The first session of the Kent Ethics Seminars for Summer term will take place on Friday, 13 May, 3-5pm in the Marlowe Lecture Theatre 1.
Dr Maximilian Kiener, University of Oxford will give a talk on “The Scope of Moral Responsibility” followed by a discussion.
Maximilian Kiener is a philosopher and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford who specialises in moral and legal philosophy. He is currently completing a monograph on Responsibility and Artificial Intelligence. Dr Kiener is a member of a working group at the European Commission that focuses on meaningful and ethical communication, and a member of the clinical research ethics committee Oxford C South Central.
Abstract: Bernard Williams famously described the case of a ‘lorry driver who, through no fault of his, runs over a child’. The driver is without fault and, as many have argued, also not morally responsible because he could not possibly have foreseen the accident, was unable to prevent it when it happened, and did not display any other flaw in his conduct. In this presentation, I argue against these views and claim that, despite his lack of fault, the driver is genuinely morally responsible for the accident. I call this type of responsibility ‘strict moral answerability’, show how it has been neglected in the debates on responsibility, and claim that it solves a puzzle about Williams’s case which I call the Lorry Driver Paradox.
The Kent Ethics Seminars is a multidisciplinary forum for the exploration of cutting-edge research in ethics and wider normativity studies. We meet fortnightly during Autumn and Spring Terms and monthly during Summer Term. To learn more about and/or join the Seminars, please contact the Kent Ethics Seminars Convenor, Lubomira Radoilska at L.V.Radoilska@kent.ac.uk