Happy Birthday/Anniversary to Us!

I'm not sure whether to call it a 'birthday' or an 'anniversary', but in any case, this fact calls for celebration -- the Garden of Forking Paths has now been in existence for exactly one year!  That's right, believe it or not, it was May 31, 2004 when we made the official welcome post.  Since that day, the Garden has blossomed into an excellent forum for discussion, with 32 official contributors (not to mention many more regular, but "non-official" commenters), lots of great papers online, and many helpful resources.  Everyone who has helped us achieve such success deserves a big thank you.  So thank you!

And to continue patting ourselves on the back, here are the stats for the past year:

Total number of hits: 85,916     Average per day: 233.47

It's been great fun so far -- let's keep up the good work.  May this next year be even more successful!

P.S. A "Garden Party", in honor of our one year anniversary, is currently in the planning stages.  We'll update you all with details soon.

Desires vs. values: A new experiment

Ever since  Watson's classic paper, philosophers have been concerned with the distinction between desires and values. The usual view is that this distinction is a purely psychological one -- the sort of thing that might figure in a scientific theory of the human mind.

Erica Roedder recently suggested to me that this view might be leaving out an important aspect of our ordinary folk concept of values. She pointed out that certain moral norms might be playing an irreducible role in the concept.

Together, we designed an experiment to test this hypothesis:

Subjects in one condition were given a story about a character loosely modeled on Huck Finn. On a conscious level, he believes that the racist practises of his society are morally right, but he sometimes feels a pull in the opposite direction. He finds himself feeling guilty when he performs racist behaviors and sometimes ends up doing things that promote racial equality as a result. Subjects in this condition were then asked whether, despite his conscious beliefs, the character actually values racial eqaulity.

Subjects in the other condition were given a story about a kind of 'inverted Huck Finn.' On a conscious level, he believes that he ought to treat all races equally, but he sometimes feels a pull in the opposite direction. He finds himself feeling guilty when he performs behaviors that advance other races at the expense of his own, and he sometimes ends up doing things that promote racial discrimination as a result. These subjects were then asked whether, despite his conscious beliefs, the character actually values racial discrimination.

The results showed a marked asymmetry. People who had been given the first story tended to say that the character's attitude toward racial equality was one of his values, whereas people who had been given the second story tended to say that the character's attitutde toward racial discrimination was not one of his values. This result is puzzling, since the two stories seem exactly parallel on a psychological level, differing only in the moral worth of the attitudes themselves.

Any interpretations?

Robert Kane's Free Will Book

Robert Kane has just published an introductory book on Free Will in Oxford University Press's new series, Fundamentals of Philosophy (of which John Perry and I are general editors).  This is, not surprisingly, an outstanding book, and highly recommended. 

Congratulations to Robert Kane for this excellent book!

Congratulations to Peter Van Inwagen

Peter Van Inwagen has been selected for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  This is a distinguished honor, and obviously richly deserved.

Congratulations, Peter!

For more, see the Notre Dame University homepage: www.nd.edu