Title: Ameliorative Skepticism and the Nature of Health Abstract: In this talk, I’ll give a brief overview of the project I call ‘ameliorative skepticism’. Sally Haslanger has argued that, in doing social ontology, we can sometimes approach the question ‘what is x?’ by asking question ‘what do we want x to be?’. I argue that […]

Title: "Against 'Good For,' Against 'Well-Being'" Abstract: This paper challenges the widely held view that ‘good for’, ‘well- being’, and related terms express a distinctive evaluative concept of central importance for ethics and separate from ‘simply good’ as used by G.E. Moore and others. More specifically, it argues that there’s no philosophically useful good-for or well-being […]

Title: “Epistemic Reparations and the Right to be Known” Abstract: In this paper, I provide an account of the epistemic significance of the phenomenon of “being known” and the relationship it has to reparations that are distinctively epistemic. Drawing on a framework provided by the United Nations of the “right to know,” I argue that […]

Event co-Hosted with ECT and FPST. Title: Extractivist epistemologies Abstract: This paper (which is very much a work in progress) will develop the concept of extractivist epistemology as a way to think through the effect of colonialism on knowing practices. Extractivist epistemologies work analogously to extractivist capitalism: seeking an epistemic resource of some sort---such as […]