Moving to Miami!

I'm very happy to say that Helen & I will be joining the philosophy department at the University of Miami next year!

We bid farewell to many fantastic colleagues, and will certainly miss daffodil season in York...

... but are thrilled to be joining the outstanding philosophical community at UM!

December Donations

Happily, I was in a position this year to make donations worth around 8 kidneys, mostly split between SCI (deworming: most cost-effective "quality of life"-improving intervention) and GWWC (growing the effective altruism community, so more money is donated wisely in future).

For anyone interested in donating to GiveWell-recommended charities, check out the Effective Altruism hub on how to donate most tax-efficiently in your country.  E.g., for UK taxpayers, giving via the GWWC trust allows the charity to claim "Gift Aid" from the UK government -- increasing the size of your donation by 25% at no added cost to you. (Donations directly to SCI are already Gift Aid eligible, but this allows you to donate to other GiveWell-recommended charities in addition.)  If GiveWell doesn't process your donation, be sure to fill out a donation report to help them track their "money moved".

My take on GiveWell's top charities:

Moving to York (UK)

Happily, Helen and I will be joining the wonderful philosophy department at the University of York, starting in September. We're really looking forward to being part of such a large and active research community--and the department's strengths in both philosophy of mind and ethics make it an especially good fit for the two of us.  (The city itself is none too shabby, either!)

Over the summer, we will both be presenting at the AAP conference in Canberra, and then Helen will be presenting at the Barnard-Columbia Perception Workshop in New York.  So, busy times ahead, but they should prove philosophically rewarding!

Forthcoming in Noûs

... is my paper, 'Value Receptacles'.  The abstract:

Utilitarianism is often rejected on the grounds that it fails to respect the separateness of persons, instead treating people as mere "receptacles of value". I develop several different versions of this objection, and argue that--despite their prima facie plausibility--they are all mistaken. Although there are crude forms of utilitarianism that run afoul of these objections, I advance a new form of the view--'token-pluralistic utilitarianism'--that does not.

This is my favourite of my papers to date, so I'm especially glad that it found such a good home!

Effective Giving

I encourage everyone who wants to make the world a better place to join Giving What We Can and pledge to give 10% of their pre-tax income to effective charities.  You can expect to save several lives each year (averaging over your lifetime earnings, if you're currently a student), which is pretty amazing when you think about it, and it's surprisingly easy too.  (A 10% change in income generally doesn't impose any drastic lifestyle changes!)  Some people give even more, and that's even cooler.  Some start with less, and every bit helps.  However much you give, for the remainder of this post I want to turn to the question of where to give.

Professional Update

It's been a crazy year. Helen turned down two tenure-track offers, and me one (from St Andrews), for "two body" reasons. Fortunately, things have worked out very well for us even so. Helen has accepted a Bersoff fellowship from NYU for next year, while I have a bioethics postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. And in Fall 2013, I'll be joining the philosophy department at Bowling Green as an assistant professor, where we look forward to finding a permanent solution to our two-body problem!

We've also had some recent good news regarding publications: Our co-authored 'Mind-Body Meets Metaethics: A Moral Concept Strategy', and Helen's 'Circularity in the Conditional Analysis of Phenomenal Concepts', have both been accepted by Phil Studies. My two other acceptances this year were for 'Fittingness: The Sole Normative Primitive' (forthcoming in Phil Quarterly) and 'Knowing What Matters' (forthcoming in Peter Singer's edited collection, Does Anything Really Matter? Parfit on Objectivity, to be published by Oxford University Press).

Now I just need to finish my dissertation...

Philanthropy Interview

I was recently interviewed about optimal philanthropy by Alex from OK So What Now?. Follow the link for the full episode (which includes interviews with a psychologist and an economist). Alex was kind enough to send me an mp3 of just our section to post here.

I should flag that this is an edited version, so the audio stream has been cut and moved around a bit. E.g. There's a bit early on where my answer shifts to a slightly different topic, but the question Alex had asked in the meantime was cut out, so I come off as inexplicably rambly! But other than that, I'm pretty happy with the result, and the interview itself was lots of fun.

Philanthropy News

Giving What We Can: Princeton is launching this Monday with talks from Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia) and Larry Temkin (Rutgers) -- event details below. I've previously discussed GWWC here and here, and am very excited to see the movement grow.

Mr. & Mrs. Yetter Chappell

Helen and I got married over the weekend!

Scott on Vibes

Check out my little brother on the vibraphone!

Back from NZ

Well, that was a fun trip. We were staying with family in Christchurch for the 7.1 magnitude earthquake, but our house was undamaged. (Incredibly, one of my brothers slept right through it!)

Here are a couple of scenic photos from our visit to Marlborough Sounds:

What should I be reading?

It's time for me to start preparing for my pre-dissertation "generals exam". Probably the trickiest thing here is pinning down an appropriate topic and reading list for the exam to be based on. So I figure I may as well try appealing to the collective wisdom of the Internets (that's you) for advice. My (tentative) topic is 'evaluating non-ideal agents', insofar as this suggests questions like the following:

• In light of our fallibility, should we have less credence than would be ideally warranted [arguably: 1] in logical and purely normative truths?


• Is there a difference between rationality and reasonableness? (Might we fruitfully analyze the former as an 'ideal' notion and the latter as a kind of normativity more tailored to 'non-ideal' agents?)


• Can purely normative ignorance affect what's rational? Praise/blameworthy?


• If it is rational to commit to a policy, is it thereby rational to act on the policy in each instance? Is it praiseworthy?


• What is the relation between (ir)rationality, virtue (vice), and (blame/)praiseworthiness?


• Are the above (e.g. rationality or virtue) types of evaluation in conflict with ordinary consequentialist evaluations of character?


• Is consequentialism self-effacing? Is the pluralistic motivational structure of "indirect" or "sophisticated consequentialism" coherent/possible, or does it collapse into crude subjective consequentialism (with its single ultimate aim)?


• Does virtue consist in concern for the ultimate right-making feature [viz., maximizing utility], or just the surface [prima facie] right-making features possessed by typically utility-promoting acts [e.g. promise-keeping, respecting rights and autonomy, helping others in need, etc.]?

Follow the original link for further explanation, and for my first pass at a list of relevant readings. (Some I haven't read yet, so may be removed if they turn out not to be so relevant after all.) Please leave a comment here or email me if you have any further suggestions for readings I should add to my list!

(I'm also open to suggestions for tweaking my topic questions, though I'm less likely to change them in the absence of compelling reasons.)

Birthday Charity

I've previously noted the norm-shaping importance of public giving, for which social-networking sites like Facebook seem especially well suited. The Facebook "Causes" application now makes this even easier, by encouraging users to make a "birthday wish" inviting their friends to donate to their preferred charity.

Today I get to make use of this new feature, picking GiveWell as my (meta-)charity of choice.

If you're a Facebook user, you can view my birthday wish here (and donate here). Or, if you don't use Facebook, feel free to donate directly to Givewell. Thanks!

Marimba Masterpieces

Oh my god... I love this piece! It's Don Skoog's wonderfully rhythmic Attendance to Ritual, performed by my legendary little brother, Scott Chappell:



See also his solo performance, Memories of the Seashore (I think the section from 2:40 to 3:20 is especially cool).

'Misfit' is a relative term

Some commenters here complain about how "Social misfits are really rife in philosophy." It can certainly be discomforting when the people around you do not share your social norms and expectations. But isn't it a bit quick to just assume that it's their fault (and so call them 'jerks', 'boors' and so forth)? Lack of fit is a symmetrical relation, after all. Consider the following complaint:

How many times as a female professor have I gone out to dinner parties with visiting speakers where there were several philosopher’s wives present (my other colleagues mostly being males), where the entire dinner table conversation was devoted to philosophical issues that excluded them? As a woman, I or perhaps simply as someone socialized to be more polite and empathetic, I face the choice then: should I try to join in with “the guys” and prove my mettle, thus ignoring half the people present at the table, or should I attempt to be more congenial and polite and talk to the women?

Now, from my perspective, the whole point of a bunch of philosophers going out to dinner with a visiting speaker is to discuss philosophy. That's what they're there for. To complain that "the entire dinner table conversation was devoted to philosophical issues" seems as bizarre to me as complaining that the entire seminar was dedicated to philosophy when some of the students might rather have discussed the local sports team. The problem does not necessarily lie with the topic of conversation; it could just be that the sports fans are in the wrong place.

More generally, it's nice to accommodate people and make them feel comfortable. But given that the lack of fit between 'nerds' and 'normals' is symmetrical, it's not clear why the norms of the latter group should always take precedence. I mean, there's no surer way to make me uncomfortable than to put me in a situation where one is expected to engage in small talk. That's just a fact about me and how I relate to others. Many people (outside of academia) seem to be just the opposite: uncomfortable with serious discussion, comfortable with small talk. That's a fact about them and how they relate to others. Each of these two personality types may find it difficult to relate to the other. Objectively speaking, that's the end of the story. But in practice the extroverts are socially dominant, so they lay fault on the nerds and introverts for failing to conform to their preferred (arbitrary) norms. What they don't seem to realize is that they are equally failing to conform to our preferred norms.

Why Coffee Shops?

Assuming that expressions of cultural incomprehension fall under the 'et cetera' component of this blog's purview, let me ask: why do people like to meet in commercial places (coffee shops, bars, etc.)? It seems to me like a double cost: firstly, the environment is intrinsically less pleasant than elsewhere (cf. a comfy private lounge, or stroll through the park), and then - to add insult to injury - one is expected to waste money on consumables whether one really wants them or not.

Maybe the idea is that most people really like the consumables. That'd be fine, I'd happily endure a cramped and noisy coffee shop for the sake of a caffeine-craving friend. My worry is just that there seems to be a social norm that people should meet in such places, and so a group of people might end up meeting there merely due to the norm and not because anyone actually prefers this location over non-commercial alternatives. "Meeting for coffee" is the expected behaviour. I'd rather invite people for a stroll in the park, but they might think that weird. Depending on my mood, that may or may not bother me, but it seems like the sort of thing that would deter many people from socializing in a way that they'd actually enjoy more. (Whether there really are "many people" who share my idiosyncratic tastes here is, of course, another question!)

Eight Random Personal Facts

Jean Kazez says I'm supposed to list eight random facts about myself, and then tag eight random people to repeat the process. Here goes:

1) I feel inappropriately proud of having only vacuumed my dorm room once last year.

2) I rarely get sick, except on Good Friday. (Sympathy pains?)

3) I was kind of hoping to avoid this meme, but - like many things, I find - it's not so bad once you start.

4) I have four brothers. (Mum gets a lot of sympathy.)

5) We got what we thought was a female cat, but it turned out to be male too. We decided "Murphy" was a fitting name. I'm gonna miss that furball.

6) I played the oboe for a while in high school. It was a short while.

7) I'm beginning to think that eight facts is a bit much to ask, really.

8) My first computer was an Apple IIe, with no hard drive. I would amuse my 8-year-old friends by running the program:

10 PRINT "Enter name 1";: INPUT name1$
20 PRINT "Enter name 2";: INPUT name2$
30 RANDOMIZE TIMER
40 x = INT(RND(1)*100) + 1
50 PRINT name1$;" loves ";name2$;" ";x;"%"
60 END

We were easily amused.

I'll tag: Jared, Isa, Chris, Blar, Clark, Brian, Macht, and Kyle.
(But feel free to disregard if you wish.)

Facebook

At my brother's insistence (he wants to beat me at geography games), I've finally signed up for this "Facebook" thing that's taking over the interweb. It even sports a "David Lewis Appreciation Society". Any other Facebook recommendations?

Achiever's Guilt

There's a nice quote from Marianne Williamson:

It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Last year, an undergraduate friend of mine received an scholarship to Princeton University. Oddly, he seemed almost embarrassed by it. (In fact, it was a mutual friend who informed me of his success.) I was bemused by his reaction at the time, but now find echoes of it in myself. (Sometimes, when talking to a random person who asks where in America I'm going, I answer with an evasive 'New Jersey'. Silly, eh?)

On reflection, I think this kind of misguided modesty is not a good thing. In the case of my friend, I was happy for him and wanted to share this. But you can't celebrate with someone who refuses to acknowledge that something good has happened! So that's unfortunate. And I've been a little slow to internalize this lesson in my own case, I think.

Rather than pointlessly beating myself down, I should probably just relax and let myself feel grateful for my good fortune. So, on that note, a couple of photos of the beautiful campus from my March visit:


Just three weeks till I move in! Quite exciting, really... I imagine the Graduate College will be full of students - from all sorts of disciplines - who are intelligent and academically motivated. And dammit, that's a good thing!

Philosophers' Carnival #50

The 50th Philosophers' Carnival is here.

A nice milestone -- we've come a long way since August 2004! There were a few fits and starts early on, but thanks to the support of early participants (e.g. Brandon and Chris) - and promotion on Brian Leiter's blog - the carnival eventually grew in momentum. So I'm pleased that it looks set to remain a valued fixture of the online philosophical community for some time to come.