Peter Railton posts a link to his short article in the NY Times on evolution and morality. People can discuss it at On the Human. Frans De Waal has already chimed in on the comments thread.

In this week’s On the Human Forum, Brian Leiter observes that after two thousand years of moralizing by alleged experts, no consensus exists within the expert community on any substantive ethical claim. What should we make of this dismal fact, if it is a fact? Leiter's subtitle is "Developing an Argument from Nietzsche."

Discussion of Walter Sinnot Armstrong's new Analysis article over at PEA Soup

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.

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.

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.

• Kant’s Aesthetics: Overview and Recent Literature, Christian Helmut Wenzel
• Environmental Ethics: An Overview, Katie McShane
• Margaret Cavendish on the Relation between God and World, Karen Detlefsen
• Whatever Became of the Socratic Elenchus?
  

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.

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:

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