One thing I haven't blogged about much is that one of the things I like to read about is ethical theory and political philosophy. This might seem a strange interest for a philosopher of science, but it becomes less strange if we start seeing some of the professional commitments of scientists - such as truthfulness, openness, willingness to revise one's beliefs and so on as ethical commitments in the sense that that's what scientists ought to do. I also believe that these professional commitments have a bearing on how we believe theories to be true, and what we believe our theories tell us about the world.
(As an aside, my problem with the sociological approach to science, such as for instance in the work of Latour, is not primarily that I think Latour is wrong, but that he takes the pathological, unprofessional behaviour as the norm in science, and then seeks to build a theory of 'nature' on that. My problem with this approach is not merely that I think Latour is wrong (I believe he is) but that he is so cynical.)
Being somewhat, though not entirely, continental in philosophical outlook, I am also not a big fan of utilitarian approaches to ethics, but see more value in a deontological approach.
Anyway, I just this week got my new copy of Derek Parfit's 'On what Matters' and am now up to about Chapter 3. The interesting bit about Parfit's view on ethics is of course that he believes (and builds arguments in favour of) the idea that the consequentialist and deontological approach eventually lead to the same mountain peak - that, in the words of the manuscript version of the book, both approaches climb the same mountain.
To achieve this, Parfit re-engages with Kant in a way that I find ultimately very refreshing. He states upfront that Kant's writing is messy and in many places incoherent (unlike many other works on Kant I've read, or even my undergraduate lectures on Kant, who often try to unify the mess by lengthy discourse) and Parfit is the only philosopher I've read who states outright that Kant is prone to emotional outbursts. I've always found these outbursts in Kant too - such as his boast that the philosophy of the Kritik deals definitively with the problems of epistemology ('endgültig gelost zu haben'), his characterisation of New Zealand as one of the seats of radical evil, or his dry wit in answering Woellner's attempt at censorship in the Battle of the Faculties (at least I hope it's dry wit, otherwise that passage is unbearably servile).
So, right, I'm engaged.
