Microsoft Teams

Title: Practical Reason and the Satisfaction of Desire Location: Teams (online only) Abstract: I have a desire for dulce de leche ice-cream (or that I myself eat ice-cream) but there’s no ice-cream nearby. A heavenly angel takes pity on me and decides she will help me out. She conjures the ice-cream and quickly shoves it ... Read more

Title: Encroachment and epistemic negligence Abstract: In this talk, I argue that the moral duty of non-negligence is a fruitful way to understand and motivate the claim that moral reasons can ‘encroach’ on epistemic norms. More forcefully: we should readily affirm that on the epistemic norms governing agents like us—that is, who have limited cognitive ... Read more

Title: Is There Anti-Fittingness?" Abstract: The permissible and the forbidden are privative opposites: each is a lack of the other. The good and the bad are, by contrast, polar opposites: badness is anti-goodness, not non-goodness. What about the fitting and the unfitting, the appropriate and the inappropriate, the apt and the inapt, the warranted and ... Read more

Title: Threshold Deontology: Some Lessons from Vagueness Abtract: Threshold Deontology is the view that the positive consequences of an act do not normally override moral constraints, but when the positive balance of the consequences of an act is sufficiently great, it may be morally permitted, and possibly required to engage in an act that is ... Read more

Title: Risk, Ambiguity, and Ethical Decision-Making Abstract: I argue that it can be rational to defer to an authority about what to believe or what to do even when doing so goes against one’s own reasoning. Indeed, such deference is rational in typical cases in which individuals treat others as authorities: for example, experts in ... Read more

Title: Chance Prioritarianism Location: Teams (online only), and streamed from Edgecliffe G03 Abstract: I will defend what we could call survival chance prioritarianism, according to which the moral value of improving someone’s chance of surviving (some period) is greater the more likely the person was to die before the improvement. I motivate this view by ... Read more

Title: On seeing women as objects: objectification and affordance perception Location: Teams (online only), the talk will be streamed from Edgecliffe G03 Abstract: Objectification is a central topic in feminist philosophy theorising. But what is it for someone to objectify another person? A common theme is that objectification involves treating and viewing the other person ... Read more

Location: Teams (online only) Title: Superogation Abstract: This paper considers the relation between supererogation and duties (also here referred to as obligations) from a nonconsequentialist point of view. It first considers whether supererogation may sometimes take precedence over positive and negative duties and how this relates to personal costs (including efforts) required to perform one’s duty. It then ... Read more