I was very interested in getting F.M.M. Kamm’s new book Intricate Ethics because the second chapter in devoted to the aggregation literature I have been dealing with the last few weeks (on a somewhat tangential note, Ethics Etc. is doing a reading group on this book this summer.) On the whole, Kamm’s discussion is interesting. [...]
What follows is the second part of the post that I started here. Also, parts of this post were copied from a paper I am working tentatively entitled “Contractualism, Basic Aggregation, and Varied Ills Aggregation: A Defense.”
0. We will once again start with contractualist principles (slightly revised from last time):
CW: an act, α, [...]
0. Let’s start by making some contractualist definitions explicit.
First, an act is wrong on contractualism if an agent can reasonably reject the inclusion of a principle allowing that act to a set of action guiding moral principles.
Second, an agent x has grounds for a reasonable rejection of a principle α if and only if α [...]
Richard posted about his future research interests a few months ago. His post got me thinking about what my main future research interests are. I will follow him by adding the disclaimers that this list is not exhaustive, that I am sure new projects will strike my fancy in the future, and that I am [...]
Over at the papers page of this site I have posted a new paper and two updates on older papers. The new paper is “The Respect Model of Freedom of Expression”. I wrote about the issues discussed in this paper here and here. The updated papers are “Changing Places: The Personal Reason Requirement and Patient [...]
Those of you who have been following my rationality posts in the past few weeks know that the notion of being in a position to know is central to my analysis of substantive rationality. Up until yesterday, I thought that it was fairly obvious what this notion is. However, now I am not quite sure. [...]
After some conversations with various people, it has become clear that my two cases involving Lois outlined in this post are not very good in pumping the right intuitions. In fact, now I am unclear whether Lois really is in a position to know that she has a reason to stand still. In fact, I [...]
As it often is, I have started to question some implicit assumptions I made while writing the first draft of my paper on analyses of ‘rational’ and ‘irrational.’ One such assumption concerns what an adequate analysis is meant to capture. The way I see it as follows: there is a fairly broad conceptual space that [...]
In the comment thread to my reductivist moral responsibility post, Cullen said the following about my view (which is partially presented in my Scanlon and Substantive Rationality post), “However, the view you present assumes that reasons for action and rationality do not come apart, which is something you’ll have to argue for. Some people (Parfit, [...]
