tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59324778207158368492024-03-13T15:39:07.545+13:00Waka HuiaEthics, philosophy, and other treasures.Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.comBlogger45125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-5541364792669122812013-12-23T01:17:00.002+13:002013-12-23T01:17:11.771+13:00RIP Peter GeachHis daughter Tamsin Geach has reported that Peter Geach has passed away Saturday. He was 91 years old. In his long and fruitful career Geach had made a number of important contributions to the philosophies of logic, language, and mind, and to the interpretation of Frege, Wittgenstein and Aquinas.
Geach is now probably best known for providing the canonical statement of the embedding problem: forMarinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-92111478815726884502013-11-26T20:11:00.001+13:002013-11-27T00:21:15.740+13:00Why you shouldn't read usage advice (with examples)Helen Sword is someone at my university who coaches academic writing, and has written a large number of articles and a couple of books on the subject. She has recently released another book, which has prompted a few discussions I've had with colleagues where I warn them off work like hers. I have not read her latest book, and will only do so if compelled to. I have read some of her earlier work Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-87540286708185423502013-10-24T00:48:00.004+13:002013-10-24T00:48:59.992+13:00Why Kant's moral theory takes account of the consequences of actionsThis is a sketch of a response to a common misconception about Kant, which I wrote for a discussion elsewhere.
I think it's false that Kant's theory doesn't consider the consequences of an action.What Kant's view doesn't do is make the rightness or wrongness of any act depend upon what consequences it brings about. To make sense of this, we need to ask a series of questions.
Is the only way Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-18318135552859547772012-04-12T17:16:00.000+12:002012-04-12T17:16:19.363+12:00My final input re: Paul HolmesThe saga re: Paul Holmes' inflammatory Waitangi Day column is ongoing, but coming to a head. The editor of the Weekend Herald, David Hastings, responded to my complaint to the Press Council (after two complaints to his paper), and I was given an opportunity to respond. What I wrote is below. The Press Council will judge the case on the 7th of May. If they uphold the complaint, they'll forcing theMarinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-10245819155572510752012-03-05T11:58:00.003+13:002012-03-05T11:58:36.188+13:00UK Government rolls out plan to partially privatise policeforceLife imitating blogging: a few days ago I talked about why it is a mistake to model government action on private enterprise, and now the British government is making a big privatisation push in two of its police jurisdictions. The proposal is for contractors to take over many of the tasks of the West Midlands and Surrey police forces, including (quoting from the news article):
investigating Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-47135552222759815632012-02-29T22:01:00.000+13:002012-02-29T22:10:55.436+13:00What is at stake in acts of governmentSomewhere in the recent public debates about the role of government something that has dropped out of view is that the main task of a government is to govern - maintain the necessary infrastructure and institutions to keep a society going, organise and co-ordinate the resources of its constituents, and so on. A government is often being viewed and evaluated as you would an especially large and Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-57584403624427901152012-02-29T00:18:00.000+13:002012-02-29T00:18:43.779+13:00Complaint to Press Council re: Holmes on Waitangi DayThe New Zealand Herald gave me another response to my complaint regarding Paul Holmes's inflammatory Waitangi Day piece, after I had told them that I was dissatisfied with their first response. While this second response was far longer, it simply re-iterated the position of the Herald and its Weekend editor, David Hastings, that clearly Holmes was aiming at one small band of Māori protestersMarinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-39878580167935626672012-02-15T16:10:00.002+13:002012-02-15T16:10:25.000+13:00NZ Herald's Response to complaint re: Paul Holmes
I received a response to my complaint from the editor of the Weekend Herald, David Hastings. The response was very much in line of those other complainants have received. I won't post it here, but Hastings ran the line that Holmes was clearly targeting the small band of protesters at Te Tii Marae, not Māori as a whole. He pinpointed the examples of Holmes talking about "Maori fringe self-denialMarinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-75289346197071736402012-02-14T16:12:00.001+13:002012-02-15T16:10:40.659+13:00Complaint re: Paul Holmes on Waitangi DayThis Saturday the weekend edition of the New Zealand Herald published an opinion column by Paul Holmes (someone with a chequered history) which was, to put it plainly, racially motivated hate speech. This was the letter of complaint I wrote to the editor. If you wish to do the same, his name is Tim Murphy and his address is tim.murphy@nzherald.co.nz.
Dear Mr Murphy
I wish to lodge a complaintMarinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-55940649299072729102012-01-06T12:07:00.000+13:002012-01-06T12:11:47.771+13:00Transplanting Ricardo's result on rent to worker's wagesHaving been introduced to the philosophical interest of classical economics through Robert Paul Wolff's Understanding Marx and his tutorial on Ricardo, I was prompted me to think a little deeper about Ricardo's results, in particular a very striking one about how rent paid for land plays no part in determining the price of agricultural goods. I've been trying to determineMarinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-45472192413286391112011-12-14T12:31:00.001+13:002012-02-29T10:05:09.312+13:00Why it matters that we support gay marriage
Anne Russell is a personal friend of mine. She has recently published an opinion piece where she has admitted being confused and maddened by how stridently LBGT people argue for equal recognition of gay marriage, an institution she believes everybody would be better off without. I found her case to be deeply unconvincing, and here is my piece in response.
Anne Russell has recently argued&Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-92045901790571208082011-10-25T18:45:00.000+13:002011-10-25T18:50:13.935+13:00Rest in Peace - Peter GoldieToday I received sad news about the passing of Peter Goldie, a philosopher who specialised in the emotions, personality and aesthetics. I quote the short announcement by some of his colleagues that they sent out:
Peter Goldie 1946-2011
We are very sad to report that Peter Goldie died of cancer last night after a brief illness.
Philosophy was Peter Goldie’s second career. Before training as aMarinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-26876613399052698102011-09-25T19:43:00.002+13:002011-09-25T19:43:49.892+13:00The problems of the problems of philosophy
Very often in philosophy getting clear
on what the question is is one of the hardest parts of answering it.
I set out to write something on the way I do philosophy,
because the question of how we should approach it is one of the most
difficult and bitterly fought of all philosophic debates. So, it
should have been no surprise to find that I got stuck doing so. In
the spirit of better bloggingMarinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-15294054631131684872011-08-20T14:33:00.000+12:002011-08-20T14:33:16.080+12:00The Media Failures Surrounding the England RiotsOn Wednesday 17/8 Scoop Independent News ran a piece I wrote about the dramatic but uninformative coverage of the riots in London and elsewhere in England earlier this month. Since it has now gone to pasture in their archives, I'm posting the piece here as well, making use of the occasion to embed a bunch of links to stories where appropriate, and make a small correction.
In the Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-70869947473306090602011-07-26T02:33:00.000+12:002011-07-26T02:33:29.288+12:00Limited conventionalism and the lawFor the past few years I've had an on-going research project of trying to use the framework David Lewis developed for analysing conventions in the interesting meta-ethical case where whatever basic principles we might have (for this purpose it doesn't matter what they are - one problem at a time!) don't give us enough guidance and we end up with equally attractive but mutually exclusive options Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-55992320195474778802011-04-20T17:21:00.000+12:002011-04-20T17:21:58.264+12:00Robert Paul Wolff replies re: the prisonder's dilemma.A couple of days ago I posted a criticism of Robert Paul Wolff's dismissal of the prisoner's dilemma . Wolff has now posted a reply on his blog (quoting the version of my post I had emailed to him). He is pressing the fact that game theory is only properly-speaking a study of decision under certainty, while the problem I identify (which is hardly original on my part!) is to do with decision Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-8051416409008293432011-04-18T22:37:00.003+12:002011-10-25T21:04:37.512+13:00What to make of the prisoner's dilemma
About a year ago, when I was making my first serious inroads into the technical underbelly of my field, following my utilitarian opponents into a futurist landscape of backwards Es and upside-down As, Robert Paul Wolff (who seems to be entirely incapable of stopping writing, bless his soul) ran a tutorial on formal methods in political philosophy which I found very useful, especially its Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-86263743770350560732011-04-07T19:30:00.002+12:002011-04-07T19:43:42.514+12:00Today's Entry in the Annals of Unresponsive Academic JournalsI received the following sardonic comment on one of the philosophic mailing lists I'm subscribed to which caters to the academic community:
List members,
Tomorrow will mark the first anniversary of one of my papers being submitted to the Journal of Global Ethics. As I have not received any feedback on the content of my paper as yet, I have been prompted to mark the occasion with a lunchtime Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-42574913664519600802011-03-20T00:55:00.000+13:002011-03-20T00:55:30.448+13:00Langton - Speech Acts and Unspeakable ActsAs I occasionally do, I'll use this blog as a place to keep a store something I wrote for a conversation somewhere else: in this case (as with the Swanton piece I did last year) it's a summary of a favourite paper of mine: Rae Langton - 'Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts'.
Langton sets out to to defend a claim by MacKinnon's that pornography constitutes a harm to women, in particular Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-72416242966175572982011-02-09T12:58:00.000+13:002011-02-09T12:58:48.417+13:00The difference democratic challenge: why the communicative challenge failsToday we move onto the meaty part of this project, where I lay out my case against what I have called the communicative challenge. That interpretation of what the difference democratic complaint is claims that the problem with deliberative democracy is that it neglects the different ways different cultures advance and discuss claims. Because the deliberative process is the product of one culture Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-13454446721967593632011-02-08T17:18:00.000+13:002011-02-08T17:18:13.464+13:00The difference democratic challenge: introductionWhat follows is one of the more significant pieces of research I did in the past year, as part of my MA in applied ethics. I'm revisiting it currently, and in the process of doing so will post it up (in edited form) over three blog posts (three for reasons of length). It was an attempt to make sense of one of the more prominent challenges to the delibrative model of democracy, that of the Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-32497938117218627622011-01-31T23:54:00.001+13:002011-01-31T23:56:07.567+13:00Resilience to counterfactualsOne project that I have been pottering away at recently is an attempt to cash out what could be meant with something like Phillip Pettit's theory of 'freedom as non-domination' (meaning that we are free to the extent in that we can do what we go about our affairs without the arbitrary intervention of another party). To do so I develop a framework for highlighting some important modal Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-34094237622627999782011-01-19T00:42:00.001+13:002011-01-19T15:43:41.496+13:00Distinguishing Moral Theory and Anti-Theory Through Intuitionistic LogicMy purpose here is to present a formal framework for the relationship between intuitions and concrete particular judgements in moral cases and the general theories which are supposed to capture them. This framework is to give that relationship a suitable interpretation in intuitionistic (or constructivist) logic, with which I hope to give an interesting way to articulate the difference between Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-5506380089605007012010-08-02T14:36:00.003+12:002010-08-02T22:54:53.604+12:00If there were a market in organs, we would be obligated to trade on itI'm participating in a debate on the goodness of markets for the trade of organs on the Practical Ethics blog hosted by the University of Oxford. Nicholas Shackel has made a case that such a market would only be a benefit. Simon Rippon has objected that such a market would give rise to social obligations to make use of the market even when doing so would harm you. Shackel has responded that Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5932477820715836849.post-56027993860443386552010-06-30T16:41:00.000+12:002010-06-30T16:41:05.373+12:00Formal Methods in Political PhilosophyOn the off-chance that there is somebody reading this who doesn't already know about it: the political philosopher Robert Wolff is running a very detailed serialised introduction to game theory and related fields here. Wolff is very much a skeptic about most of the uses that people try to make of formal methods in political philosophy, especially about the simplifying assumptions that are Marinushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13492009758043047531noreply@blogger.com0