This season’s seminars are held in a hydrid format, both in-person and online.
26 January 2022
Elliot Porter
Manic Responsibility
A prominent thread in responsibility literature takes responsibility as tied to how well agents respond to the reasons which speak to them. We are responsible for a moral failing insofar as we failed to respond to the moral considerations which spoke for or against some action. Manic episodes are marked by a pervasive sense of urgency which alters the way in which agents interact with reasons. Specifically, manic agents struggle to take reasons as contributory, or defeasible. All considerations are demands. This has only a qualified effect on an agent’s ability to recognise and respond to reasons. In this paper I examine how far this change will alter which responsibility judgements are fitting in such cases of mania.
16 February 2022
Maria Skoutaridou
The Liberal Conception of the Self and Climate Change
In liberal democracies, the debate regarding manmade climate change and how we should approach this problem has been going on for a several decades now, on a political, scientific, and also philosophical level. Nevertheless, the state of the climate and of the biosphere is worsening. While some progress has been made at a policy level, there is fundamental disagreement, even at a theoretical level, as to which approach is best suited to tackle climate change. Broadly speaking, there are four main approaches, a political, moral, an economic and a scientific approach. These approaches don’t have to exclude each other, but currently there is no consensus whether and how they should be combined with one another. For example, Weisbach (2016), prefers a purely economic and scientific approach. However, it could be argued that by side stepping the moral dimension, we are failing to understand how we got to our current predicament and how we could change our attitudes towards the problem, as individuals and collectively. It is for this reason that thinkers such as Gardiner, Jamieson and Williston have argued that the climate change problem is ethical in its core, as it raises questions regarding morality, global justice, and individual and collective responsibility.
I argue that the liberal conception of the self as prior to its ends – in (Western) liberalism and liberal theories of individual freedom – a conception best articulated by Rawls, and the priority of subjective rights over the common good, which thrives in modern democratic societies, contributes to the problem of climate change.
23 February 2022
Hugh Robertson-Ritchie
Epistemic Injustice in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyopathy (CFS/ME)
‘…[W]hen our knowledge of our own experiences and sensations are dismissed, when we don’t know if we have made something up or it really happened, because we are supposed to question that lived reality, to believe it to be fiction, unevidenced and illegitimate, I know it in my own body.’
This quotation from a CFS/ME patient encapsulates many of the epistemic injustices that these patients suffer in their interactions with doctors.
CFS/ME is a long-term disabling condition of unknown cause and without any curative treatments. People with CFS/ME suffer excessive fatigue and many other intrusive symptoms. But many CFS/ME patients report that some doctors don’t accept their accounts, and recommend treatments that don’t help or make patients feel worse.
In this presentation I explore some reasons for these unhelpful attitudes to CFS/ME patients, and I suggest ways to mitigate them.
16 March 2022
VIttorio Serra
Necessitarianism is not the only way
Necessitarianism is the metaphysical doctrine that the universe is deductively closed under laws that are universal, eternal, immutable, exact and time-reversible. It is a doctrine held, explicitly or implicitly, by many practising scientists, and has a long history, stretching back to Democritus, and much later exemplified by Laplace’s Demon.
Charles S. Peirce took issue with this doctrine, maintaining that any pre-suppositions we have should be susceptible to scrutiny, that any metaphysics should be scientific. Necessitarianism has weak if any empirical support, and we should consider alternatives that were more amenable to testing. To this end he produced a metaphysics that followed from his logic, his theory of inquiry, that took the form of an evolutionary cosmology. This purported to explain the presence of nomicity in the universe and predict the general character of nomicity, so we know what we are looking for in inquiry.
This talk will continue this Peircean line, showing how the necessitarian fails to account for their kind of nomicity, and looking at some cases in modern physics where Peircean metaphysics is a better fit than necessitarianism.