David Miller (Oxford): The Nature and Limits of the Duty of Rescue
Seminar
Virtually everyone believes that we have a duty to rescue fellow human-beings from serious danger when we can do so at small cost to ourselves – and this often forms the starting point for arguments in moral and political philosophy on topics such as global poverty, state legitimacy, refugees, and…
Timothy L Williamson (ANU): Causal Decision Theorists are Unstable [TPR]
Seminar
Causal Decision Theorists (Gibbard & Harper 1978, Lewis 1981, Joyce 1999) think that an act's expected value is determined by what that act is likely to cause. Evidential Decision Theorists (Jeffrey 1965, Ahmed 2014) disagree and think that an act's expected value is determined by the…
Margaret Moore (Queen's): Is Canada entitled to the Arctic?
Seminar
This paper examines the moral foundation of arguments for rights over territory in cases where the land is uninhabited or unoccupied. It takes the Canadian claim over the Arctic as an example. It is not asking a question in international law or international relations, but about the deep moral…
David Braddon-Mitchell (Sydney): Representation in a Three-Dimensional World
Seminar
A number of recent theories of quantum gravity lack a one-dimensional structure of ordered temporal instants. Instead, according to many of these views, our world is either best represented as a single three-dimensional object, or as a configuration space composed of such three-dimensional objects…
Graduate and Postdoc Work in Progress presentations
Seminar
Today's Philsoc is a graduate students/postdoc only special session.We'll have James Willoughby and Matt Kopec presenting.1) James WilloughbyWhy Global Scepticism Doesn’t Matter Much Even if you accept a global sceptical conclusion, it does not seem to impact our day to day epistemic…
Margaret Moore (Queen's): Collective Self-determination and Secession in the Current World Order
Seminar
This paper aims to develop a distinctive account of secession which is not vulnerable to some of the problems that afflict the two dominant accounts - the plebiscite view of self-determination on the one hand and the just-cause account on the other. On the plebiscite view of secession, a majority…
Philosophy, AI and our responsibility to the future
Lecture
Thanks to a chance meeting in a taxi in Copenhagen in 2011, Cambridge now has two new Centres dedicated to ensuring that we humans avoid the pitfalls of our own technological success, and make the best of the opportunities of the twenty-first century (especially in Artificial Intelligence). Huw…