Is it permissible for a program to let their applicants know the final results after April 15th?

[Franzkafka]

On April 20th, I received a rejection letter from UT-Austin via email. I don't have any idea why did their department sent the rejection letter out at such a late time. Though I know UT-Austin is always one of the latest universities to send out the rejection letter (I found this result on http://thegradcafe.com/survey/index.php?q=philosophy+austin&t=a&o=&pp=25),April 20th is too late. I applied to 20 programs this application season. I got my first result on Febraury 17th (it was a rejection), and got my last but one result on March 31th (it was an acceptance). It seems that the philosophy program at UT-Austin has a significantly low efficiency relative to other programs. And I wonder is it permissible for a program to let their applicants know the final results after April 15th?

[TakeruK]

Yes, of course it is permissible. They are allowed to let you know whenever they want. What usually happens is that people close to the accept/reject cutoff might be placed on a waitlist (formal or informal) until April 15 as they wait for their top choices to make decisions. If they would like to fill more spots after everyone has made a decision on April 15, they could make some offers from this waitlist. Once they have filled all the spots (or if they decided no further spots need to be filled), then they will finally reject all outstanding applications. So, a common interpretation of getting a rejection after April 15 is that you were close to the accept cutoff so they wanted to hold onto you as an option until they heard back from other people.

 

Some programs will even wait until the Fall semester starts before issuing official rejection letters because they might want to fill a last minute spot. 

 

Of course, because most decision deadlines are April 15 (as per the CGS Resolution), it is not in a program's best interest to respond so late since it's likely good candidates will have received and accepted other offers by then (as it sounds like the case for you!). The April 15 resolution says nothing about when the program have to notify you of a decision, it simply states that if they make you a financial offer, they should not compel you to respond prior to April 15.

[fuzzylogician]

Yes, it is permissible. Why wouldn't it be? The April 15 deadline is about when you have to decide, if you have an offer with funding. It's not about when the school has to notify you.

 

Some universities have a process in place where at some late point in the game, after all admissions decisions have been made and acceptances have gone out, someone updates rejections in the system and a mass rejection email is sent. It's a formality on their end to ensure everyone's application was process and closed. It's nothing to get upset about, it's no different from a rejection that would have come a month earlier; if you were seriously still waiting on an answer from them, the solution would have probably been to contact the department long ago, and if you were not waiting then you can just ignore it and move on. 

[Establishment]

And I wonder is it permissible for a program to let their applicants know the final results after April 15th?

 

I considered myself lucking if I ever even received a rejection notice.

[Franzkafka]

So, a common interpretation of getting a rejection after April 15 is that you were close to the accept cutoff so they wanted to hold onto you as an option until they heard back from other people.

I hope so, but the case is that I have never been wait-listed by them, and they sent out all the rejection letters after April 15. Anyway, thank you very much for the helpful reply. 

[Eigen]

How do you know you weren't wait listed?

Many schools don't tell you if you are or not.

[Franzkafka]

How do you know you weren't wait listed?

Many schools don't tell you if you are or not.

But UT-Austin usually notifies those on the wait list. 

[ianfaircloud]

It's funny. When I hear "is it permissible . . . ," I first think about whether it's morally permissible. It looks like no one else went that direction. But I'll say that rejections after April 15 are disrespectful to applicants unless the department has wait-listed those applicants or given them some reason to believe that rejections might come later than April 15, or unless some very special circumstances arise. We're not talking about programs that aim to enroll dozens or hundreds of people. These are programs that aim to enroll fewer than ten people. If you're among the few people whom they wait-listed, then out of respect for you, they should contact you before April 15 to let you know that you're in that small group. Many of us have expressed frustration that some departments do not have their stuff together, and the burden falls on anxious applicants. I understand why that's just the way it works for larger programs of study. But in philosophy, again, we're talking about small groups. So I would say that, in general (see the conditions above), with regard to philosophy PhD applications, it's actually not permissible to send you a rejection email after April 15.

[TakeruK]

Hmmm morally permissible, that's an interesting angle. I rarely think "permissible" in terms of ethics/morals, because in my opinion, being allowed to do something (permissible, having permission) and whether they are ethically/morally right are two completely separate ideas. 

 

In that light, I would slightly revise my above answer to say that it is poor practice for a school to send an acceptance letter to an applicant after April 15 without any prior communication that the applicant might be on wait list / still considered for admission. This is disrespectful to the applicant and will cause more trouble for both the applicant and other schools if the applicant actually preferred the late-acceptance school and now has to withdraw from a previous commitment. However, I would not say this is immoral / unethical because I don't think it's that bad, just an inconvenience. 

 

I think that applicants should assume no communication by April 15 = rejection. I think it is perfectly fine (legally and morally) for a school to wait until the class is entirely full before rejecting people that they had no intention of making any offer. For applicants that are well below the waitlist (i.e. for sure rejection decisions), I think schools should either reject early on or wait until well after April 15 (e.g. May or something) before sending rejection letters. Rejections could result in a lot of work as some applicants will want to inquire why / try to appeal and I think the school's resources in the Feb 15 to April 15 time period is better spent negotiating with accepted applicants and on existing students!

 

In my field, we also admit small classes (6-10 people max, usually). In programs with waitlists, what normally happens is that they probably make 10-15 offers to fill the 6-10 spots. Then, on April 13 or something, they would start contacting applicants on the waitlist (whether it's an official waitlist or not) and ask if the applicants are still interested in a spot at the school and let them know that they are on the waitlist and should someone decline, they might get a very last minute offer with very little time to respond. Usually a school would have to contact a LOT of people on the waitlist because at this point, most of the good candidates would have already got an offer elsewhere and may no longer be interested. 

 

I think this last minute notification/heads-up on waitlist status just prior to April 15 is the best practice. If they notified students about waitlist status too early, then this defeats the purpose of the April 15 deadline because everyone would ask for an extension of their current offers beyond April 15, which means the schools themselves won't know our decisions by April 15 and no waitlists will move. By waiting until just the day or two before, applicants should already know the school they would want to accept from all of their existing offers and hopefully declined all offers they are not interested in. Then, when they get the waitlist notification, they would know whether they would want to stay with their existing offer (and let the waitlisting school know they are not interested) or know they will want to accept the new offer (usually the waitlist notice comes with financial information too, to help people decide), in which case they would ask for a one or two day extension with their existing offer to see if they will get off the waitlist.

[sidebysondheim]

I rarely think "permissible" in terms of ethics/morals, because in my opinion, being allowed to do something (permissible, having permission) and whether they are ethically/morally right are two completely separate ideas. 

 

I know it's probably because I study philosophy, but this just seems like such an odd statement.

[TakeruK]

I know it's probably because I study philosophy, but this just seems like such an odd statement.

 

It's been a long time since my college non-science electives, but I took them in philosophy and one of them was a moral philosophy class. I don't consider myself knowledgeable in this field at all, but I do remember one discussion in this course. In that discussion, we considered different mechanisms that regulate (if that's the right word?) human behaviour and how there can be conflict between what the law says and what your own morality determines (we read a lot about moral relativism).

 

Similarly, in Grade 12, we read Antigone, where Antigone chooses to bury dead rebel brother despite the current ruler not granting permission (making it against the law). She makes this decision because she believes the law of the gods (which I interpreted as her own moral code) is more important than the law of the ruler.

 

Being a complete novice (maybe novice is too kind of a word) in philosophy, I apologize if I used words stupidly or misinterpreted things. But this is why, in my mind, I distinguish between "having permission to do something" (i.e. something granted by some external form of authority) and "actions that are morally/ethically okay" (something granted by yourself and your own moral code only).

[Eigen]

Might just be a field divide, but I (obviously) interpreted this the same way as TakeruK. 

 

Permissible is synonymous with something being "allowed", i.e., approved or OK in some external construct. It has a connotation of legality. 

 

For it to become a moral question, I would have prefaced it with that connotation: "morally permissible" would imply that the question pertains to whether or not something is allowable under some assumed moral or ethical code. In fact, a quick google of that phrase seems to imply that a number of writings specifically refer to (and define) the coupling, setting "morally permissible" as a separate conjoined phrase to be discussed.

 

If "permissible" itself had an ethical or moral connotation, why would we have such a common used specification?

 

Without the specification, I wouldn't assume a question about permissibility was about ethical or moral behavior- I'd have assumed it was about some over-arching construct of allowability under agreements or unspoken contracts between the students and the university. 

[sidebysondheim]

@TakeruK I definitely didn't mean to imply anything negative against you! It's been my (so-far-limited) experience that philosophy construes morality more often as authoritative than not, hence making something morally permissible (in the way Eigen has defined). 

 

On Eigen's later comment, I also immediately read the original post in terms of standard permissibility and not as moral permissibility (like Ian). I mostly just responded because moral permissibility is a "major player" when talking about moral philosophy/ethics. 

[TakeruK]

@TakeruK I definitely didn't mean to imply anything negative against you! It's been my (so-far-limited) experience that philosophy construes morality more often as authoritative than not, hence making something morally permissible (in the way Eigen has defined). 

 

Didn't interpret any negativity at all. I was just realising that I was about to make some statements about philosophy while not being a student of philosophy, hence all of the conditional statements.

 

It's interesting to hear that "philosophy construes morality more often as authoritative than not", because based on the one single moral philosophy class I took (obviously not going to be a representative sample), I thought moral relativism is how most philosophers thought about philosophy. I know it's silly to extrapolate from one single course but that was my only experience learning about morality in philosophy. Glad to learn new things, in any case!

[philstudent1991]

Didn't interpret any negativity at all. I was just realising that I was about to make some statements about philosophy while not being a student of philosophy, hence all of the conditional statements.

 

It's interesting to hear that "philosophy construes morality more often as authoritative than not", because based on the one single moral philosophy class I took (obviously not going to be a representative sample), I thought moral relativism is how most philosophers thought about philosophy. I know it's silly to extrapolate from one single course but that was my only experience learning about morality in philosophy. Glad to learn new things, in any case!

That's interesting, because I think most folks think philosophers are moral relativists. But there are actually very few who are. Many instructors I know like to teach moral relativism and then follow it up with an article on FGM or something equally objectionable to show the students that they aren't the relativists they thought they were when they read Benedict or whoever the week before. 

[TakeruK]

That's interesting, because I think most folks think philosophers are moral relativists. But there are actually very few who are. Many instructors I know like to teach moral relativism and then follow it up with an article on FGM or something equally objectionable to show the students that they aren't the relativists they thought they were when they read Benedict or whoever the week before. 

 

My philosophy professor didn't do anything like that so it seems like I left that class with a distorted view of what philosophers think about morality! But that's a good point. I don't think I consider myself completely a moral relativist because I do think some actions can be objectively moral/immoral (e.g. slavery, FGM, genocide, etc.) but I think that a lot of actions that are immoral by other moral codes, such as religion, are not necessary objectively moral/immoral (e.g. murder, stealing, lying). In the latter group, I believe that there are some instances where these actions can be moral, if it benefits the greater good. 

[Glasperlenspieler]

For what it's worth, a recent survey (http://philpapers.org/archive/BOUWDP.pdf)  reports that 56.4% of professional philosophers surveyed accept or lean towards moral realism (roughly: there are facts of the matter about what one ought (not) to do in certain situations) as opposed to 27.7% who accept of lean towards moral anti-realism.

 

Relatedly, 65.7% accept of lean towards cognitivism about moral judgements (roughly: moral statements express beliefs and are apt for truth or falsity) as opposed to 17.0% who accept or lean towards non-cognitivism.

 

Not sure what we actually ought to make of that, but it's intriguing.

 

Of course, where relativism fits in all this is a little hard to say since basic forms of relativism are typically varieties of congnitivist realism. The view that an action is permissible only if and because one's society/community/culture approves of it, is a type of cognitivist realism because the claim that any action is (im)permissible is true or false and is grounded in facts about one's community. Then again, I think that the handful of philosophers who actually argue moral relativism (Harman, Velleman, etc.) tend to have substantially more complex views that may not fit as easily in to the realism/anti-realism and cognitivist/non-cognitivist distinctions.

Edited May 4, 2015 by DerPhilosoph

[Misosophe]

For what it's worth, a recent survey (http://philpapers.org/archive/BOUWDP.pdf)  reports that 56.4% of professional philosophers surveyed accept or lean towards moral realism (roughly: there are facts of the matter about what one ought (not) to do in certain situations) as opposed to 27.7% who accept of lean towards moral anti-realism.

 

Relatedly, 65.7% accept of lean towards cognitivism about moral judgements (roughly: moral statements express beliefs and are apt for truth or falsity) as opposed to 17.0% who accept or lean towards non-cognitivism.

 

Not sure what we actually ought to make of that, but it's intriguing.

 

Of course, where relativism fits in all this is a little hard to say since basic forms of relativism are typically varieties of congnitivist realism. The view that an action is permissible only if and because one's society/community/culture approves of it, is a type of cognitivist realism because the claim that any action is (im)permissible is true or false and is grounded in facts about one's community. Then again, I think that the handful of philosophers who actually argue moral relativism (Harman, Velleman, etc.) tend to have substantially more complex views that may not fit as easily in to the realism/anti-realism and cognitivist/non-cognitivist distinctions.

Without getting too off topic, this post interests me, because I have always had trouble understanding where the line between moral realism and anti-realism lies; it seems that the line is not clearly drawn, though many philosophers tell us clearly enough where they draw the line. For example, if I say "There are no moral facts, but various moral interpretations are biological/psychological/sociological facts," am I a realist or an anti-realist? If someone says to me "X is absolutely wrong," I would reply "No: there are no absolute moral facts"; moral facts in that sense are not real, and belief in them is based on an error. But if someone said to me that moral talk is meaningless, I would say "No: moral interpretations tell us a lot about human beings and human life, understood as symptoms." In other words, moral interpretations are the result of much that can be considered fact, and for that reason they tell us a lot; but these interpretations themselves often contradict fact, and to that extent are errors. Is this realism or anti-realism?

[thatsjustsemantics]

Without getting too off topic, this post interests me, because I have always had trouble understanding where the line between moral realism and anti-realism lies; it seems that the line is not clearly drawn, though many philosophers tell us clearly enough where they draw the line. For example, if I say "There are no moral facts, but various moral interpretations are biological/psychological/sociological facts," am I a realist or an anti-realist? If someone says to me "X is absolutely wrong," I would reply "No: there are no absolute moral facts"; moral facts in that sense are not real, and belief in them is based on an error. But if someone said to me that moral talk is meaningless, I would say "No: moral interpretations tell us a lot about human beings and human life, understood as symptoms." In other words, moral interpretations are the result of much that can be considered fact, and for that reason they tell us a lot; but these interpretations themselves often contradict fact, and to that extent are errors. Is this realism or anti-realism?

 

The moral realist, in general, endorses the claim that there are facts of the matter as to whether or not some actions are moral or immoral, and that these facts are objective. The moral antirealist agrees that there may be facts of the matter as to whether or not some actions are moral or immoral, but they reject that these facts are objective or bivalent (either true or false). What do we mean by the word "objective"?  See below.

The better-worded moral anti-realist would say that there are various moral interpretations that emerge from biological/psychological/sociological facts; and not that these interpretations are the facts. This emergence is contrary to objectivity because it is contingent upon factors that are non-moral. Moreover, it is important to notice that this emergence is also the fact of the matter as to why some particular individual might play the moral language game when they say that a particular thing is right or wrong.

Edited May 5, 2015 by thatsjustsemantics

[TakeruK]

The moral realist, in general, endorses the claim that there are facts of the matter as to whether or not some actions are moral or immoral, and that these facts are objective. The moral antirealist agrees that there may be facts of the matter as to whether or not some actions are moral or immoral, but they reject that these facts are objective or bivalent (either true or false). What do we mean by the word "objective"?  See below.

The better-worded moral anti-realist would say that there are various moral interpretations that emerge from biological/psychological/sociological facts; and not that these interpretations are the facts. This emergence is contrary to objectivity because it is contingent upon factors that are non-moral. Moreover, it is important to notice that this emergence is also the fact of the matter as to why some particular individual might play the moral language game when they say that a particular thing is right or wrong.

 

This sounds very interesting to me, but I'm afraid this is over my head. If you don't mind, would you be able to provide some examples of what you mean by facts and moral interpretations? And the "moral language game"?

 

Or, perhaps it might help me if you could explain how the moral realist and a moral anti-realist would consider the morality of a concrete example, such as murder (do they think it is moral? immoral? something else? and why do they think it is this way).

[mjf1240]

haha, I'm going to UWMadison, who accepted me on April 17th. It happens.

[Duns Eith]

explain how the moral realist and a moral anti-realist would consider the morality of a concrete example, such as murder (do they think it is moral? immoral? something else? and why do they think it is this way).

 

Isn't "murder" by definition an immoral act of killing? I.e. "murder is wrong" would tautological. If so, then no moral realist or anti-realist would say murder is not wrong, just as no one would say a triangle is 4-sided.

[TakeruK]

Oh, I didn't think "immoral" had anything to do with the definition of murder. I thought it was simply a premeditated killing. The dictionary I just used says it is the "unlawful and premeditated killing of another human". (But as I said before, I don't think lawful and moral are always the same thing).

[Duns Eith]

Oh, I didn't think "immoral" had anything to do with the definition of murder. I thought it was simply a premeditated killing. The dictionary I just used says it is the "unlawful and premeditated killing of another human". (But as I said before, I don't think lawful and moral are always the same thing).

 

Huh. Well, you're right, following that dictionary entry, murder would not necessarily be immoral or wrong. Just unlawful. Ponder ponder.

Edited May 6, 2015 by Turretin

[ianfaircloud]

I thought moral relativism is how most philosophers thought about philosophy.

 

I see that my peers already addressed this comment, but I have to emphasize just how far off it is. I've studied ethics as an undergrad and at two graduate programs, and I practically never heard the words "moral relativism" uttered. Moral relativism is not the same thing as moral anti-realism. Anti-realism covers a broader range of views. Moral relativism is a very extreme kind of moral subjectivism, as I have heard the term used. If you say "cultural relativism," that changes things. But if you talk to an ordinary speaker who uses the term moral relativism, generally you'll find that it's a kind of extreme subjectivism. Maybe others have encountered different uses of the term. The point is that moral relativism has no currency in philosophy.

 

I saw recently a post titled, "The decline of philosophy," and the writer suggested that moral relativism is one of the reasons for the decline. I laughed pretty hard when I read the article. The guy obviously doesn't know shit about philosophy.

 

By the way, in my limited experience, philosophers who self-identify as moral anti-realists are less likely to be ethicists. I think when philosophers say that they are moral anti-realists, what they often mean is that they have trouble defending moral realism.

 

P.S. I say all of this with all due respect to the moderator, who I think is only trying to help answer questions, etc. If I tried to chime in on the Planetary Sciences forum (or the Physics forum, or any of the hard sciences, or anything medical, psychology, English, etc.), I would be in over my head, too.