We are very happy to kick off another PEA Soup celebration of the Ethics 125th anniversary retrospective series, with this special feature of R. Lanier Anderson's essay on Marjorie Grene's "Authenticity: an Existential Virtue." And, as an additional bonus, Professor Anderson has kindly offered us some background about Grene's life […] Read More
All over there are arguments that employ the following premise: Necessarily, the true moral theory is action-guiding. I must confess that I don’t really have a grip on what this notion is. And yet it is often appealed to to do some very heavy-lifting: most […] Read More
A much-anticipated announcement from Russ Shafer-Landau: The annual metaethics workshop that's long been held at UW-Madison is now moving (along with yours truly) to UNC Chapel Hill. There will be no workshop in Madison this year. The dates of this year's workshop are Oct. 30-Nov. 1, […] Read More
Morality is not exclusively deontic. There are, after all, many things that are morally good to do though not required, or morally bad though not forbidden. However, a deontic conception has gotten a grip on the contemporary conception of interpersonal morality, or morality insofar as […] Read More
Over the last decade, I have been developing an interconnected set of claims and arguments concerning the second-personal character of central moral phenomena. My focus has been the deontic moral notions of obligation, duty, right, wrong, rights, and so on, which I have argued are […] Read More
Here’s an argument against subjectivism about moral wrongness I’ve been kicking around. (By ‘subjectivism’ here I just mean any theory which is not “objective”—that is, a subjective theory is one that has it that that in virtue of which one’s behavior is wrong (when it […] Read More
Helen Frowe wrote me yesterday to try to understand better my position on how to count the agent’s interest in a trolley switching case. The text she was trying to understand was a piece I co-wrote with David Wasserman, called “Agents, Impartiality, and the Priority […] Read More
I am happy to announce that our next Featured Philosopher is Stephen Darwall, who is currently the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. His post titled "Second-Personal Attitudes of the Heart" will be up for discussion on Monday. Please stop by then to […] Read More
I very much love Michael Smith’s recent paper “A Constitutivist Theory of Reasons: Its Promise and Parts” (Law, Ethics and Philosophy 2013, also available on his website). One thing that strikes me about this paper is that, whilst discussing Parfit’s views on practical reasons, Smith […] Read More