50 Shades of Grue

The heroine of "50 Shades of Grue" is a masochist before time t and a sadist after time t. I don't like how the book glamorizes treating her sexuality as a property.

(I much prefer this poem about grue love.)

At Sheffield

After many drinks, one of the grad students asked me, "What are you, fundamentally?" I said, "I'm a werewolf."

You "...speak for more than one contemporary naturalist"

Somehow I went all these years without reading "Naturalism and Prescriptivity", despite having absorbed a lot of the views and forcefully defended them. I just checked sportswear websites to see how much I'd have to pay for a Michigan football jersey that says "Railton" on the back.

OUEC moral judgment paper

David Killoren of Coastal Carolina University, who organized a bunch of those split-screen PhilosophyTV and Bloggingheads debates years ago, asked me to comment on a paper for an Online Undergraduate Ethics Conference. The idea was for undergraduates to submit papers and faculty to comment on the best ones.

He sent me a nice paper from Quitterie Gounot of Swarthmore defending a Humean, externalist, and cognitivist approach to moral judgment. Following Peter Railton, I think that's exactly the way to go. There was a nifty point in her paper about the term "prescriptivity", often used as a necessary feature of moral judgment by internalists about the connection between moral judgment and motivation: real prescriptions that doctors give you actually are externalist in the way they motivate action and provide reasons.