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.

All deontological moral theories endorse agent-centered constraints. They hold that in certain circumstances an agent must not perform an act of a certain type even if doing so is the only way to prevent more instances of that act being performed by others. In this paper I argue that agent-centered constraints, as standardly formulated, are ambiguous and have three distinct interpretations. Thus, a deontologist must clarify which of these three interpretations her theory endorses. However, I argue that once we sift through the various options we discover a trilemma for deontology. The deontologist must either accept that: (i) deontological constraints are maximizing-state rules, or (ii) deontological constraints give no moral advice in cases where commonsense morality expects moral advice, or (iii) deontology adopts a counterintuitive anti-aggregation rule. I argue that each of these options is a tough bullet to bite.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Monday, 6 June 2016
Time: 11am – 1pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Mr Matthew Hammerton
Moderator: A/P Loy Hui Chieh

About the Speaker:

Matthew Hammerton is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University. His research is primarily focused on foundational issues in normative ethics. In particular, he is interested in the debate between consequentialism and deontology and the role that agent-relativity and time-relativity play in this debate. He also has ongoing research projects on analogical reasoning in ethics, virtue theory, and Buddhist ethics.

In this talk, I critically engage with the “political realist” movement developed by Bernard Williams. Although I sympathize with the realist intuition that politics is distinct from moral philosophy or applied morality, a concern realists raise against recent trends in political philosophy, I challenge the sharp conceptual barrier realists erect between, on the one hand, politics and realism and, on the other, moralism and liberalism. Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s state theory, I clarify this realist intuition while avoiding some conceptual problems realism currently runs into. I draw conclusions from my analysis by arguing that – pace both Williams and Schmitt – politics and liberalism are compatible. I sketch the framework for a political liberalism and connect its normative arguments to constrained democracy, a constitutional mechanism that prioritizes a liberal basic structure over democratic procedures.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 2 June 2016
Time: 11am – 1pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Dr. Benjamin A. Schupmann
Moderator: A/P Loy Hui Chieh

About the Speaker:

Dr. Schupmann is a Post Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He is currently finalizing his book manuscript Carl Schmitt’s State and Constitutional Theory: A Critical Analysis, which is under contract with Oxford University Press for its Oxford Constitutional Theory Series. He received his PhD from Columbia University in the City of New York in February 2015, following the successful defense of his dissertation.

Situationism is a view arising out of experimental psychology, suggesting that human cognition and behavior are far more susceptible to the influence of immediate variables in a person’s environment than is otherwise acknowledged. Among philosophers taking the implications of situationism seriously, some have suggested we exploit this tendency to be shaped by situational variables toward desirable ends; if experimental studies produce reliable, probabilistic predictions about the effects of situational variables on behavior—for example, how people react to the presence or absence of various sounds, objects, and their placement—then we should deploy those variables that promote prosocial behavior, while avoiding those that don’t. Put another way, some have suggested that we tweak situations to nudge people toward the good. A question arises: Isn’t this manipulative? In this presentation, I describe some existing proposals and consider the manipulation worry. I conclude by claiming that, when all is considered, it is chimerical to think we can decide whether to manipulate others or not. We must rather accept that manipulation is part of social existence. Once we do, the only remaining question is how to manipulate. I suggest that this should make us conceive ourselves in an ‘object-ive’ fashion.

Read more about our visitor at http://www.hagopsarkissian.com/

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 19 May 2016
Time: 2pm – 5pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Associate Professor Hagop Sarkissian
Moderator: A/P Tan Sor Hoon

About the Speaker:

Hagop Sarkissian is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Baruch College, City University of New York, where he teaches classes in ethics, moral psychology, Chinese philosophy, philosophy of religion, and experimental philosophy. Most of his research is in moral psychology, broadly construed. He is a methodological pluralist, and use resources from other relevant disciplines to inform his work, such as evolutionary biology and experimental psychology. He also draw extensively from the history of Chinese philosophy, especially the classical period (ca. 6th to 2nd century BCE).He is a faculty advisor to the Metro Experimental Research Group, co-chair of the Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy, and Core Project Member of the Oneness in Philosophy and Psychology project.

Responding to Cappelen and Dever’s claim that there is no distinctive role for perspectivality in epistemology, I will argue that facts about the outcomes of one’s own reasoning processes may have a different evidential significance than facts about the outcomes of others’.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Friday, 22 April 2016
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Michael G. Titelbaum
Moderator: Dr Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Michael G. Titelbaum is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University.  He works on epistemology (especially formal), ethics, metaethics, political philosophy, decision theory, philosophy of science, and the philosophy of logic.  His book Quitting Certainties received an Honourable Mention for the 2015 APA book prize; he is currently writing an introduction to Bayesian Epistemology.

According to moderate alethic pluralism there is a single truth property. This property is possessed by any true proposition, but may be so by having different properties across different domains of discourse. In this sense truth is both One and Many. A pressing issue for moderate pluralists is what to say about the relationship between the One and the Many. Manifestation functionalism is a specific form of alethic pluralism that is meant to address this issue. The view has two components. According to its functionalist component, truth is a functional property—a property whose functional role is characterized by a set of core principles. According to its “manifestationalist” component, different properties manifest truth for propositions belonging to different domains of discourse—where a property M manifests property I if and only if it is a priori that the set of I’s conceptually essential features is a subset of M’s features (Lynch 2009, 2013). Thus, the manifestation functionalist commits to a specific view on the nature of the relationship between the One and the Many: it is one of manifestation. In this paper I offer a critical discussion of manifestation functionalism. I first argue that the view leads to a messy metaphysics due to its commitment to the idea that the One-Many relationship is one of manifestation. I then suggest that taking the One-Many relationship to be one of grounding delivers such an alternative.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Wednesday, 13 April 2016
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen 
Moderator: A/P Axel Gelfert

About the Speaker:

Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Underwood International College and Director of the Veritas Research Center, both at Yonsei University. He works on truth, epistemology, and metaphysics. Prof. Pedersen has edited (with Cory D. Wright) New Waves in Truth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Truth and Pluralism: Current Debates (Oxford University Press, 2013). He is currently the principal investigator of a collaborative research project that investigates pluralism about truth, logic, and ontology and is co-editing Epistemic Entitlement (to appear with Oxford University Press) and The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology.