2021-2022 Events Archive

Fall 2021

October 22: SWIP-NYC Colloquium with Pamela Hieronymi (University of California at Los Angeles), “Defensiveness and the Blame Game”

Abstract. In a recent manuscript, Paulina Sliwa presents an extremely promising account of what it is to “take responsibility.” In doing so, she suggests that any form of what she calls “making excuses” is a failure to take responsibility. After presenting her account, I will argue that offering an excuse is often compatible with taking responsibility, and I will try to pin point more exactly where potential incompatibility between excuse-making and responsibility-taking lies. In doing so, I will consider the under-discussed phenomena of defensiveness and introduce an important distinction between two forms of “negotiation.” I will then consider the role of defensiveness and negotiation in what I will call “the blame game.” We will see that it allows for some dispute about when or whether one has displayed the virtue that Susan Wolf regards as nameless but Sliwa calls “being responsible.”   

December 3: SWIP-NYC Colloquium with Jessica Brown (University of St. Andrews, UK), “Group Evidence”

Abstract. We routinely ascribe belief and knowledge to groups, saying such things as that the government knew that the new strain of covid was especially transmissible, or that the government believed that restrictions on inbound travel to the country weren’t necessary despite the new strain. Many take such ascriptions to be literally true, and there has been much recent work on what it is for a group to have a belief, or for a group belief to be justified or constitute knowledge. Just as in the case of individuals, if groups have beliefs then whether they are justified or constitute knowledge partially depends on their evidence. So it’s important to address the question of what is a group’s evidence. Here, I argue against summative accounts on which a group’s evidence is a function of the evidence of its members. Instead, I argue for a non-summative account of group evidence by embracing the idea that p is part of a group’s evidence if and only if the group holds the appropriate doxastic relationship to p. Hedden (2019) has already defended the latter style of account by arguing that it enables us to dispense with requirements of rationality for groups in addition to the requirement of being sensitive to reasons. Here, I defend it on different grounds: it fits better with the criteria of avoiding inconsistency in group evidence, meeting the constraint that evidence is part of a subject’s epistemic perspective, and yielding intuitive results about when groups have evidence, and when their beliefs and actions are justified.

Spring 2022

March 4: SWIP-NYC Colloquium with Rachel Barney (University of Toronto), “The Ethics and Politics of Plato’s Noble Lie”

Abstract. The Noble Lie proposed by Plato for the Just City in Republic III has been much misunderstood. Its agenda is twofold: to get the citizens of the City to see their society as a natural entity, with themselves as all ‘family’ and akin; and to get the Guardians in particular to make class mobility, on which the justice of the City depends, a top priority. Since the second is taken to depend on the first, the Lie passage amounts to an argument (1) that the survival of a just community depends on the existence of social solidarity between elite and mass, which allows for full class mobility and genuine meritocracy; (2) that this solidarity in turn depends on an ideology of natural unity; and (3) that such ideologies are always false. So the Lie really is a lie, but a necessary one; as such it poses an awkward ethical problem for Plato and, if he is right, for our own societies as well.

April 1: SWIP-NYC Colloquium with Susan Wolf (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “Character and Agency”

Abstract. Philosophers often refer to character, but they rarely focus attention on the concept itself.  One plausible way to understand character, which the talk will consider, is to identify character with the set of dispositions and traits that reflect and express an individual’s values.  But this suggestion is in one way too narrow and in another too broad.  I shall propose instead that we understand character as the complex of dispositions and traits that reflect and express an individual’s way of seeing the world, where this is understood to be continually revisable through the exercise of active intelligence.  This conception of character may have implications for how we think of agency.  Specifically, it may suggest that agency is less related to action and to the will that we tend to assume.

May 19: SWIP-NYC Essay Contest Winner Presentation with Yiran Hua (Brown University), “On Being a Good Friend to a Bad Person,” and Saikeerthi “Rani” Rachavelpula (Columbia University), “Modelling Morality: A Kantian Account of Moral Examples”

Abstract for Yiran Hua’s “On Being a Good Friend to a Bad Person.” Have you ever had an urge to break up with a friend because they seem to be a morally bad person– an unrepentant racist, a cruel soul, a hack? I think many of us have experienced this urge during and after the 2016 election. Recently, philosophers have argued that there is a moral basis for this urge. Jessica Isserow, for example, argues that it is morally problematic to count a bad person as a friend because it makes one morally complacent to the bad person’s wrong beliefs and projects. Other philosophers have accounted for this wrongness in other ways: bad persons do not deserve the goodness of friendship; being friends with bad persons is enabling them, etc. However, does a person necessarily go wrong in counting a bad person as a friend? In my talk, I will (hopefully) convince you that there is nothing fundamentally wrong in friendships with bad people. This is because (among other reasons) our choice of friends, like our choice of many other things, does not necessarily reflect our moral priorities. In fact, some friendships with bad people can be especially inspiring.

Abstract for Rani Rachavelpula’s “Modelling Morality: A Kantian Account of Moral Examples.” Kant is notably ambivalent when it comes to the role of examples in morality. On the one hand, he is extremely critical of their use with famous claims such as “one [could not] give worse advice to morality than by wanting to derive it from example” (Groundwork, 4:408). On the other hand, he frequently endorses their use, especially in the case of moral education. Reconciling these two attitudes has proven difficult. Part of the problem is that we lack an account of how Kant thinks we learn from examples despite their many dangers. Taking seriously Kant’s remarks in the Doctrine of the Method of the Critique of Practical Reason (CPrR) that morality should seek out a method like those found in science, I offer an account which looks to the latter. I show that we can understand Kant’s view of how we learn from examples as analogous to a well-known view in the philosophy of science concerning how we learn from models. I show that this account not only makes sense of Kant’s puzzling ambivalence, but it also yields several explanatory advantages and insights.