Title: The Permissibility of Lesser Evil Abstract: Flood: Flood water is headed toward a cave where five innocent people are trapped and will be killed if the water reaches them. The water can be diverted into a mineshaft, but innocent Betty is trapped in the mineshaft and will be killed if the water is redirected.…
TITLE: Interactional Wrongs and Vices ABSTRACT: This paper explores a domain of action that we often regard as a minor moral matter, the domain of ordinary interactions. Yet, ordinary interactions are morally significant for two reasons: they are the primary vehicle through which 1) we show respect and disrespect for each other, and 2) we…
Title: Big Data and the Risk of Misguided Responsibilization Abstract: The arrival of big data promises new degrees of precision in understanding human behavior. Could it also make it possible to draw a finer line between individual choices and circumstances that operate in the background? In a culture in which individual responsibility continues to…
Title: Justice Before Role Obligations Abstract: Many believe that agents in the justice system are morally constrained to follow certain assigned roles, understood as excluding the exercise of moral judgement: lawyers to serve the interests of their clients, judges to enforce the law as written by the legislature, and juries to assess the factual evidence…
Title: Value Capture Abstract: Value capture occurs when an agent enters a social environment which presents external expressions of value which are often simplified, standardized, and quantified and those external versions come to dominate our reasoning and motivations. Examples include becoming motivated by Twitter Likes and Retweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best…
Title: The limits of ideology critique Abstract: The tradition of ideology critique promises a lot. It promises to be critical of the existing social order. (Good!) But it promises to generate this critique without appealing to external normative standards. In this talk I argue on meta-normative grounds that ideology critique cannot make good on these…
Title: Ameliorative Skepticism and the Nature of Health Abstract: In this talk, Ill give a brief overview of the project I call ameliorative skepticism. Sally Haslanger has argued that, in doing social ontology, we can sometimes approach the question what is x? by asking question what do we want x to be?. I argue that…
Title: “Against ‘Good For,’ Against ‘Well-Being'” Abstract:This paper challenges the widely held view that good for, well- being, and related terms express a distinctive evaluative concept of central importance for ethics and separate from simply good as used by G.E. Moore and others. More specifically, it argues that theres no philosophically useful good-for or well-being…
Title: Epistemic Reparations and the Right to be Known Abstract: In this paper, I provide an account of the epistemic significance of the phenomenon of being known and the relationship it has to reparations that are distinctively epistemic. Drawing on a framework provided by the United Nations of the right to know, I argue that…
Event co-Hosted with ECT and FPST. Title: Extractivist epistemologies Abstract: This paper (which is very much a work in progress) will develop the concept of extractivist epistemology as a way to think through the effect of colonialism on knowing practices. Extractivist epistemologies work analogously to extractivist capitalism: seeking an epistemic resource of some sort—such as…
Climate Change, COVID-19, Justice, and Quality of Life Abstract:Justice would appear to require that those who are the principal beneficiaries of a history of economic and political behavior that has resulted in harmful global climate change should bear a correspondingly large share of the burden in contending with these harms worldwide. At the same time,…
Title: An Agential Account of Poverty Abstract: Poverty has traditionally been conceived as a state of deprivation. To be poor is to lack something that is essential to human flourishing. How that something is conceivedin terms of welfare, resources, or capabilitiesand how it is to be measuredin absolute terms or as relative to a social…
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