ethics
TagHeyd Wins EMET Prize
David Heyd, professor of philosophy at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the winner of the 2017 EMET Prize for Art, Science and Culture in the Humanities category. (more…)
New Public Philosophy Award from Environmental Ethics Group
The International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE) has given its inaugural Public Philosophy Award to Andrew Light, professor of philosophy, public policy, and atmospheric sciences at George Mason University, as well as director of the school’s Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. (more…)
Oxford Philosophy PhD Candidate Wins New $100,000 Essay Prize
James Williams, a doctoral student at the Oxford Internet Institute who works on the philosophy and ethics of technology design, and who previously worked at Google, is the winner of the inaugural Nine Dots Prize. The prize solicits 3,000-word essay responses to a question, and the winner receives $100,000 and to write a book expanding on the ideas of the essay, to ..
Glasgow Wins APA’s Baumgardt Fellowship
Joshua Glasgow, Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Sonoma State University and director of the university’s Center for Ethics, Law, and Society, is the winner of the 2017 David Baumgardt Memorial Fellowship. (more…)
Three Observations About Moral Philosophy Today
Below are three features of contemporary moral philosophy that I’ve observed, and that may be worth discussing. I present them largely without judgment, except to say here that each seems like a mixed bag. Feel free to discuss, evaluate, elaborate, etc.  These aren’t the only observations I have about moral philosophy today, but they are ones that recent events have..
McMahan & Singer: Stubblefield Is A Victim Of Injustice (updated)
In an essay at The New York Times’ “The Stone,” two of the most prominent living moral philosophers—Jeff McMahan, White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University, and Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University—argue that Anna Stubblefield, a former professor of philosophy at Rut..
Association for Practical & Professional Ethics Moves to DePauw
The Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE), a “comprehensive, international organization advancing scholarship, education, and practice in practical and professional ethics,” will be moving from its current institutional home at Indiana University to the Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University. (more…)
Ethics and Education Grant Winners
The Center for Ethics & Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has announced the winners of its latest round of grants. The grants include awards of up to $40,000 for research projects in philosophy as it relates to educational policy and practice (see this description of the grant program). (more…)
Prindle Institute Receives $30,000 Grant to Study Business Ethics
The Prindle Institute of Ethics at DePauw University, whose aim is “to enrich the quality of ethical deliberation and action for DePauw’s students, as well as for its faculty and administration, and to reach out in related ways to the broader academic, geographical, and global community,” has received a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to..
Ethics Professors and Ethical Standards
Should ethics professors be held to higher ethical standards in their personal behavior? A post on that topic by Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR) at The Splintered Mind (which I had put in the Heap of Links last week) asks that question. (more…)
Traits of Deontologists and Consequentialists: Appearance and Reality
People who hold deontological moral views appear to others to be more “pro-social,” but actually aren’t, according to a new study. The study, entitled “Are Kantians Better Social Partners? People Making Deontological Judgments Are Perceived to Be More Prosocial than They Actually Are,” is by Valerio Capraro (Middlesex University, London) and seven others, and is ava..
Philosopher Wins 2 Million Euros To Study “Limitarianism”
Ingrid Robeyns, professor of philosophy and holder of the Ethics and Institutions Chair at the Utrecht University, has won a 2 million euro grant from the European Research Council to pursue her research on “limitarianism” over the next five years. (more…)
The Effective Altruism Challenge (guest post by Holly Lawford-Smith)
The following is a guest post* by Holly Lawford-Smith, lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sheffield (and soon-to-be senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Melbourne), on teaching about altruism. (more…)
26 New Blogging Awards and 2 Article Awards
Ethics blog PEA Soup, in cooperation with the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at Depauw University, has announced that it will be offering 26 new blogging awards, plus two awards for papers blogged about there. (more…)
Topical Shifts in Submissions to Ethics Over the Past 6 Years
Ethics: an International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy, one of the discipline’s leading journals, is seeking a new editor-in-chief. (more…)
Criticism of the APA’s Code of Conduct
Last week, the American Philosophical Association (APA) issued a Code of Conduct. The document was produced by a volunteer task force headed by Nancy Holland (Hamline University), in response to a petition. (more…)
APA Issues Code of Conduct
The American Philosophical Association (APA) has published a Code of Conduct. You can find it here.
I’m off to a meeting but may have time for a more detailed post about it later today.
A Surprisingly Overlooked Gap in Philosophy (guest post by Bob Fischer)
Bob Fischer is an assistant professor of philosophy at Texas State University. In a brief conversation over the summer, he shared with me an observation about a problem teaching philosophy to college students and I thought, “no, that can’t be correct.” But he was right, and he was doing something about it. In the following guest post, he explains the problem and how..
Major Ethics Blog PEA Soup Revamped
PEA Soup (with the PEA standing for Philosophy, Ethics, and Academia) has just undergone a number of changes. It has a new look. It has moved to a new address: www.peasoup.us, and it has teamed up with DePauw University’s Prindle Institute of Ethics (directed by Andrew Cullison). (more…)
Getting Ethics into Non-Philosophy Courses & other Strategies for Expanding Ethics Instruction
Questions about right and wrong action, what kinds of things are of value, and what kinds of persons we should be—i.e., ethics—arise in nearly every area of scholarly inquiry. This provides opportunities for philosophy departments to play a role at their universities outside their traditional courses.  (more…)
Humans Haven’t Yet Figured Out How To Combine Culture and Ethics
“The good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other.” This famous line from Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics sets out a basic idea that, in some form or another, is at least part of most thoughtful philosophical understandings of morality: at a fundamental level, you and..
The Ethics of Honoring
The recent wave of student protests in the United States have focused on a range of issues related to the status and treatment of racial minorities and other vulnerable parties on campus. One issue that has come up on several occasions are the ways in which universities have decided to honor various historical figures—for example, by naming buildings after them, o..
Ethics of Suicide Digital Archive
In what is being referred to as “an unprecedented example of library-author-publisher collaboration,” a new philosophy book and accompanying digital archive of its material were recently launched. The book is The Ethics of Suicide: Historical Sources, by Margaret Battin (Utah). Professor Battin worked with her publisher, Oxford University Press, and the University o..
The Ethics Centre Invites Contributors
Matthew Beard of The Ethics Centre writes:
The Ethics Centre is an independent not-for-profit organisation that provides an open forum for the promotion and exploration of ethical questions. Part of our work involves producing ethics-related articles for our website. We invite a range of thinkers from various walks of life to write short, conversational pieces ex..
Philosophers On The Ashley Madison Hack
Last Tuesday, a group calling itself “Impact Team” followed through on its threat to release data it had stolen from Ashley Madison, an internet service that facilitates encounters between people interested in having extramarital affairs. The data included information on approximately 37 million people who had signed up for the site (see news reports at Wired and Th..
What’s Wrong? (A New Blog)
What’s Wrong? is the “not quite official” blog of the University of Colorado, Boulder’s Center for Values and Social Policy. The blog is edited by Colorado’s David Boonin, and its purpose is to provide “a forum for discussing and reporting on topics in applied normative philosophy, broadly understood to include applied ethics as well as practical subjects in social,..
NCAA’s Report on Academic Fraud at UNC
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) released its report on academic fraud involving student athletes at the University of North Carolina (previously), according to reports at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and the New York Times. According to the Chronicle, the report focuses “most prominently” on former philosophy professor and..
New Blog on the Ethics of War
The Ethical War Blog is a new group blog hosted by the Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace. The Centre’s Jonathan Parry writes:
The Ethical War Blog will publish short and timely opinion articles on war-related topics in the news, written by specialists in the field, in an accessible and digestible format. The blog launches with five articles, with n..