Moral Philosophy Reading Group (MPRG)

Reading:

For next week’s MPRG, we are returning to Abelard Podgorski’s paper, “Complaints and Tournament Population Ethics”. Our new PhD colleague, Ida Miczke, will guide the discussion. Please find the paper attached, or by accessing the following link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/phpr.12860.

Below are some suggested questions from Ida to help us focus in on different aspects of the paper.

• What do you think of the claim that there can be no victimless wrongs? Is it possible to commit a wrongdoing without wronging anyone?
• ⁠Is the idea of morality based on complaints intuitive? What about morality based on gratitude?
• What are your intuitions about the neutrality condition – is bringing happy people into existence neutral, i.e. neither obligatory nor wrong? What if we phrase it in axiological terms instead – is bringing happy people into existence neutral, i.e. neither good nor bad?
• Can we really bite the bullet on the non-identity problem?
• Can all of ethics be a tournament, or is it just population ethics?

See you all next Wednesday, October 29^th, from 4-5pm at Edgecliffe (room 104).

Location: Edgecliffe 104