In his Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do?, Michael J. Sandel examines three approaches to justice: the utilitarian idea of justice as maximizing welfare or happiness, the freedom based idea of justice as respecting freedom and human dignity, and the Aristotelian idea of justice as recognizing, honoring, and rewarding virtues. In his view, the first two are inadequate, and he himself aims to develop a version of the third approach. Two central features of this approach can be summarized as justice as a virtue and justice according to virtues. In discussing the first feature, my main concern is the relationship between justice as a virtue of an individual person and justice as a virtue of a social institution and the Confucian contribution on this issue. In discussing the second feature, I shall develop the Confucian idea of justice of virtues as an amendment or alternative.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 27 October 2016
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Prof Huang Yong
Moderator: Dr Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Yong Huang, Ph.D. (Fudan) and Th.D. (Harvard), is a professor of philosophy at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the editor of Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy and Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy (a book series), both by Springer. His research interests include ethics, political philosophy, and Chinese and comparative philosophy. Author of Religious Goodness and Political Rightness: Beyond the Liberal and Communitarian Debate (2001), Confucius: A Guide for the Perplexed (2012), and Why Be Moral: Learning from the Neo-Confucian Cheng Brothers (2014), as well as three volumes of essays in Chinese, Ethics in a Global Age, Politics in a Global Age, and Religion in a Global Age (all in 2010), Huang has also published about 70 journal articles and book chapters each in English and Chinese.

Sometimes philosophers claim that we can learn philosophically valuable results from a proposition’s conceptual possibility. In this paper, I will examine this notion of conceptual possibility. I will be interested in two claims about conceptual possibility. First, several authors have advanced the view that conceptual possibility properly constrained provides us with evidence for metaphysical possibility: conceptual possibility is a guide to metaphysical possibility. Second, philosophers sometimes argue that the conceptual possibility of a proposition can be philosophically informative in the absence of evidence for the proposition’s metaphysical possibility. I argue against both claims.

Suppose we have a concept of X and we are curious what being X entails. Our concept of X might leave it open whether x is F. That can certainly happen when the proposition <x is F> is a posteriori. However when <x is F> is agreed on all sides to be an a priori matter, can we can make any sense of the claim that our concept of X leaves it open whether X is F while, at the same time, the conceptual possibility of X being F is a significant result? There are two situations to consider: first, that we have definitively concluded that X being F entails no contradiction, and second, that we are just so far unable to see any contradiction in X being F. In the first situation, we would be in a position to conclude that X being F is metaphysically possible after all, making the appeal to conceptual possibility gratuitous. The second case is the interesting one: we often appeal to conceptual possibility in just those cases where we are not in a position to draw out all the entailments of our concepts. The question in the second case is how worried we should be that our finding a proposition conceptually possible is driven by our less-than-ideal epistemic situation, raising the concern that we simply have not reflected carefully enough on whether the proposition is in fact coherent. I argue that this worry should be given much more credence than conceptual possibility’s defenders have allowed.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 20 October 2016
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: A/P Peter Kung
Moderator: Dr Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Peter Kung is Associate Professor of Philosophy and former Department Chair at Pomona College in Claremont, California. His research centers on two areas: the philosophy of mind, in particular imagination and thought experiments; and epistemology, where he focuses on the limits of skeptical challenges and the proper treatment of probabilistic reasoning. He has published a number of articles in leading peer-reviewed journals, and recently co-edited Knowledge Through Imagination (2016, Oxford University Press) with Amy Kind.

In most legal regimes, imprisonment is the primary means of criminal sanction, while punitive torture is prohibited.  However, I argue that the same moral reasons that ground prohibitions on torture are also reasons to oppose punitive imprisonment.  Prison, especially long sentences, can involve as much or more suffering as torture. Moreover, both involve intentional degradation, dehumanization and a cruel use of the threat of suffering to induce compliance.  Some have used this line of reasoning to argue for the permissibility of mild forms of torture (i.e., corporal punishment) in the criminal justice system.  I propose that we should instead accept the arguments against torture as sound; punitive imprisonment is, like torture, inhumane and therefore impermissible.  This implies the need for significant reforms to criminal justice systems, and we need to urgently investigate alternatives to imprisonment such as reconciliation models of justice.  Some non-punitive use of imprisonment (such as sequestration of acutely dangerous individuals, where inducement of suffering is not intended) may still be justifiable, but still prisons would have to be significantly reformed – perhaps along the public health model of quarantine.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 25 August 2016
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Owen Schaefer
Moderator: Dr Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Owen Schaefer is a Research Fellow at NUS’s Centre for Biomedical Ethics under the MOH-funded initiative, Clinical Ethics Network + Research Ethics Support (CENTRES).  He first began working in applied ethics as a ‘pre-doctoral’ fellow at the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health in the US.  He received his DPhil degree in philosophy at Oxford in 2014, writing a dissertation on moral enhancement.  Immediately prior to joining CBmE, he spent a year as a post-doc at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics researching the implications of various novel biotechnologies.  His research interests cover a wide array of topics in applied ethics, including research ethics, enhancement, punishment, neuroethics, stem cell studies, synthetic meat, and assisted reproduction.

In this paper I explore a series of terse arguments by Newton in the General Scholium of the Principia. All these arguments involve unusual modal metaphysics. I analyze the metaphysical commitments revealed by these arguments and by drawing on writings of Toland and Clarke I argue that Spinozism is the implied target.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 18 August 2016
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Prof Eric Schliesser
Moderator: Dr Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Eric Schliesser (PhD, Chicago 2002) is Professor of Political Theory at The University of Amsterdam, and Visiting Professor of Philosophy & Moral Sciences, Ghent University. He publishes in early modern philosophy and the philosophy of economics. He is an active blogger, and has edited numerous volumes, most recently, “Sympathy: A History of a Concept” (Oxford). His monograph on Adam Smith is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

Happy mid-July, Singapore philosophers!

Here’s a brief “save the date” for an event happening early this upcoming semester: Prof. Iakovos Vasiliou (City University of New York) will be giving a talk entitled “Rethinking Eudaimonism.”

When?: Friday, 12 August 2016, 2:30-4:30 p.m. Where?: East Core Board Room (EC-03-08), Yale-NUS College

Here is a link to the Yale-NUS campus map: https://www.yale-nus.edu.sg/about/campus-map/. East Core is highlighted in light purple. To get to the board room, enter through the library and walk up the stairs.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Two approaches to understanding the idealizations that arise in the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect are presented. It is argued that the standard topological approach, which takes the non-simply connected electron configuration space to be an essential element in the explanation and understanding of the effect, is flawed. An alternative approach is outlined. Consequently, it is shown that the existence and uniqueness of self-adjoint extensions of symmetric operators in quantum mechanics have important implications for philosophical issues. Also, the alleged indispensable explanatory role of said idealizations is examined via a minimal model explanatory scheme.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 30 June 2016
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Dr Elay Shech
Moderator: A/P Axel Gelfert

About the Speaker:

Dr Elay Shech is an Assistant Professor at Auburn University, Alabama, and is currently an Isaac Mannaseh Meyer Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at NUS. His work primarily concerns the nature and role of idealizations and representations in the sciences and, more specifically, in condensed matter physics. His work has appeared journals such as Foundations of Physics, Synthese, and Philosophy of Science.

Philosophers commonly distinguish norms that tell us what to do in light of all the facts, objective norms, from norms that take into account our uncertainty and ignorance, subjective norms. But our uncertainty comes in two kinds. On the one hand, we can be uncertain about matters of descriptive fact, such as the effects of some proposed action or policy. On the other hand, we can be uncertain about fundamentally normative matters – what is valuable or what the right moral principles are. While philosophers are generally happy to accept that there are norms sensitive to descriptive uncertainty, a controversy has recently developed over whether there are any interesting norms sensitive to our distinctly normative uncertainty.

In this talk, I address this controversy by drawing attention to puzzling cases of infectious normative uncertainty, where our uncertainty about the way things are descriptively depends on our uncertainty about the way things are normatively. Many existing views about subjective norms give intuitively absurd recommendations in such cases, and violate minimal constraints on the relationship between objective and subjective norms. Ultimately, I argue that we need subjective norms to be sensitive not just to our descriptive uncertainty, and not just to our descriptive and our normative uncertainty taken separately, but also to the relation between the two.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Monday, 13 June 2016
Time: 11am – 1pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Mr Abelard Podgorski
Moderator: A/P Loy Hui Chieh

About the Speaker:

Mr Abelard Podgorski received his Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Mathematics at Michigan State University, and have recently completed his PhD at the University of Southern California. His primary research interests are in ethics, the study of rationality, and epistemology, driven by a general concern with the way idealization plays a role in different normative theories. His work can be found in Mind, Philosophical Studies, and Ergo.

Normative reasons are considerations that justify action and belief. Motivating reasons are considerations for which an agent acts and believes. Sometimes, an agent’s motivating reasons match the normative reasons. When this happens, the agent’s actions and beliefs are creditworthy. Actual cases of match have a modal profile: that match can either obtain, or not, in certain counterfactual scenarios. Does the modal profile of a case of match affect its creditworthiness in any way? I consider and reject two possible answers. The failure of these answers naturally yields a third, hybrid, view, which I describe. I articulate two principles any hybrid view should respect.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 9 June 2016
Time: 11am – 1pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Dr Nathaniel Sharadin
Moderator: A/P Loy Hui Chieh

About the Speaker:

Dr Nathaniel Sharadin received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014. In 2014-2015 he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University and is now the Allan and Anita Sutton Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Syracuse University. He works on normative and metanormative issues in ethics and epistemology.