My TED talk on moral luck

Here's the video of my TED talk back in October. (Really, TEDxNTU, which is kind of the minor league version of TED, at a local university.) They wanted me to talk about moral luck, so that's what I did. I suggest that consequentialists should address moral luck by judging people's virtue and blameworthiness by their motives, while still judging the rightness of actions by their consequences.

How-in-the-world did they miss that?

The heartwarming story of Being and his friend Tim, brought to you by unusually bad copy editing.

(the typo has since been corrected)

Modal Spice was my favorite

I've updated the wikipedia page on anankastic conditionals so that the example, "If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends", is accurately rendered and properly referenced.

Ernst Zermelo would've commented

What would Bertrand Russell have posted about liking your own posts on Facebook? Perhaps, "I like all and only those posts that aren't liked by their own authors." 

Six degrees of Francis Bacon

If your objection to Lewis' modal realism is that the Chronicles of Narnia are bad fantasy novels, you're probably making an ad homonym argument.

The new poem of induction

If Goodman thought what good men ought,
then for all Hume ever knew
every green he'd ever seen
was a missing shade of grue.

TEDxNTU talk on moral luck

I gave a TED talk on moral luck Saturday at Nanyang Technological University. Probably the most fun example was about some hypothetical German cannibals a century ago, one of whom killed and ate some ordinary people, and one of whom killed and ate Hitler. They both had the same bad intentions, but on a straightforward consequentialist view (plus a few assumptions about history) the Hitler-eater kind of saves the 20th century. 

Joint intention

I'm trying to figure out whether to add a section on shared agency to my book. I'd love to have an example where Harold and Kumar want to smoke together, so when Harold brings the rolling papers and Kumar brings the marijuana, they're acting on a joint intention.

Treating the rear end as a mere means

Kant could hold that actions have immoral worth if they're done from the motive of booty, as the will is then determined by a posteriori principles.

[Null, as limericks typically don't have titles]

There once was a [person] from [place]
Who [had quite an unusual case]
[An attempt to react
 to the ‘forementioned fact]
 [Caused a punchline that fits in this space]

 -Elisabeth Helen Cohen

Achieving youdaimonia

I kind of like the view that morality is other-regarding, so moral value excludes prudential value. On this view, it's morally praiseworthy for me to accept severe pain to cause you slight pleasure. But it's still better from the standpoint of overall value and prudential value for me not to go through this pain for you. If I accepted this view, my moral theory would be youtilitarianism. (In my own life, the theory of sexual morality it supports is shedonism.)

Still, inventing the predicate calculus entitles you to call yourself Fr∃g∃

Øystein Linnebo was my logic TA (or TF, as they call it) at Harvard. For years I thought he wrote his name with the empty set symbol because he loved logic so much, until I learned that it was a real Norwegian letter.

Backhanded footnotes

Footnotes saying "I thank an anonymous referee for raising this issue" sometimes make me wonder if the author wants to say, "Look, I know this is irrelevant -- I'm only discussing it because a clueless referee made me."

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.

Yongming Han to Brown for Ph.D

I'm really proud of my student Yongming Han, who is defending a Humean account of willpower in his undergraduate thesis, and who has recently accepted an offer to join the Ph.D program at Brown. He had offers from several good Masters and Ph.D programs.

We have a lot of excellent undergraduates at NUS, and Yongming was an awesome example. He read lots of opponents of mine that I hadn't read yet and laid out excellent ways to respond to them, and helped me learn about lots of recent psychological experiments that I didn't know. Working with him was not only wonderful from a teaching standpoint, but a boon to my research. I think he and the excellent people working on motivation and action at Brown will be able to do great things together.

"Possible Girls" in the Washington Post!

Thanks to Harvard philosophy major and excellent policy journalist Dylan Matthews, who provides a wonderful explanation of my paper at Ezra Klein's blog. 

Or maybe it was my ontological views?

Two weeks ago I was working on my computer in the airport when a woman pointed in my general direction and said to her friend, "So thin!"

 I thought to myself, "Yeah, I'm kind of skinny... maybe they like skinny guys?" And then I realized she was pointing to my MacBook Air.