We’re #11

Random notes from around the web.

Brian Leiter has posted “preliminary survey results”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/11/the_pgr_for_200.html with the highlight being the jump in Cornell’s ranking. A jump I like to note that coincides with their hiring of ex-Syracusans. (Just like Rutgers in the last survey!) There’s a lesson in that somewhere.

Given that they seem to be about all of time, I’m not sure how the “free will awards”:http://gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_forking_pat/2004/10/the_willies.html will be annuals. But maybe that was part of the joke.

Meg Wallace has invented “Acutetarianism”:http://www.unc.edu/~megw/Acutetarian.html.

“Dan Moller”:http://www.princeton.edu/~dmoller/philosophy.htm at Princeton has added his dissertation abstract to his webpage. I was especially interested in this bit.

bq. Suppose you have considered all of the arguments you know purporting to show that abortion is wrong and have concluded that they all fail. Are your deliberations about the morality of abortion at an end? The first essay of my dissertation, “Abortion and Moral Risk,” argues that the answer is _No_: you must proceed to consider the possibility that you are mistaken in your assessment. Ignoring the possibility that you are mistaken about the morality of abortion involves taking a risk – the risk of unwittingly committing serious wrongdoing – that I show may itself be impermissible.

As it turns out, I’ve “written on this”:http://brian.weatherson.org/lockhart.pdf, actually the only bit of normative ethics I’ve published. (There’s some normative stuff in the “pie paper”:http://brian.weatherson.org/prank.pdf too, though that’s mostly Andy’s doing – from memory I stuck mainly to the applied side there.) The main points were that (a) the kind of view Moller is sketching is bound to be _very_ demanding and (b) it’s very hard to motivate this kind of constraint unless you regard doing the right thing _as such_ to be among one’s obligations. I tend to like non-demanding and (to use Michael Smith’s terminology) non-fetishistic moral theories, so I’m ill-disposed to the project. But that’s why they write the dissertations. I’ll be interested to see whether Moller’s arguments change my mind.