In Robert Kane’s A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will, he represents Galen Strawson’s argument against the possibility of moral responsibility as follows: (more…)
Archive for July, 2006
Ought implies can…or does it?
Thursday, July 27th, 2006Tradition says that ought implies can. I’ve long found this persuasive as it seems to explain quite a bit. For example, I ought to push a button that would save St. Louis from nuclear holocaust. If I don’t meet this (or any) moral obligation, then I’ve acted wrongly. So why don’t I do anything wrong in the case in which I am handcuffed and unable to reach the button? Because I couldn’t do so, and ought implies can.
But here’s a dilemma I don’t know how to solve… (more…)
Perfect moral teachers and morally reprehensible results
Monday, July 24th, 2006Hi all,
I’d like to get some commentary on the following claim:
(C1) For any moral teacher X, if there is a non-obviously wrong way of understanding X’s teaching that yields a morally reprehensible result, then it is unlikely that X is a perfectly good moral teacher. (more…)
Art as Device
Saturday, July 22nd, 2006Literary critic Vladimir Shklovsky’s essay “Art as Device” lays out, even before you’ve gotten past the title, the claim to fame that eventually came to define the Russian Formalist movement. On Shklovsky’s view all art is the employment of device. (more…)
Are the Epistemic Foundations of Ethics any Less Strong than those of Logic?
Saturday, July 22nd, 2006I often hear that ethics (especially applied ethics) is a branch of philosophy that is built upon a flimsier (epistemic) foundation that that of logic, metaphysics and/or analytic epistemology. That is to say something like, we have better reason to accept logical truths than we do to accept ethical truths. The implication/bias held by many contempory philosophers, I suspect, is that there is something more percise, exacting and frankly more likely to get the truth of things when we study logic or metaphysics than when we study ethics. I offer that such a position is unteneable (more…)
Original Sin (Again)
Friday, July 21st, 2006I’m going to give another plug for Michael Rea’s paper on original sin which can be found at: www.nd.edu/~mrea/papers.html.
This time, however, I’ll say more about it. Rea takes (more…)
Yet another coat of paint…
Monday, July 10th, 2006…and some infrastructure changes, too. Thanks to GP, Show-Me is now running on the latest version of the Wordpress software. You’ll notice some small changes in the admin area such as a new window for posts that avoids the use of html tags for italization, etc. plus some other goodies. And we’ve tried to re-organize the information on the main screen to make it more user-friendly, etc. (e.g. the main window is larger so that there’s more room for text, etc.).
There are still some kinks to work out (e.g. we need to get the most-recent-comments function running again), and we may add a few more bells and whistles (like a spam guard) before we’re done. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions or concerns, comment here.
Why Is Pedophilism Wrong?
Monday, July 3rd, 2006My human sexuality psychology professor wrote to me of the following experience:
“Some years ago, I was speaking at a scientific convention on the damage that incest does to children, and on how we do therapy with adults who were molested when they were children. After my talk, I was confronted by a man who told me that I was completely WRONG. He said that incest was very good for children. (more…)