old graduate student is murdered. To my mind, the question cannot be answered without having more […] Read More
On behalf of all of us here at PEA Soup, I extend a warm welcome to Troy Jollimore, who has graciously accepted our invitation to be a contributor. We’re hoping to add some other new contributors in the near future. So stay tuned.
I’ve always been puzzled by the standard account of posthumous harm that we find in the literature. The standard account of posthumous harm—the one expounded by Brandt (1979, 330), Feinberg (1984, 87), Griffin (1986, 23), Kavka (1986, 41), Parfit (1984, 495), and others—goes as follows. […] Read More