CEPPA Talk

Title: Hypocrisy as Evasion Abstract: Hypocrites attract moral condemnation and are widely thought to lack standing to criticise others. This paper argues against attempts to explain this that appeal to moral conditions on blaming and notions of moral authority, proposing instead an account based on a conception of moral interactions as fundamentally dialogical in character. According to ... Read more

Title: Revisiting the Spinoza Controversy in an age of Environmental Crisis Abstract: Modern scientific naturalism arguably tries to ontologically describe or account for the entirety of the natural world using necessity. Scientific naturalism presents logical causal necessity as constituting how nature "makes" things exist, and it presents necessity in the more general or abstract sense ... Read more

Title: The Incomparable Value of the Individual Abstract: Kant believed that every human being should be treated as an end in itself. In the Groundwork, Kant explains many of our duties by arguing that their violation would involve treating a human being as a mere means. But we cannot explain all of our duties that way. Nor ... Read more

Title: Autonomy and control over one’s social self-consciousness Abstract: Humans have the capacity to absorb – to feel – others’ feelings. More particularly we feel others’ feelings about ourselves: at least as long as we are awake, we are subject to being self-consciously affected in our interactions with others. We are capable of social self-consciousness, and ... Read more

Title: Hope and the Powers of Shared Agency Abstract: This paper argues that Kant’s theory of radical evil exalts the powers of organized, shared and institutional, agency. In section 1, I illustrate the paradoxicality of radical evil and the novelty of Kant’s “empowering” conception focused on human agency. In section 2, I argue that radical evil ... Read more

Title: The (Aesthetic) Value of Environmental Activism Abstract: TBC Location: Edgecliffe G03

Title: Merely Imagined Moralities Abstract: Artworks and other cultural products (films, novels, operas, pop songs, etc.) often express heroic, pessimistic, melancholy, or dark ways of looking at the world (also referred to as ‘perspectives’). Sometimes, these worldviews appear politically inflected; we may, for instance, describe a work as "feminist" or "patriotic" according to the worldview ... Read more

Title: Moral Blackmail Abstract: Suppose I want you to do something. How can I make you do it? Depending on me, you, our context, and the nature of the thing I want you to do, I have various options: rational or emotional persuasion; manipulation; coercion; physical compulsion; maybe more. Different mechanisms will be more or ... Read more

Title:  Against Excellence as the Norm of Ambition Abstract: This paper investigates norms of ambition, which set the level of achievement one ought to aspire to. I critically examine the widely accepted norm of excellence, which encourages one to seek excellence in one’s pursuits. I argue that while this norm is accepted by default, we ... Read more

Title: How nonexistence is worse for us Abstract: I defend the view that, when a person’s life is worth living, her existence is not merely good for her. It is also better for her than her never existing. I defend this view against the objection that it absurdly implies that nonexistence is bad for the ... Read more