There has been a little discussion lately in Vallentyne’s course about when an duty is enforceable and when it is not. As you recall, I relied on a distinction in my paper that received some criticism in class. This leaves me without an iron-clad distinction between duties that are morally enforceable and those that are not. The question is basically that of when it is morally permissible to use non-consensual force to prevent moral wrongdoing. Here are some possible analyses (more…)
Archive for October, 2005
Philosophical Applications of Probability
Saturday, October 29th, 2005Has standard analytic epistemology jumped the shark?
Wednesday, October 26th, 2005Michael Bishop and J.D. Trout argue in a new book Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment (Oxford, 2005) that the epistemological project should be reconceived as the project of ameliorative psychology. They explain that the essential feature of this project is one that “aims to give positive advice about how we can reason better†(p. 12). The ameliorative project includes the use and proper reliance upon successful Statistical Predication Rules (SPRs). The main motivation for ameliorative psychology is to return epistemology to the task of offering practical advice to reasoning problems. They describe the fundamental aim of ameliorative psychology is “to provide an account of reasoning excellence†(p. 16).
There is much here to recommend, but I want to focus on Bishop and Trout’s negative conclusions about Standard Analytic Epistemology (SAE). (more…)
Planarity
Saturday, October 22nd, 2005On a lighter note, I ran across Planarity while reading the Leiter Report. At the risk of revealing a lack of planarity, I’ll say that I completed level 4 (score: 394) before deciding that I couldn’t justify spending any more time on it. I’m sure you can do better …
Reliabilism and Normal Worlds
Sunday, October 16th, 2005The New Evil-Demon Problem poses a major difficulty for reliabilism, the view that a belief is justified only if it is produced by a reliable process (to put it roughly). The New Evil-Demon Problem is this: imagine a world in which persons have the same type experiences we have, but where all (or most of) their beliefs are false; for their experiences are produced by a nefarious demon or a malevolent cognitive scientist. The intuition is that these folks have good reasons for their beliefs, but their beliefs are not produced by a reliable process. Ergo, reliabilism is false. I want to show that one response to this problem will not work. (more…)
Mackie, Marbles, and Miracles
Friday, October 14th, 2005David Johnson, (author of “Hume, Holism, and Miracles”) reconstructs J.L. Mackie’s reconstruction of Hume’s argument. Johnson takes Mackie to be making this inference. (more…)
A Problem with Induction
Monday, October 10th, 2005In this post, I’m basically getting at the Problem of Grue, but I’ll state it in what I think is a clearer way.
In ProtoSeminar, we talked about (more…)
Can we be good without God?
Sunday, October 9th, 2005This post is an offer to engage in a descriptive task. In church again today I was presented with the claim that there is some kind of link between the existence of God and the existence of objective morality. So here’s the descriptive task: what is it that people are suggesting when they say things like “it is impossible to be good without God” or “God is the foundation of morality” or, in the vein explored by Dostoevsky, “if God does not exist, then all things are permissible.” I’m interested in two things: 1) how might such an argument go and 2) what reasons are there to think that the key conditional claim linking God with morality is true?
Please don’t respond with criticisms of the argument–we can save that for another post. I just want to hear your thoughts on how this (ubiquitous) contention might be spelled out and what reasons we might have for accepting any of the premises.
Argument from Moral Disagreement
Thursday, October 6th, 2005Here’s an argument I’ve found persuasive for a while but need to give much closer scrutiny. I’d love to get your thoughts. (more…)