“A Kantian Case for Prioritizing the Least Well-Off” by Jade Lim (Apr 7)

In this talk, I argue that we sometimes have to prioritize the least well-off. In order to do so, I will apply Kant’s Formula of Universal Law that says, “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” I will show that we cannot will maxims that do not prioritize the least well-off as universal law and thus are not morally permitted to act in accordance with them. It then follows that we sometimes have to act against those maxims and prioritize the least well-off.

Graduate Seminar Series.
Date: Tuesday, 31 Mar 2015
Time: 2 pm – 3 pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Jade Lim
Moderator: Koh Hui Li

About the Speaker:

JadeJade’s main areas of research are in ethics and political philosophy. Her interests also extend to feminism, environmental ethics and race.

“Tragedy of the Commons and Role Ethics” by Koh Hui Li (31 Mar)

In this talk, I apply Roger Ames’ Role Ethics to see if new light can be shed on the Tragedy of the Commons. I survey the mainline approaches to the problem and its limitations. I then argue that Ames’ reconceptualised self as a web of relation with others provides a better conceptual resource in weakening the logic that leads up to the Tragedy. I consider objections of role conflicts, and argue that role ethics can be better conceived as an epistemic resource in helping one recognize their moral obligations to others.

Graduate Seminar Series.
Date: Tuesday, 31 Mar 2015
Time: 3 pm – 4 pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Koh Hui Li
Moderator: Jade Lim

About the Speaker:

Hui Li's photoHui Li’s background is in political science. She was drawn to the normative questions surrounding justice and the good, and is now pursuing them in philosophy. She is interested in ethics, political philosophy and the insights that one can gleam on these subjects through the study and comparison of different philosophical traditions.

“Sustainability, Complex Systems, and the Greeks” by Mark Usher (Mar 5)

Proponents of sustainability and complex systems tend to present their ideas and prescriptions as new and innovative, and sometimes as conceptual insights and a set of values that have been recovered from non-Western traditions. On the first point, to the extent that sustainability studies and complexity theory utilize new technologies and scientific discoveries in their pursuits, they are indeed new and innovative. However, the fundamental tenets of sustainability—living within limits; imposing/encouraging limits and stewardship through social pressures/incentives and civic policies—are some of the hallmarks of ancient Greek culture and thought. As for systems thinking—the idea that no phenomenon is a discrete, isolated entity or event, but must be viewed as part of complex, interrelated wholes with physical, moral, social, and noetic dimensions—this is exactly the philosophic undertaking of the Presocratics and of the poet Hesiod, and, in their wake, of Plato and Aristotle, and, later, the Stoics, Cynics, and Epicureans.

This lecture is the first installment of Professor Usher’s new book project in which he traces the trajectory of modern ideas about sustainability and complexity theory back to the Greeks. Its aim is 1) to invigorate current thinking in these areas, and 2) to underscore the extent of the Greco-Roman contribution to these topics of contemporary, global concern.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 5 Mar 2015
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Mark Usher, University of Vermont
Moderator: Dr. Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Picture1M.D. Usher is Professor and Chair of Classics at the University of Vermont. In addition to academic books and articles, he has published three children’s books, original poetry and translations, and two opera libretti. The impetus for this project on sustainability and complex systems stems from his training as a Classicist specializing in Greek literature, his appointment as a Sustainability Faculty Fellow at the University of Vermont for 2010-11, and twelve years of hands-on experience as a farmer. (He and his wife built and operate Works & Days Farm, a small, diversified farmstead that produces lamb, poultry, eggs, and honey on 125 acres.)

 

“Preferring to Go On” by Meghan Sullivan (Jan 22)

In my talk, I will identify some structural parallels between preferences that we form about prolonging our natural lives and preferences that we form about whether we hope to have an afterlife. I’ll argue that the two cases (taken as cases of forming rational preferences) are similar in ways which are often overlooked. I’ll then consider some norms that rational agents might follow in adopting preferences about “going on” more broadly conceived. I’ll argue both sets of “going on” preferences (life extension and afterlife) are preferences that can be guided by rational deliberation. And I’ll argue for a particular principle for forming these preferences.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 22 Jan 2015
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Meghan Sullivan, University of Notre Dame
Moderator: Dr. Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Picture1Meghan Sullivan is the Rev John A O’Brien Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.  She specializes in metaphysics and topics where it overlaps with semantics, logic, epistemology and practical reason.  She’s currently on leave writing a series of papers on issues at the intersection of the metaphysics of time and diachronic rationality, supported by grants from the University of Sydney and UC Riverside.  Meghan holds a PhD from Rutgers University and a B.Phil from Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

“Moral obligations of collective beneficence” by Anne Schwenkenbecher (Jan 8)

The world is an imperfect place. Many of its imperfections have people live worse lives than they could live. And many of those lives could be substantially improved if we collectively worked on solutions to them. But when are we morally required to do that?

This paper examines the idea of moral obligations of collective beneficence – obligations we have to collectively help others in need where we bear no responsibility for their need. Acts of collective beneficence can either provide so-called threshold goods or contribute to incremental goods. For incremental goods, every contribution counts and the more we contribute the better. However, this paper will focus on moral obligations to collectively produce threshold goods, that is, goods the production of which requires a minimum number of contributions. Providing such goods may require all available agents to assist (joint necessity) or only a subgroup of them (overdetermination cases). When moving away from uncontroversial threshold cases towards more complex scenarios, it will become apparent that duties to contribute to collective beneficence are less stringent the greater the number of agents involved. While the case for moral obligations of collective beneficence can be convincingly argued for small-scale threshold scenarios, such duties are more difficult to justify once the problem in need of remedy exceeds a certain scale and complexity.  This may mean that such obligations – in their most stringent form – can only be held by agents in relatively small groups.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 2015
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Anne Schwenkenbecher, Murdoch University
Moderator: Dr. Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Picture1Anne Schwenkenbecher is a Lecturer in Philosophy in the School of Arts. Before joining Murdoch University in June 2013, she held appointments at The University of Melbourne, the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) at Australian National University, and the University of Vienna. Her PhD in Philosophy (2009) is from Humboldt University of Berlin. Anne’s research focuses on a range of topics in normative and applied ethics, as well as political philosophy and action theory. These include the possibility and normative significance of collective agency, the ethics of political violence, and ethical problems arising from climate change. Her book “Terrorism: A philosophical enquiry” was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2012.

“Thought Experiments in Ethics” by Peter Kung (Oct 9)

Many compelling thought experiments have played a prominent role in the ethics literature: the transplant case, deciding on the best policies from the original position, being kidnapped and attached to a famous violinist. A wide range of thought experiments in ethics have a distinctive feature: they feature forced choices with fixed outcomes. In a typical ethics thought experiment, an agent A is faced with choice C1 and C2. If A picks C1, then O1¬ will occur. If A picks C2, then O2 will occur. The thought experiment forces the choice between C1 and C2: they are the only relevant options. To suggest another option, C3, is to violate the rules of the game. Likewise, O1¬ and O2 are the only possible outcomes. It is not merely probably that one will occur; it is definite. Suggesting that something other than O1 and O2 will occur is, again, not to play the game.

Starting with the plausible assumption that good thought experiments must be metaphysically possible, I explore whether thought experiments with forced choices and fixed outcomes are metaphysically possible. In my view, attending closely to features of imagination suggests that pessimism is warranted. I contend that the best account of our knowledge of metaphysical possibility is via imagistic imagination. I develop a key distinction between types of content in imagistic imagination, and use this distinction to analyze the metaphysical possibility of forced choices and fixed outcomes. I reach a pessimistic conclusion: we have no reason to think that forced choices and fixed outcomes are metaphysically possible.

I conclude that that any ethical view that counts outcomes as ethically relevant will have to take seriously moral risk, a result I thinks accords with common sense. In everyday ethical reasoning, choices are not forced and outcomes are not fixed. We take into account the chancy nature of our decisions: choosing C1 will likely lead to O1, but there is a chance it will lead to O1.1 or O1.2 or…. On my view, the methodology of thought experiments itself requires that we consider moral risk. This has the implication that some putatively devastating counterexamples in ethics prove to be less devastating than widely thought.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 9 Oct 2014
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Peter Kung, Pomona College
Moderator: Dr. Tang Weng Hong

About the Speaker:

PeterKungPeter Kung (Pennsylvania, B.S. in Computer Science & Engineering, Stanford, M.A. In Philosophy, NYU, Ph.D. In Philosophy) is Associate Professor of Philosophy and former Department Chair at Pomona College. He has held visiting or teaching appointments at New York University, Stanford University, Claremont Graduate University and now the National University of Singapore. Professor Kung’s research centers on two areas: the philosophy of mind, in particular the thought experiments, where is coediting a collection for Oxford University Press titled Knowledge Through Imagination; and epistemology, where he focuses on the limits of skeptical challenges and the proper treatment of probabilistic reasons. He is grateful to have the chance to explore Singapore with his wife, who is also visiting at NUS, and two young children.

“Valuable Asymmetrical Friendship” by Thomas Brian Mooney and John Williams (24 Apr)

Aristotle distinguishes three sorts of friendship. There are friendships of pleasure or of utility, in which the friend takes the other—even as an object of care—as a person qua bearer of characteristics conducive to pleasure or utility. Then there are much more valuable character friendships in which the friend cares for the other qua person for the other’s own sake. These are held by Aristotle and a variety of contemporary thinkers who broadly follow his account of friendship to involve various fairly strict equalities, or as we prefer to put it, symmetries between the friends. Roughly, such friends are fairly strictly symmetrically autonomous in relation to each other, fairly strictly symmetrical in their separateness of identity from each other, fairly strictly symmetrical in the degree to which they identify with each other, and are fairly strictly symmetrical in the degree to which they are virtuous. There is a fourth important sort of friendship that has been overlooked in the philosophical literature. We call this asymmetrical friendship. This is not friendship of pleasure or of utility, being much more valuable. Like character friendships but unlike friendships of pleasure or utility (that may also be largely asymmetrical) these involve each friend caring for the other for the others’ own sake. Unlike character friendships, they may be largely asymmetrical. So they are unlike Aristotle’s fairly strictly symmetrical and certainly valuable character friendships which seldom appear at all in our imperfect lives, lived as they are in an imperfect world.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 24 Apr 2014
Time: 2 pm – 4 pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speakers: T. Brian Mooney, John Williams, Singapore Management University
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speakers:

BRIANMOONEYT. Brian Mooney is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Singapore Management University and has just been appointed as Professor of Philosophy and Head of School of Humanities and Creative Arts at Charles Darwin University.  Brian’s research interests are in Ancient and Mediaeval Philosophy, Moral Philosophy and the Theory and Practice of Education.  Brian is the author, co-author and co-editor of 9 books and over 50 articles in philosophy.

JOHNWILLIAMSJohn N. Williams (PhD Hull) works primarily in epistemology and paradoxes, especially epistemic paradoxes. He also works in philosophy of language and applied ethics. He has published in Acta Analytica, American Philosophical Quarterly, Analysis, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Philosophical Research, Philosophy East and West, Mind, Philosophia, Philosophical Studies, Religious Studies, Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, Synthese and Theoria. He is co-editor of Moore’s Paradox: New Essays on Belief, Rationality and the First Person, Oxford University Press together with Mitchell Green. He researches and teaches in the School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University.

 

“Self-Reflection and the Verdictive Organization of Desire” by Derek Baker (20 Mar)

Deliberation often begins with the question “What do I want to do?” rather than a question about what one ought to do. This paper takes that question at face value, as a question about which of one’s desires is strongest, which sometimes guides action.  The paper aims to explain which properties of a desire make that desire strong, in the sense of strength relevant to this deliberative question.

Both motivational force and phenomenological intensity seem relevant to a desire’s strength; however, accounting for the strength of a desire in terms of these opens up significant indeterminacy about what we want.  The paper argues that this indeterminacy is often resolved simply by posing the question “What do I want to do?” to oneself: there is reason to believe that one’s answer will play a verdictive role, partially determining what the agent most wants.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 20 Mar 2014
Time: 2 pm – 4 pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Derek Baker, Lingnan University
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker:

Photo on 3-3-14 at 11.34 AM #2Derek Baker is an Assistant Professor at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.  He completed his PhD at Princeton University in 2009.  He works on the nature of autonomy, practical rationality, desire, the relation between self-knowledge and freedom, and problems in expressivism.  His papers have been published in Philosophical Studies and Australasian Journal of Philosophy.  He has also served as Associate Editor for AJP since 2012.  He is currently working on a book.  Its most recent working title (which he probably won’t change again) is An Almost Unified Theory of the Self.  He used to have hobbies, but no longer has time for them.

“Aristotle on the ease of Philosophy” by Matthew Walker (5 Dec)

Aristotle’s Protrepticus, which currently exists only in fragments, was a popular work that sought to exhort its audience to pursue a philosophical life. As part of its task, the Protrepticus attempts to respond to the worry that philosophical contemplation is somehow too demanding or difficult to be pursued or enjoyed with profit. On the contrary, Aristotle argues, philosophy is actually easy. I aim (i) to understand what these arguments are saying and (ii) to evaluate these arguments in the light of objections that they naturally elicit. I contend that these arguments offer reasonable responses to worries about philosophy’s demandingness.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 5 Dec 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Matthew Walker, Yale-NUS College
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker:

Matthew D. Walker (Ph.D. Yale) is Assistant Professor of Humanities (Philosophy) at Yale-NUS College. Before starting at Yale-NUS, he was an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Rutgers University. His papers have been published, or are forthcoming, in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Journal of Moral Philosophy, Apeiron, Ancient Philosophy, and other venues.

“The Varieties of Envy” by Sara Protasi (28 Nov)

Psychologists define envy as an aversive reaction to a perceived inferiority, which we feel toward those who are similar to us, with respect to a good or goal pertaining to a domain that is relevant to our sense of identity. This definition, however, applies to at least two different emotions, with opposite moral valences: malicious envy and benign envy. Scholars have provided different accounts of the distinction. Psychologists believe the crucial factor is whether the envier feels capable to overcome her disadvantage. Philosophers suggest that what differs is the subject’s focus of attention, that is, on whether one is focused on lacking the good or on the fact that someone else, the envied, has it. In my paper I show that both variables are at play, and that they do not co-vary but are independent. Consequently, we can experience not just two but four kinds of envy, with varying degree of maliciousness: emulative envy, inert envy, aggressive envy, and spiteful envy. Developing a more precise and adequate knowledge of envy’s anatomy allows the moralist to come up with the right diagnosis and remedies for what has been considered the worst of the deadly sins.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 28 Nov 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Sara Protasi, Yale University
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker:

Sara Protasi is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Yale University. She is working on the philosophical psychology, moral dimensions, and ancient and modern accounts of envy. Her previous work is on the normative dimensions of romantic love. She is also interested in feminist philosophy, bioethics, and philosophy of dance.