The Ethical Werewolf ‡ by Neil Sinhababu : "The Humean Theory of Practical Irrationality" accepted by JESP

My other blogs

I've blogged in many different places. Here are some of them:

I'm very proud of War or Car, where I posted a new thing you could buy for the price of the Iraq War everyday, for 121 days. This was during the 2008 elections, and I was glad that the antiwar candidate won. The site got its name because you could buy every American household a Toyota Prius for the $3 trillion price of the war. Or you could buy the Irish their annual beer intake, in Guinness, for a millennium. Or you could buy all the world's pandas their own personal stealth bombers!

Probably my greatest era of internet awesomeness was guestblogging for Ezra Klein long before he achieved his current superstardom at Vox. My posts there are pretty scattered, so they'll be hard to find. My work for Ezra catapulted me into other opportunities like filling in for Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly. After that from 2008 to 2015, my friend Nick Beaudrot and I wrote a blog called Donkeylicious. As the name suggests, it was largely about Democratic politics.

During the 2012 elections, I created a little blog called VoteSeeing that tabulated election predictions and graded predictors on how well they did. The folks at Daily Kos Elections won the prediction contest, with Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight a close second. Shortly afterward, a group of philosophers at a blog called NewAPPS got me to put up a few posts for them.

This post at the Philosophers' Cocoon has more about my job at the National University of Singapore, where I'm a philosophy professor.

Thursday, November 03, 2011

"The Humean Theory of Practical Irrationality" accepted by JESP

I'm proud to say that "The Humean Theory of Practical Irrationality" has been accepted by the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. Here's an abstract:

Christine Korsgaard has argued that Humean views about action and practical rationality jointly imply the impossibility of irrational action. According to the Humean theory of action, agents do what maximizes expected desire-satisfaction. According to the Humean theory of rationality, it is rational for agents to do what maximizes expected desire-satisfaction. Thus Humeans are committed to the impossibility of practical irrationality – an unacceptable consequence.

I respond by developing Humean views to explain how we can act irrationally. Humeans about action should consider the immediate motivational forces produced by an agent's desires. Humeans about rationality should consider the agent's dispositional desire strengths. When (for example) vivid sensory or imaginative experiences of desired things cause some of our desires to produce motivational force disproportional to their dispositional strength, we may act in ways that do not maximize expected desire- satisfaction, thus acting irrationally. I argue that this way of developing Humean views is true to the best reasons for holding them.

I submitted to JESP before the other ethics journals in its class -- the Journal of Value Inquiry, the Journal of Ethics, the Journal of Moral Philosophy, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice -- because it's open source.

Just sent off another R&R today, and I hope I have another happy post like this to write soon...

[Update] And it's up! Online journals are fast. Time between acceptance and publication was under a month.