Location: Edgecliffe G03 Title: The Morality of Gossip Abstract: Gossip is pervasive and wide-ranging. It lubricates and wrecks social relationships. Many people openly confess to loving it yet acknowledge that gossiping, while often gratifying, is, if not morally wrong, at least not quite right. Gossip has not received much attention in moral philosophy. In this ... Read more
Location: Edgecliffe G03 and Teams Title: What’s wrong with teaching our children to be good citizens? Abstract: Character education is a common part of schooling in the U.S. and U.K., and one popular argument in favour of character education is that it is conducive to producing citizens who have the virtues that make someone a ... Read more
Location: Teams (online only) Title: Ideology, Culture, and Social Meaning Abstract: My aim in this paper is to sketch a conception of ideology that draws on the critical theory tradition. This conception of ideology is a response to a particular challenge for those working on social justice: Why is it that most of us, most ... Read more
Location: Teams (online only) Title: Three Faces of Capitalist Labor: Uncovering the Hidden Ties among Gender, Race, and Class Abstract: Dissatisfied with identity-based politics, many activists and intellectuals are now seeking larger paradigms that can unify disparate struggles. Aiming to advance that project, I propose that labor forms the hidden link between gender, race, and ... Read more
Location: Teams (online only) Title: Laissez-Faire Democracy? Reasons to Regulate Votes Abstract: Most economists and political philosophers accept a simple argument for empowering governments to regulate citizens’ and private firms’ economic activity: Markets, they say, suffer from various market failures. In many such cases, governments can correct or prevent these market failures through various interventions ... Read more
Location: Teams (online only) Title: "Death, Deprivation, and Rational Regret" Abstract: Is death a bad thing? According to the deprivation account, death is bad because the dead don't get the various goods that they would have if only they were still alive. But it's not normally a misfortune when a merely possible good doesn't come ... Read more
Location: Teams (online only) Title: Can Fanaticism be a Liberatory Virtue? Abstract: Quassim Cassam (2022a) and Paul Katsafanas (2019) have argued that fanaticism and extremism are normatively negative concepts—characterized by, e.g., perverted ideals, vicious closed-mindedness, and unwarranted intolerance. I suggest an alternative approach that: (i) explains what makes fanaticism and extremism vicious in the very many cases ... Read more
Location: Teams (online only) Title: Two Puzzles About the Ethics of Divestment Abstract: Suppose you own stock in Acme Corp. and you learn that it consistently acts in seriously immoral ways. What should you do? A common answer maintains that owning stock in Acme Corp. makes you complicit in its immoral behavior and that you ... Read more
CEPPA Talk (online) – Zoë Johnson King (Harvard)
Location: Edgecliffe G03 Title: Proleptic Praise Abstract: What is praise? I argue that we can make progress by examining what praise does. Functionalist views of praise are emerging, but I here argue that by foregrounding cases in which expressions of praise are rejected by their direct target, we see that praise has a wider, and ... Read more