I complain about there being no papers up and I get two emails in a day letting me know about new sites with papers.

The CAPPE working papers site has five new papers up, all on issues around applied ethics and political philosophy. I’ll officially write up the papers blog report on this tomorrow, but just in case anyone doesn’t want to wait until that long, follow that link!

UPDATE: I posted before reading the papers, and I might have created a slightly misleading impression about their subject matter. Let me correct that. Three of the papers are about applied ethics and political philosophy broadly construed, the other two aren’t, unless we have a very broad construal. So rather than my summary, I’ll just copy the abstracts. Both the following papers are by Neil Levy.

Responsibility for Belief
Many contemporary philosophers defend a deontological conception of
epistemic justification. However, the viability of such a conception seems to depend
crucially upon agents being able to exert control over their beliefs. I examine various
attempts to show, either that the deontological concept does not require doxastic
voluntarism, or that doxastic voluntarism is true. These attempts all fail. I claim that this
demonstrates that the range of appropriate ascriptions of responsibility for belief is very
limited: epistemic recklessness is the only kind of doxastic responsibility there is.

A Dilemma For Libertarians
To the extent that indeterminacy intervenes between our reasons for action and
our decisions, intentions and actions, our freedom seems to be reduced, not enhanced. Free
will becomes nothing more than the power to choose irrationally. In recognition of this
problem, recent libertarians have suggested that free will is paradigmatically manifested only
in actions for which we have reasons for both or all the alternatives. In these circumstances,
however we choose we choose rationally. Against this kind of account of approach, most
fully developed by Robert Kane, critics have pressed the demand for contrastive
explanations. Kane has responded by arguing that the demand does not need to be met:
responsibility for an action does not require that there is a contrastive explanation of that
action. However, this responses proves too much: it implies that agents are responsible not
only for the actions they choose, but also for their counterfactual actions which were equally
available to them.

If it wasn’t for people prepared to comment on topics without anything like sufficient grounds, making summaries of papers without reading them, drawing conclusions about the philosophical acumen of unknown referees on the basis of apparently dubious recommendations, and so on, blogs would never get written. But we do make mistakes this way sometimes.