Ethicist for Hire

Didn't get what you wanted for Christmas?

Check out the "ethicist for hire" intimate apparrel.

http://www.cafepress.com/rsphilosopher/522181

A Celebratory Haiku

To the Greek Ancients:
A few hundred premises
more and you'd make sense.

Maybe.

The ABD Club

I backtracked one of our hits to a link from this blog. Some of their stuff might be of interest to our readers. I have also added them to our list of "other observables."

Episode 113

Ethicist suicide

Maybe I was the only one that missed this a few weeks ago, but I just saw it and wanted to share. No matter what your opinion of the Iraq war, this is a sad and disturbing story.

excerpt:
WASHINGTON — One hot, dusty day in June, Col. Ted Westhusing was found dead in a trailer at a military base near the Baghdad airport, a single gunshot wound to the head.

The Army would conclude that he committed suicide with his service pistol. At the time, he was the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq.

The Army closed its case. But the questions surrounding Westhusing's death continue.

Westhusing, 44, was no ordinary officer. He was one of the Army's leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor.

full story here

Test those intuitions

This is so relevant to our earlier discussion, it's scary.

With a hat tip to Pea Soup, the blog of the grown ups here at BG and some other grown ups elsewhere, I give you: The Moral Sense Test. It's from Harvard, and it tests your intuitions that, of course, none of us here rely on for our moral judgments.

Here's how they explain this thing:

The Moral Sense Test is a Web-based study into the nature of moral intuitions. How do humans, throughout the world, decide what is right and wrong? To answer this question, we have designed a series of moral dilemmas designed to probe the psychological mechanisms underlying our ethical judgments. By putting these questions on the Web, we hope to gain insight into the similarities and differences between the moral intuitions of people of different ages, from different cultures, with different educational backgrounds and religious beliefs, involved in different occupations and exposed to very different circumstances.

(Get out your calculator, Arthur, you'll need to compute a lot of utility!)

Moose and Dude

As some of you may know, I used to write a webcomic. It was brilliant. Seriously, seriously brilliant. Don't believe me? Check it out. After some careful consideration and the suggestions of [read: death threats from] our own Mr. Jaworski, I have decided to bring the comic back. Episodes both old and new will continue to appear on my site (which is also linked from my name on the left). As I have decided to give the comic a slightly philosophical bent, new episodes may often appear here as well. And so, without further ado, Moose and Dude, Episode 112:

intuitions?

I'll start us off with a meaty topic.

I am often baffled by the heavy reliance on intuitions in ethics. An unnamed professor in class (let's call him Shmoriarty) recently said "it's all we have!" Yet this concerns me. I understand that we all have intuitions that affect our opinions on ethical matters, but why should an intuition JUSTIFY an ethical conclusion?

I have seen philosophers scoff at ethical relativism, yet defend their intuitions as sensible justification for moral beliefs. It seems to me that intuitionism (and lesser degrees of the reliance on intuitions) boils down to relativism pretty quickly unless we think that everyone has the same intuitions. A brief look back at history (slavery, subjugation of women) informs us that intuitions about a lot of things have changed over time. Why should one's current intuitions have such a sturdy claim on our morals? Shouldn't we all be willing to say that I have intuition X, but in light of argument Y it appears intuition X could be false?

I don't think I am arguing that ethics can be done without a single reference to an intuition (though I suspect it might be possible). I'm wondering what the proper role for intuitions should be. Assuming full blown intuitionism is mistaken, most ethicists rely on intuitions far more than I am comfortable with.

What say the newly assembled BG bloggers?

(webmaster addition)Relevant Articles:
Moral Epistemology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)