Alex Miller (Otago): "Rule-Following, Meaning and Primitive Normativity"
Seminar
In “Inside and Outside Language: Stroud’s Non-Reductionism about Meaning” (2011), “Primitive Normativity and Skepticism about Rules” (2011) and”Meaning, Understanding and Normativity” (2012), Hannah Ginsborg develops what she describes as a “partially reductionist” account of meaning. Ginsborg’s…
Dr. Victoria McGeer (ANU): “Scaffolding Agency: A proleptic account of the reactive attitudes”
Other
ABSTRACT: This paper examines the methodological claim made famous by P.F. Strawson: that we understand what features are required for responsible agency by exploring our attitudes and practices of holding responsible. What is the presumed metaphysical connection between holding…
Catherine Waldby (ANU): Money, Ethics and Tissue Donation
Other
Since the 1930s it has been possible to transfer living biological material between persons for therapeutic benefit – first blood, and more recently solid organs, cellular matter, and reproductive tissues. In almost all jurisdictions organs and blood must be given as gifts, without recourse to…
Daniel Kilov (ANU): Intuition as philosophical folklore
Other
The practice of appealing to intuition is central to the way many philosophers conceive of their discipline. There is, however, no agreed upon account of what intuitions are, let alone how they are supposed to function as evidence for philosophical theories. Worse still, research by…
Fiona Fidler (UMELB): How reproducible should science be?
Other
Less than half of peer-reviewed, published experiments in psychology can be replicated with the same or similar effects[1]. The reproducibility of published biomedical research is even lower, and the cost of irreproducibility in biomedicine has been estimated at $28 billion per year, in the US…
Roger Crisp (Oxford): Moral Luck and Equality of Moral Opportunity
Other
This paper concerns what has come to be called ‘moral luck’. It begins with Adam Smith’s account of the problem, and then moves to the problem’s scope. It is argued that some of our sentiments in such cases may have their origin in views about moral pollution we no longer accept, and that this may…
Daphne Brandenburg (Radboud University Nijmegen): Inadequate Agency and Appropriate Anger
Other
It is topical in moral psychology to equate the abilities required for being deserving of blame with the abilities required for being an appropriate addressee of the reactive attitudes. The most influential account of these abilities is reason responsiveness (McGeer & Pettit, 2015; McKenna,…