Abstracts
Keynotes
Theron Pummer, “The Rules of Rescue: Cost, Distance, and Effective Altruism” In a forthcoming book, I defend a non-consequentialist picture of moral requirements to help others. I argue that there are reasons with requiring strength to prevent serious harm to strangers. The ubiquity of these requiring reasons threatens to make morality extremely demanding. But there are also permissions that stop many requiring reasons from resulting in full blown requirements. In this talk, I show how several such permissions work. These include permissions grounded in considerations of (lifetime) cost and autonomy, and permissions to help each individual stranger. L.A. Paul, "Uncomfortable Decisions" (w/ Paul Bloom) Some decision-making processes are uncomfortable. Many of us do not like to make significant decisions, such as whether to have a child, solely based on social science research. We do not like to choose randomly, even in cases where flipping a coin is plainly the wisest choice. We are often reluctant to defer to another person, even if we believe that the other person is wiser, and have similar reservations about appealing to powerful algorithms. And, while we are comfortable with considering and weighing different options, there is something strange about deciding solely on a purely algorithmic process, even one that takes place in our own heads. What is the source of our discomfort? We do not present a decisive theory here—and, indeed, the authors have clashing views over some of these issues—but we lay out the arguments for two (consistent) explanations. The first is that such impersonal decision-making processes are felt to be a threat to our autonomy. In all of the examples above, it is not you who is making the decision, it is someone or something else. This is to be contrasted with personal decision-making, where, to put it colloquially, you “own” your decision, though of course you may be informed by social science data, recommendations of others, and so on. A second possibility is that such impersonal decision-making processes are not seen as authentic, where authentic decision making is one in which you intentionally and knowledgably choose an option in a way that is “true to yourself.” Such decision making can be particularly important in contexts where one is making a life-changing decision of great import, such as the choice to emigrate, start a family, or embark on a major career change. |
Graduate speakers Eline Gerritsen, "Demystifying Authoritative Normativity" It is increasingly common in metanormative debates to distinguish two kinds of normativity: formal normativity, which all norms have, and authoritative normativity, which is a significant force not all norms have. Yet, we lack a clear and neutral understanding of the concept of authoritative normativity. This paper highlights and dispels common confusions and misconceptions that stand in the way of a careful debate. First, I separate the concept of authoritative normativity from that of ought simpliciter, showing that these have distinct roles to play. Second, I argue that discussions of authoritative normativity are shaped by the pervasive but unwarranted non-naturalist assumption that authority must be an irreducible and intrinsic property. This makes authoritative normativity seem more mysterious than it needs to be, which fuels normative scepticism. With demanding preconceptions out of the way, there is conceptual room for explaining norms’ authority with natural facts about agents or their commitments. I conclude that we must not dismiss metaphysically naturalist metanormative theories as mere theories of formal normativity. Kida Lin, "The Dependency Puzzle of Abortion: Acts, Sequences, Alternatives, and Necessity" According to Jeff McMahan’s Dependency Puzzle of abortion, the permissibility of abortion may puzzlingly depend on whether it is done via one act with two or more effects, or two or more acts, performed in a sequence, with the same effects. In this paper, I argue for a solution to the puzzle. In §1, I show how McMahan’s solution to the puzzle relies on adopting a particular view – which I call the disaggregating approach – about how the permissibility of two (or more) acts, performed in a sequence, should be assessed. The disaggregating approach contrasts with what I call the bundling approach. In §2, I present and reject McMahan’s argument for favouring the disaggregating approach over the bundling approach. In §3, I argue that, even if we adopt the disaggregating approach, McMahan’s solution to the puzzle fails; I develop a new solution. I conclude, in §4, by reflecting on why McMahan’s solution to the puzzle may seem plausible, and I propose a new – and potentially more puzzling – dependency puzzle. Diogo Carneiro, “Social Justice and Imaginative Perspective-Taking” In this paper, I argue that imaginative perspective-taking is essential to understand and evaluate reasons and claims of social justice. Specifically, I argue that we should engage in imaginative perspective-taking understood both as empathic and non-empathic perspective-taking. My overall argument for the need to engage in both these forms of imaginative perspective-taking is that by engaging in perspective-taking we can better understand and access knowledge — specifically, phenomenal knowledge — of other positions by allowing us to experience those positions. This is especially important for understanding and evaluating claims of social justice because, as I show throughout, we are much better equipped to identify and assess different reasons and claims of justice if we understand them from within, since a part of that understanding comes from the central experiential component — the lived experience — that leads to those reasons and claims to be made. Sofia Melendez-Gutierrez, "Creatonism and Reference" Creationism is the view that fictional entities are abstract objects brought into existence by human activities associated with storytelling. Nowadays, it is the most widely held view concerning the ontology of ficta; but it is not without problems. Intuitively, the following sentence is true: 'Sherlock Holmes is more perspicacious than most real detectives'. However, abstracta do not seem capable of instantiating the property of being perspicacious, so there is no way for Sherlock Holmes to be more so than any real detective if he is abstract. Our discursive practices, in sum, are in conflict with the creationist metaphysics. In my paper, I argue that this conflict cannot be resolved. I discuss three strategies that creationists could employ in order to account for our intuitions that the aforestated sentence is true, and conclude that they all fail. If my arguments are correct, then there are intuitively true sentences concerning fictional entities that must be regarded as untrue within the creationist framework. For creationists, this is a truly pernicious verdict, given that the only justification for the postulation of entities as exotic as ficta is semantic anti-revisionism. Daniela Schuster, “Suspension of Judgment and Logic-Based AI” Intelligent, artificial systems make our lives easier in many ways. In decision-making processes, expert-systems often advise us towards one direction or another, by following some chain of non-monotonic rules. In some situations, however, the output will not be clear, yielding conflicts in the systems. While in machine learning systems such conflicting situations are often hidden behind the statistics, in logic-based AI, which often operates with systems of non-monotonic reasoning, the conflicting ^cases are visualizable quite explicitly. On a different note, there is the fairly recent development in epistemology of considering suspension of judgment to be a proper object of investigation. Suspension is commonly taken to be a neutral position one can take, in between believing and disbelieving a proposition. In this paper, we will bring the two fields together. We elaborate the stake-of-the-art options to deal with conflicts in non-monotonic reasoning and we will argue that all current methods are more intended to prevent the deliberation process from coming to an undesired end than to properly handle the conflicts. We will, therefore, propose a different way to deal with those conflicts that makes use of the current philosophical considerations on suspension in philosophy. Guy Lotan, “A Phenomenological Conception of Desires” The question of self-knowledge of desires has two aspects: the content aspect, exemplified by the question: “how does one know that one desires that P, rather Q?”; and the attitude aspect, exemplified by the question: “how does one know that one desires that P, rather than (say) believes that P, or fears that P?” This paper’s purpose is to investigate what enables subjects to answer the latter question, referred to as the Attitude Question. The line of investigation will be the following: Given that self-knowledge of the attitudinal component of desires is, at least sometimes, immediate and fallible; and that the metaphysical nature of desires is constrained by the ways in which we can obtain self-knowledge of the attitudinal component of desires; it follows that the metaphysical nature of desires is constrained by the epistemological properties of self-knowledge of the attitudinal component of desires. Thus, we can examine which metaphysical conception of desires can provide the best answer to the Attitude Question by investigating its capacity to accommodate the aforementioned epistemological properties. The conclusion will be that only phenomenological conceptions can accommodate both epistemological properties, and therefore that it is the phenomenal character of desires that enables subjects to answer the Attitude Question. |