camp seminars 23-24

SEMINARS

Semester 1

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• Room 1.03 Botany House
• Hybrid: in-person & online options available
• Hover mouse over plus buttons for info about speakers & talks, and for the MS Teams Links

Wednesdays 3-5pm

2010

Semester 2

Note: OnMonday

Oct 11 Troy Jollimore

CAMP 2023-2024

Oct 25 JosephBowen

Nov 22BenediktBuechel

Dec 6GeraldLang

Nov 8Currently Free

Dec 18TomDougherty

May 1RobynBoere

Apr 24TeemuToppinen

Mar 20Graham Bex-Priestley& Will Gamester

Mar 6MatthewChrisman

Jan 24JulianDodd

Feb 7VidSimoniti

Feb 21MollieGerver

May 17Daniel Muñoz

Note: OnFriday

Julian Dodd, University of Leeds Link to MS Teams meeting Talk title: Composers' mistakes and their correction in performance.

Troy Jollimore, California State University, 'Seeing Other People' Link to MS Teams meeting here Abstract: As proponents of so-called “epistemic partiality” have claimed, we tend be biased in favor of those we love, relative to those to whom we are indifferent. But how ought we to understand this bias? Currently dominant accounts of epistemic partiality tend to wrongly view the lover as naïve or epistemically irrational, to center on the denial of well-grounded facts, or to be over simplistic in their accounts of love’s influences on epistemic practices and on resulting beliefs. In this talk I argue that love’s epistemic dispositions should be largely understood as motivating and grounding practices of interpretation, and suggest that love is, in large part, a creative task calling for us to develop a vision of the beloved. This gives us reason to resist the assumption that objective epistemic standards must be in conflict with the practices and tendencies of a good friend or lover. Moreover, the fact that such visions are unique, and that it is important to us to be seen in such ways, helps us understand why love itself is so significant and valuable to us.

Joseph Bowen, University of Leeds Link to MS Teams meeting here Talk title: Consenting to the Unconsentable Abstract: By validly consenting, we change the directed duties that others are under. But sometimes consent doesn’t have this force because it’s invalid. This paper focuses on whether consent can be invalid in virtue of the thing to which one consents. Recently, Victor Tadros has argued that our powers to consent might be limited by whether we would violate a self-regarding duty in giving it. I call this the Self-Regarding Duty View. While the view is underexplored and promising, unfortunately it fails. But it fails in an interesting way. I argue, it doesn’t follow from one’s consenting being inconsistent with a duty (self-regarding or otherwise) that one is under that one’s consenting isn’t valid. What follows, only, is that one acts wrongly in consenting. We need some additional account of why there are some things that we lack the power to consent to. But the view may help us identify where that account lies: namely, whatever explains why we’re under self-regarding duties might also directly explain why there are limits to our normative powers.

Want this spot? Email: J.M.Isserow@leeds.ac.uk

Tom Dougherty, UNC Chapel Hill Link to MS Teams meeting here

Gerald Lang, University of Leeds Talk title: 'Can Necessity Stand its Ground?' Link to MS Teams meeting here

Benedikt Buechel, University of Leeds Talk title: 'Ontic Justice' Link to MS Teams meeting here

Robyn Boere, University of Oslo, 'Attentiveness to Children at the End of Life'' Link to MS Teams meeting There are many challenges that children face at the end of life. They come up against cultural ideas about childhood, received understandings of moral agency, and institutional structures of hospital systems. In this talk, I will focus on the theme of attentiveness: a careful and considered look at who children are and what they do that is, as much as possible, not hindered by our preconceptions, or finding new preconceptions that renew. For me, this project of attentiveness is explicitly theological, starting with an understanding of childhood as not only the beginning but also the goal of human life. This theme of attentiveness is especially important in the hospital system, where children are often overlooked and where the culture of communication and decision-making, so dependent on autonomy and consent, serves to exclude them. When we are attentive to children in decision-making, we benefit and they benefit. Children bring new meaning to decisions, they ask questions we may not have thought of, they bring laughter and silliness. In fact, children reveal a lot about our shared human moral agency more generally, especially how it is received from others and developed in community. Attending to dying children reveal how we think about death, both ours and theirs. The cultural stories we tell about death shape the decisions we even think possible and the actions we can take to help children die well.

Matthew Chrisman, University of Edinburgh MS Teams meeting link Talk title: 'Freedom of thought' Abstract: This paper develops a novel conception of freedom of thought in terms of a modally robust normative status that I think one has as a potential knower in an epistemic community, a status that I argue one cannot enjoy without a specific form of institutionalized intellectual respect and support. To this end, I seek to characterise the political-epistemic infrastructure facilitating epistemic self-realization in terms of relationships of nondomination and mutual recognition. The resulting conception of freedom of thought is contrasted with more traditionally “negative” conceptions of freedom of thought, in terms of not being interfered with. It is also contrasted with a “positive” conception of freedom of thought derived from a recently prominent account of doxastic agency as grounded in the rational capacity to self-determine one’s own response to reasons. In both cases, I argue that a conception of freedom of thought developed in terms of epistemic self-realization does a better job making sense of why we fear the counter-liberatory forces of propaganda and regulated thinking, and also why we can (maybe?) hold out hope for the liberating potential of education, free speech, and critical engagement with public expertise.

Vid Simoniti, University of Liverpool MS Teams link Talk title: 'The Unsaid in Art' Abstract: Cognitivist theories of art claim that the arts are a significant source of knowledge, thereby comparable to philosophy or the sciences. Here I investigate one clear disanalogy between art and philosophy: the tendency in the arts to set up moral and philosophical problems, but to refuse any conclusions as to what we should make of them. On matters of utmost importance, much remains unsaid in the arts. We might describe such inconclusiveness by saying that artworks ‘pose questions’ rather than answer them, or that they leave something ‘up to the viewer.’ As characteristic as such inconclusiveness is of artworks, are there any cognitive benefits to it? After all, clearly stating what you take to be the case seems to be a precondition for imparting your beliefs to the audience. I develop my defence of artistic inconclusiveness by drawing on Cora Diamond’s concept of the ‘difficulty of reality’, and then draw out some political implications. Could artistic inconclusiveness be valuable not only for existential questions, but for defusing polarised debates?

Mollie Gerver, Kings College London Link to MS Teams meeting Testing Adaptive PreferencesMollie Gerver, Faten Ghosn and Miranda Simon Abstract: People often form preferences which are adaptive. This means that, when they struggle to obtain an option, they adapt their preferences and decide they do not want the option anyhow. For example, a woman might struggle to access a particular type of employment due to sexism, and as a result decides she does not want this type of employment anyhow, and would turn it down even if the employment were offered. While this phenomenon has been widely discussed, it can be difficult to evaluate whether preferences really are adaptive. In this article, we present a novel theory of why adaptive preferences matter, a novel method for evaluating whether preferences are adaptive, and the ethics of utilising such a method in practice.

Graham Bex-Priestley & Will Gamester, University of Leeds Talk title: 'The Problem of Creeping Maximalism' MS Teams meeting link

Teemu Toppinen, Tampere University, 'How to define Normative Properties Linguistically' (Joint work with & Vilma Venesmaa (Tampere University).) Link to MS Teams meeting: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ZTc0ZDI2MTEtN2M1My00ZmIwLWJiNjAtNzUyODc5NDUzOWZm%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22bdeaeda8-c81d-45ce-863e-5232a535b7cb%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%228cea2950-b2cc-42ef-8c04-8a463add3c70%22%7d Abstract: A simple linguistic definition of normative and descriptive properties says the following: a property is normative if and only if it can be ascribed by a normative predicate; a property is descriptive if and only if it can be ascribed by a descriptive predicate. This isn’t satisfactory as it stands. Consider, for example, the predicate ‘has the property I am actually now thinking about.’ This is plausibly a descriptive predicate. Yet this predicate may, in a suitable context of use, ascribe a normative property that should not for this reason alone also count as a descriptive property. The simple definition requires, then, modification. The set of predicates that is relevant to determining the status of properties as normative or descriptive must be constrained in some suitable way, so as to rule out predicates of the wrong kind. Our main task, in this paper, is to articulate a constraint that achieves this in a way that captures the fundamental difference between the right and the wrong kind of predicates. We begin by explaining why the viability of such a project matters for nearly every view in metaethics. We then formulate desiderata for a successful definition and clarify how we think the talk of normative and descriptive predicates is best understood in this context. Having discussed two existing proposals (by Billy Dunaway and Bart Streumer) for how to fix the simple definition, we articulate improved versions of these proposals, but we argue, unsurprisingly, that even these improved versions fail to meet our desiderata. We then go on to articulate what is in our view an adequate proposal and conclude with a discussion of some possible objections.

Daniel Muñoz , UNC Chapel Hill Link to MS Teams meeting: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ODNkYTU2NzAtYTQwZC00N2FmLThkZmUtMmQ5NzgzN2IxZWRi%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22bdeaeda8-c81d-45ce-863e-5232a535b7cb%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%228cea2950-b2cc-42ef-8c04-8a463add3c70%22%7d Each Counts for One After 50 years of debate, the ethics of aggregation has reached a curious stalemate, with both sides arguing that only their theory treats people as equals. I argue that, on the issue of equality, both sides are wrong. From the premise that “each counts for one,” we cannot derive the conclusion that “more count for more”—or its negation. The familiar arguments from equality to aggregation presuppose more than equality: the Kamm/Scanlon “Balancing Argument” rests on what social choice theorists call “(Positive) Responsiveness,” Kamm’s “Aggregation Argument” assumes that “equal” lives are fungible, and Hsieh et al. have it that spreading goods broadly best approximates equality. In each case, the crucial premise is not equality itself but a further idea that Taurek, I argue, can safely reject. I conclude with a conjecture: there is no theory-neutral argument that settles the question of whether the numbers count.