John Doris and Jesse Prinz have a nice review of Anthony Appiah's book Experiments in Ethics over at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
The review focuses on Appiah's discussion of character and of ethical intuitions and then concludes with a suggestion that 'empirical work demands a reconstruction of morality.'
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Discussion of Walter Sinnot Armstrong's new Analysis article over at PEA Soup
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Gordon Marino, professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College, writes about the current health care debate.
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Would you be worse-off with respect to well-being if your spouse didn’t really love you, but only seemed to? Lots of people think you would be and are therefore persuaded that well-being/welfare must consist of something more than pleasure, happiness, or other mental states.
Read more »Harming Future Persons: Ethics, Genetics and the Nonidentity Problem, edited by Melinda Roberts and David Wasserman, just came out!
From the back cover:
This collection of essays investigates the obligations we have in respect of future persons, ranging from our own future offspring to distant future generations. What are our obligations to persons who [...]S. Matthew Liao
The following comment, from an anonymous NEH reviewer, was posted over at IHE due to some (length-related?) problem with posting it here. It is worth reading.
***Sorry for joining the conversation so late. I am an assistant professor of
philosophy in a PhD-granting department and was a reviewer for the NEH Enduring
Questions grant this past year. I hope you will excuse this message's anonymity
-- and its length.
Let's get a little down to earth here at PEA Soup: I may have to confront an actual ethical quandary in a few months, and I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts about how I ought to respond.
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It turns out there is no statistically significant difference between ethicists, other philosophers, or non-philosophers in their responsiveness to students. This is taken as one method to see whether ethicists are any more ethical than other academics.
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A young philosopher writes: Here is a question on the ethics of teaching philosophy in a small department. I can imagine circumstances in which a philosopher only gets to teach one course a year in their specialism (because the department...Brian Leiter
Read more »I’ve just read T.M. Scanlon’s chapter on blame in his latest book Moral Dimensions. The discussion is subtle, provocative, and quite insightful. It has already caused me to rethink some of my own views on moral responsibility in general and blame in particular. Nevertheless, I have a few questions/worries about the account that may be worth discussing over the course of a few posts. In this post, I’ll just focus on his account of moral responsibility, and in later posts I hope to focus on his accounts of blame and the ethics of blaming.
Read more »I have a colleague who has had a paper under review at a Philosophically Respectable journal for about 7 months. The journal claims to let authors know within 3-4 months about an initial decision on submissions. A couple of months ago (at the 5 month mark), after not having heard anything, he contacted the journal to see if there was any news. The journal sent a boilerplate reply, apparently, about how the article was still being looked at.
Read more »I was reading the Normative Ethics volume in the great "5 Questions" series from Automatic Press, and was struck by this passage from the conclusion of the interview with Jeff McMahan (Rutgers): I am highly optimistic about the prospects in...Brian Leiter
Read more »Shared by Peter Bradley
Leave it to the linguists to destroy press coverage of bad neuroscience. Wait. Shouldn't that be our job?
A little more than a week ago, our mass media warned us about a serious peril. "Scientists warn of Twitter dangers", said CNN on 4/14/2009:
There is, I think, something of a standard history of 20th Century English-speaking philosophy, at least through 1980. The broad outlines are fairly familiar.
Read more »Now we get to the argument why it’s not just nice to give, but we ought to, it’s a moral obligation. What I find particularly interesting about the chapter is the way Singer starts off with Bob and the Bugatti and switches half-way through to the deductive argument he made back in “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” in 1972. Bob and the Bugatti is a thought experiment due to Peter Unger, which Singer also focused on in a New York Times Magazine
Read more »Funny story about our favorite anonymous philosopher trying to convince a waiter that they have an obligation to serve on jury duty.
Read more »Interesting article discussing a recent study. The results suggest that people are more likely to lie to people over email than face-to-face communication.
Read more »Ralph Wedgwood on the morality and legality of torture. A rare venturing into applied ethics for Ralph.
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