All talks will be held in person in South Ross 421. All talks will be on Fridays 3:30 - 5:30 p.m. except for Kimberley Brownlee’s talk, which will be on a Wednesday. All are welcome! For more information contact pmoosavi@yorku.ca or rmyers@yorku.ca.
Upcoming Events
Friday October 6, 2023
John Hacker-Wright (University of Guelph)
Title: The Practical Unity of Practical Wisdom
Abstract: Practical wisdom is the sine qua non of good conduct for Aristotelian virtue ethicists. Aristotelians conceive it as the virtue responsible for the intellectual side of good conduct, which involves having the right goal and deliberating well about what fulfills that goal, among other tasks. But is there any such trait as practical wisdom? Given the diversity of jobs practical wisdom is asked to do (seven goals are often enumerated), there may be a cluster of traits corresponding to what Aristotelians are talking about, so there really isn't one trait. Some scholars have adopted the position of skepticism about practical wisdom. In this paper, I defend a traditional Aristotelian position on practical wisdom, arguing that it is one thing despite having different functions. Following Thomas Aquinas, we can see practical wisdom as having parts. Those parts may be psychological components (integral parts) of the trait, or they may be derivative functions (virtual parts), things that someone with practical wisdom is also able to do because they have practical wisdom. Still, practical wisdom is one because it is a trait that functions to enable us to pursue the good as good; it possesses what I will call here ‘practical unity’ as the master virtue of praxis or acting well full stop.
Friday October 30, 2023
Andrew Sepielli (University of Toronto)
Title: How Should We Conceptualize the World for the Purposes of Moral Theory?: The Case of Doing and Allowing
Abstract: In this talk, I take some steps towards articulating and adjudicating a split among normative ethicists that is rarely held up for explicit debate, but that profoundly shapes the ways they pursue ethical theory. As Jonathan Bennett, following Richard Rorty, put it, the split is between those ethicists who propose to “take warm, familiar aspects of the human condition and look at them coldly, and with the eye of a stranger”, and those who wish to resist this enterprise. This is not a split within moral theory itself — e.g. between utilitarians, deontologists, and virtue ethicists — but rather a distinction that manifests, if you will, earlier in our theorizing. It is a distinction between ways of conceptually “carving up” the to-be-evaluated aspects of the world. Bennett's own analysis of the doing vs. allowing distinction serves as a case study.
Wednesday November 15, 2023
Kimberley Brownlee (University of British Columbia)
Title: The Razian’s Elephant in the Room: When Do Interests Give Rise to Rights?
Abstract: Many rights theorists rely on Joseph Raz’s version of the interest theory of rights. Specifically, we use rights-talk when we believe that some party’s interest has the requisite moral importance to justify holding others to be under duties to serve it. We tend not to dwell on the fact we can conceive of both interests and the importance of interests in different ways which yield different answers about the interests that ground rights. This paper explores four factors that can alter our assessment of the importance and rights-grounding capacity of interests. Those factors are: 1) the possibility or not of securing an interest; 2) the importance of an interest viewed in isolation or in aggregation with the person’s other interests; 3) the importance of an interest as a type or as a token; and 4) the relevance or not of the interest-holder’s own perspective. These factors pose challenges we must confront if we are to draw determinate boundaries around rights-grounding interests. This paper unpacks these challenges and sketches out an inclusive, person-specific set of preliminary solutions.
Friday November 24, 2023
Neil Levy (Macquarie University, Sydney, and University of Oxford)
Title: Measuring misbeliefs and their harms
Abstract: It’s widely held that misinformation is harmful because it leads to false belief. Claims that the US presidential election was stolen, for example, cause people to believe that Biden is illegitimate and motivate movements to overthrow the government by causing the belief that the election was stolen. In this paper, I argue that misinformation is believed less often than is thought: reports of belief often don’t reflect genuine belief. The fact that misinformation is not widely believed does not entail that it is harmless, however. I sketch several reasons why it might be harmful despite rarely deceiving anyone.