CAPPE

PREVIOUS SEMINARS IN CANBERRA

 

2010

 

Wednesday 3d of March (2010): Scott Wisor (CAPPE)

Title: Developing a New Global Poverty Metric: Toward a Pro-Poor Approach
Abstract

There is widespread disagreement about what poverty is and how it should be measured. In this paper I develop a methodological framework for analyzing poverty. I argue that poverty is an essentially contested concept and there are multiple plausible conceptions of poverty. Similarly, there are multiple plausible poverty metrics that can be and have been developed. I argue that poverty measurement has hitherto been treated as value-neutral, despite the inherently value-laden nature of poverty conceptions and metrics. I argue for an ameliorative approach to poverty analysis that is explicitly normative, explicate the ameliorative approach, and defend it against common objections. I will then sketch how such an approach might contribute to the development of a pro-poor global poverty metric.
 

Wednesday 24th of February (2010) : Professor Christel Fricke (University of Oslo)

Title: What we cannot do to each other – On Forgiveness and Moral Vulnerability

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the conditions under which moral forgiveness becomes an issue, namely our moral vulnerability to each other. Moral invulnerability does not depend on a meritocratic or perfectionist understanding of morality (as Charles Griswold seems to imply). According to our Western, egalitarian understanding of morality, the morality of a person relies in this person intrinsic value or moral dignity. The attribution of dignity to a human being neither depends on this being’s moral merit, nor does it depend on the social role this being might have within a society. It is out of reach of anything a human being can do either to another human being or to herself or himself. Thus, an offender cannot damage the dignity of his victim; nor can he completely undermine his own dignity. Human beings are morally invulnerable to each other, if ‘moral vulnerability’ is to be understood in terms of the vulnerability of dignity. But dignity is a normative status, not a psychic disposition. In order to be able to perform as a responsible moral agent, a person needs a stable and mature psyche. A healthily born baby may have the disposition to develop such a psyche, but in order to actually become such a person it depends on being brought up by loving, caring, and morally respectful people. A child is morally vulnerable in the sense of being in danger to suffer psychic damage that hinders it from becoming a morally responsible agent. And even a fully responsible moral agent’s psyche is not invulnerable. Human beings are morally vulnerable – not in the normative, but in the psychological sense of the term.

 

Wednesday 15th of January (2010) at 4pm: Steve Clarke

Title: Consequentialism,Coercion and Salvational

Abstract

There are many salvific exclusivists and consequentialism is very influential in philosophical ethics. The combination of these two intellectual commitments is extremely dangerous. In virtue of her intellectual commitments, a consequentialist who is also a salvific exclusivist will consider that she has a moral obligation to ensure that everyone accepts her religion. If they will not do so voluntarily, then she will have a compelling reason to attempt to coerce others to accept her religion, and a compelling reason to coerce others to prevent proselytizing on behalf of other religions. If the state tries to prevent her from using coercive means to achieve these ends then she will have a compelling reason to attempt to overthrow the state.  It may seem that there are few sorts of states that would be able to tolerate the presence of consequentialist salvific exclusivists other than religious states that happen to endorse her religion. However, it is possible for the liberal state to tolerate the presence of consequentialist salvific exclusivists. To do so the liberal state needs to ensure that the consequentialist salvific exclusivist will judge that she is more likely to be able to make converts by non-coercive means than she is by attempting to overthrow the state so as to enable the use of non-coercive means.

 

 

2009

 

Tuesday 15th of December (2009) at 4pm: Paula Casal

Title: Moral Reflections on the Great Apes

Abstract

Recent scientific findings have caused a large increase in the number of people who believe that the great apes should have certain rights. This is an important and desirable development in the animal movement and in applied ethics. It does not, however, exhaust the connection between primatology and moral philosophy. Primatological data has also been employed to discuss personhood, full moral-standing, and the concept of agency. The paper discusses some less explored implications including the distinction between natural and social inequality, theories of crime and punishment, and new error theories, in the light of data regarding great apes’ abilities, politics and proto-moral behaviour.

It is a power-point presentation accessible to non specialists and with many pictures of apes doing the relevant things.

 

Wednesday 9th of December (2009) at 4pm: Igor Primoratz

Title: Civilian Immunity, Supreme Emergency, and Moral Disaster

Abstract

Any ethics of war will include the requirement of protection of civilians (non-combatants) against lethal violence. This requirement is particularly strong in just war theory. Some adherents of the theory see civilian immunity as absolute. Others allow that it may be overridden, but only in extremis. The latter position has been advanced by Michael Walzer under the heading of ‘supreme emergency.’

I look into some of the issues raised by Walzer’s ‘supreme emergency’ view and some of the criticisms that have been levelled against it. I argue that Walzer’s view is vague and unacceptable as it stands, but that the alternatives proposed by critics are also unattractive. I go on to construct a position that is structurally similar to Walzer’s, but more specific and much less permissive, which I term the ‘moral disaster’ view. According to this view, deliberate killing of civilians is almost absolutely wrong.

 

Wednesday 2nd of December (2009) at 4pm: Seumas Miller

Title: Collective Responsibility, Epistemic Action and Climate Change

 

Wednesday 25th of November (2009) at 4pm: Steve Vanderheiden (University of Colorado at Boulder)

Title: Climate Justice at COP-15 and Beyond

Abstract

Activists for ‘climate justice’ have called upon affluent nations like the United States to contribute their fair share toward the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change, describing this as an imperative of justice. But what does justice require of the world’s nations and persons, and how might justice theories help to inform the design of a fair and effective global climate regime? I shall examine two primary climate justice problems in an effort to marshal political theory’s normative resources on behalf of climate policy development: the allocation of atmospheric space among nations and over time and the assessment of remedial responsibility for coping with the manifold harms associated with climate change. In so doing, I will suggest how theories of distributive and restorative justice may be applied to constructing a global policy response to this pressing environmental problem.

 

Wednesday 18th of November (2009) at 4pm: Mark Colyvan (Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science, University of Sydney)

Title: Environmental Decision Making and Environmental Ethics

Abstract

Ethics and decision theory are often seen to be in conflict, in that they frequently give different advice about the best course of action. In this paper I examine this alleged conflict in the realm of environmental decision-making. I focus on a couple of areas where ethics and decision theory might be thought to be offering conflicting advice: environmental triage and carbon trading. I argue that the conflict can be seen as disagreement about other things (e.g. the appropriate temporal scales for value assignments and idealisations of the decision situation). The good news is that there is no conflict between decision theory and environmental ethics, although, on my account, ethics is left with a rather minor role to play in environmental decision making.

 

Wednesday 11th of November (2009) at 4pm: Joseph Smith

Title: Philosphy Fiddles While the World Burns:  Global Climate Change and the Crisis of Civilisation

Abstract

Recent scientific evidence is reviewed indicating that global climate change is occurring much faster than predicted in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. Viewed in the context of other environmental  threats, such as peak oil and physical and biological resource depletion and degradation, concerns have been expressed by a number of thinkers that human civilisation is heading towards a collapse. Philosophers, strangely enough, have been silent about this issue, and in the few discussions available in the literature, the treatment of climate change issues has been along the lines of viewing the matter as just another ethical problem, to be dealt with in the received fashion. In this paper I argue that philosophy has much to contribute to the issue of the crisis of civilisation, but philosophers need to move beyond the ruling models of philosophy, be these models, analytic, continental or postmodern.

 

Wednesday 4th of November (2009) at 4pm: Jeroen van den Hoven

Title: Values, Design and Information Technology

Abstract

The paper discusses developments in the ethics of engineering under the heading of "value sensitive design", that is the idea that values are incorporated and embedded in artefacts and infrastructures in ways that shapes the space of action of users, i.e. brings about options and constraints for human agents. Consequences for the ability to take responsibility of users in a special set of engineered environments is explored.

 

Wednesday 28th of October (2009) at 4pm: Mark Collier (University of Minnesota)

Title: Hume's Ethics: A Cognitive Science Perspective

Abstract

Hume’s naturalistic approach to ethics receives a surprising amount of support from recent work in cognitive science. The first half of this talk examines his account of justice conventions. Hume maintains that considerations of strategic rationality are not sufficient to explain how trust is established between shortsighted agents; we manage to engage in social exchange because (most of us) have an emotional aversion to cheating. This sentimentalist proposal might sound like wishful thinking, but it is consistent with recent work in neuroeconomics. The second half investigates Hume’s theory of moral imagination. Hume embraces a hybrid account of sympathy: our concern for the pain and suffering of those around us depends upon associative mechanisms, whereas our capacity to adopt the moral point of view depends upon cognitive principles of the imagination. This distinction is bolstered by recent work on affective mirroring and cognitive pretense. It also enables us to resolve an apparent contradiction in Hume’s ethical theory. Hume maintains that (1) sympathy is sufficient for concern, (2) our moral judgments about distant characters require us to sympathize with those close to them, but (3) our concern is limited to those in our narrow circle. This tension dissolves when we disambiguate the senses of sympathy in Hume’s moral psychology. We must /perceive/ the pain and suffering of others in order to feel compassion towards their plight; adopting the moral point of view, however, merely requires us to /imagine/ ourselves as spectators of their afflictions. We can make moral judgments about distant characters without expanding our circle of concern, then, because these evaluations are based upon attitudes that fall short of belief.

 

Wednesday 21st of October (2009) at 4pm: John Maier (RSSS Philosophy)

Title: Moral Certainty

Abstract

Frank Jackson and Michael Smith have posed a problem for moral theories which involve absolute prohibitions against acting in certain ways (“Absolutist Moral Theories and Uncertainty,” The Journal of Philosophy, 2006).  The problem turns on the fact that, relative to any given agent’s information, there is always some probability that some given action of his will violate some given prohibition.  Jackson and Smith argue that, in light of this fact, absolutist moral theories lead to absurd consequences, at least insofar as those theories purport to issue recommendations about what agents who are not omniscient ought to do.

I argue that the way out of this problem is to introduce talk of knowledge into our formulation of absolutist moral theories.  Roughly, one ought to perform some action only if one knows that it will not violate any absolute prohibition that one accepts. This epistemic formulation of absolutist moral theories follows naturally from two claims.  The first is the familiar claim that absolutist moral theories are concerned, in the first place, with the character of agents’ intentions.  The second is a less familiar claim, which I will defend at some length, that there is an epistemic condition on intention, which connects what it is rational for an agent to intend to what he is in a position to know.

 

Wednesday 14th of October (2009) at 4pm: Clive Hamilton

Title: Coping with Catastrophe: Psychological strategies for dealing with climate change

Abstract

Humanity’s ability to adapt physically to a warming globe will depend in part on how well people adapt psychologically. Drawing on work by Tim Kasser and myself, I consider how humans might adjust to or cope with the threat associated with a world under a radically transformed climate. While varying among individuals and societies, many people will experience threats related to: the well-being and survival of descendants; the state of the planet, including its natural wonders and biological diversity; and the stability and progress of the societies in which they live. In short, the threat of climate change is a threat to one’s conception of how the future will unfold.

Extensive social scientific research into human reactions to threats provides some insights into the psychological strategies humans are likely to adopt. These “coping strategies” are designed to defend against or manage the unpleasant emotions that are associated with “waking up” to the dangers of a warming globe. The emotions include fear, anxiety, guilt, anger, anguish, sadness, depression and helplessness. These unpleasant emotions arise in part because the threat of warming may also destabilise an individual’s identity or sense of self—threatening one’s life plans, reminding one of the fact of eventual death, challenging the morality of ecologically destructive or apathetic behaviours, or subverting one’s internalised expectations of the future. Coping strategies likely to be use in the face of global warming include denial strategies, maladaptive coping strategies and adaptive coping strategies.

 

Wednesday 7th of October (2009) at 4pm: Christian Barry

Title: Human Rights Conditionality

Abstract

The conferral of benefits to countries such as aid, debt relief, and additional trading opportunities are often made to depend upon their having successfully implemented specific policies, achieved certain social or economic outcomes, or demonstrated a commitment to conducting themselves in specified ways. We can refer to policies of these kinds as conditionality arrangements. In this paper, I discuss whether conditionality arrangements that would make the conferral of such benefits depend on whether the recipient achieves a certain status with respect to the human rights fulfillment of its population can be justified. I show that many objections that are typically advanced against conditionality arrangements are not convincing and that the possible benefits of human rights conditionality arrangements are sufficient to warrant further intellectual and practical exploration.

 

Wednesday 30th of September (2009) at 4pm: Ed Spence

Title: Information, Knowledge and Wisdom: Wisdom on the Line

Abstract

If this is indeed the Age of Information and the digitalisation of information is having an unprecedented impact on the lives of individuals and on societies generally worldwide, how can that impact be philosophically evaluated? The primary aim of this paper is to explore how the dissemination and use of digital information, especially on the internet, can be normatively evaluated through the axiological concept of a good life. Central to that exploration will be the conceptual connection the paper will make between wisdom and a good life. The main line of argument the paper will take is that wisdom understood as a type of meta-information or meta-knowledge as well as a necessary condition for the attainment of a good life establishes a direct conceptual connection between information (via wisdom as a type of meta-information or meta-knowledge) and the notion of a good life. The notion of a good life used in this paper will be understood eudemonically. That is, a good life is one that is at least capable of leading to eudemonia, self-fulfilment and wellbeing. The conceptual connection between information and a good life thus established allows then for the axiological evaluation of information through a cluster of normative terms, including, epistemological, ethical, and axiological. Overall the value of digital information (its axiological goodness) and information generally can be measured and evaluated in terms of its ability or inability to contribute to the attainment of the good life of individuals and societies generally. A basic assumption of the paper is that knowledge per se has no intrinsic value. The only axiological value it has is instrumental in its ability to provide affordances for the attainment of good lives as well as in its ability to provide constraints for the avoidance of bad lives. After this initial conceptual exploration, the second aim of the paper is to examine some of the practical implications and potential consequences of online information for the good life, through a few recent case-studies.

 

Wednesday 23rd of September (2009) at 4pm: Ned Dobos

Title: Is UN Security Council Authorisation for Armed Intervention Morally Necessary?

Abstract

In the first half of the paper I argue that that UN authorisation (or lack therefore) can have some indirect bearing on the moral status of a humanitarian intervention. That is, it can affect whether an intervention satisfies other widely accepted justifying conditions, such as proportionality, “internal” legitimacy, and likelihood of success. The more interesting question, however, is whether the UN’s failure to provide a mandate can make a humanitarian operation unjust independently of these other familiar considerations. Is a proportional, internally legitimate humanitarian intervention, with a just cause and strong prospect of success, still morally unacceptable if it is not approved by the United Nations? This is the question that I turn to in the second half of the paper. The answer, I argue, depends on whether or not the Security Council was given the opportunity to act. A state or coalition that launches an armed intervention without so much as making its case to the Security Council is rightly condemned, at least under some circumstances. However, where a mandate is sought but refused, unilateral action is still likely to be justified all things considered. This might seem like a curious or even incoherent position, since it suggests that states are morally obliged to pursue that which is not morally necessary. Nevertheless, this is the position that I will be defending.

 

Wednesday 16th of September (2009) at 4pm: Meena Krishnamurthy

Title: Completing Rawls's Arguments for Equal Political Liberty and its Fair Value (Part I)

Abstract

John Rawls bases his arguments for the moral importance of democracy on a conception of citizens’ higher-order interests.  On his view, citizens conceive of themselves as having a higher-order interest in the development and exercise of their two moral powers – the capacity for justice and the capacity for a conception of the good.  Rawls argues that democratic procedures are needed to satisfy these higher-order interests.  Despite the vast literature on Rawls’s work, few have discussed his arguments for the value of democracy.  This is likely because Rawls’s arguments, as arguments that the principle of equal basic liberty needs to include democratic liberties, are incomplete.  In contrast to his trenchant remarks about core civil liberties, Rawls doesn’t say much about the inclusion of political liberties of a democratic sort – such as the liberty to vote – among the basic liberties.  And, at times, what he does say is unconvincing.  For these reasons, it is not clear that Rawls’s arguments support his inclusion of political liberties (such as the right to vote) in the principle of equal basic liberty.    My aim in this paper is to complete Rawls’s arguments and to show that Rawls has grounds for including liberties of a democratic sort in the principle of equal basic liberty.

 

Wednesday 9th of September (2009) at 4pm: John Kleinig (CAPPE/John Jay)

Title: Civil Emergencies and the Claims of Innocence (co-authored with Tziporah Kasachkoff)

Abstract

Reportedly, on September 11, 2001, while the four terrorist attacks were still taking place, US Vice-President Dick Cheney authorised the "taking out" of any further hijacked aircraft. Had that order been acted upon, passengers traveling in those planes would have almost certainly been killed. Subsequently, in 2005, and prompted by a domestic incident in which a mentally disturbed person threatened to crash a plane into a high-rise building, the German parliament passed a law to permit the Federal Minister for Defence to authorise the shooting down of an aircraft in the event that there was ample reason to believe that it was being used as a weapon. A year later, however, in response to a challenge that included a person whose standing was that of a potential passenger on a flight so affected, the German Federal Constitutional Court declared the law unconstitutional because, inter alia, it would violate Arts. 2.2 and 1.1 of the Basic Law, which recognise the right to life and the inviolability (Unantasbarkeit) of human dignity.

The German law and its subsequent overturning have generated a great deal of legal and constitutional discussion. We have no desire or competence to add to that debate. However, the moral questions raised by such possibilities are of great interest and here we propose to focus on several of them.

We will consider (in Section II) the case as outlined above, in which an appropriately authorised government official is faced with giving an order for a hijacked passenger plane to be shot down. The aircraft is believed to be heading towards a major metropolis where it will be crashed into a symbolically important building, and, if it makes it, will almost certainly cause considerable loss of life in addition to that of the passengers. Then (in Section III) we want to consider some variants on that case - one in which the pilot of the hijacked plane decides to defy the hijackers by crashing it before it reaches their intended destination, even though the lives of those on board will be sacrificed [III (A)]; another in which several of the passengers determine to overpower the hijackers and prevent them from reaching their target [III(B)]; and a third in which a private citizen, hearing of the hijacking over the radio, has an opportunity and the means to shoot the plane down before it reaches its target [III(C)].

Before we consider those cases, however, we want to spend some time discussing three issues that are common to each account. Arguably, these factors give the cases much of - even if not all - their moral potency. First, the deliberate downing of the aircraft will almost certainly result in the loss of what are called, in a restricted sense, innocent lives (I.A). Second, whether or not the aircraft is shot down, the passengers will shortly be killed (I.B). And third, if the aircraft reaches its intended target, the consequences will, arguably, be worse than if it is brought down beforehand.

Please contact John if you wish to obtain a copy of the paper.

 

Wednesday 2nd of September (2009) at 4pm: Yitzhak Benbaji

Title: Obedience, Self-Help and Political Participation: A Contractarian Justification of the War Convention

Abstract

From a moral perspective, the legal attitude to the killings that soldiers commit in wars is striking. The laws of war embody the "symmetry principle" which states that "the normative permissions and restrictions binding co-combatants in a single conflict are identical," and that "the justifiability of nation's engaging in war is independent of the permissions and restrictions binding its troops." The symmetry principle entails that if just combatants –soldiers whose cause is just – hold a right to kill their enemies in combat, then unjust combatants – soldiers who fight an aggressive war – have a right to kill just combatants. They further imply that if just combatants have a right to inflict collateral damage on enemy citizens, unjust combatants have the right to so as well.

These are legal principles; and, it has been suggested that pragmatic considerations justify them. Yet, the pragmatic interpretation notwithstanding, commonsense morality confirms the symmetrical regulations of combat.  Soldiers are conceived as morally equal, whatever their cause is. The difficulty in any moral interpretation of the symmetry principle is straightforward: "if death and destruction matter morally, as they do, and if reasons matter morally, as they do, then differences in combatants’ reasons for bringing about death and destruction must also matter morally." On the face of it, only those who fight with a just cause have a moral reason to kill and maim; unjust combatants have no such reason to act this way. Hence, critics of traditional just war theory such as Jeff McMahan and David Rodin deny the commonsense morality of war. They insist that at the level of "deep morality" combatants are unequal and hence war is asymmetrical; the killings committed by unjust combatants are morally unjustified.

This paper revisits and further develops a version of the contractarian response to what I shall call the purist critique. Contractarianism argues that just and unjust combatants are morally equal because, as Michael Walzer puts it, "military conduct is governed by rules [which] rest on mutuality and consent." Or, as Thomas Hurka put it more recently, "by voluntarily entering military service, soldiers on both sides freely took on the status of soldiers and thereby freely accepted that they may permissibly be killed in the course of war."

Following my recent elaboration of the contractarian analysis of the moral equality of soldier, I will assume here that soldiers' tacit acceptance of the rules of war is necessary but insufficient. Their acceptance of the rules is "effective" – their moral rights and duties are equalized by their acceptance of the rules – only if the egalitarian rules of war codify a fair and mutually-beneficial contract among decent states. More specifically, I will assume that the contractarian elucidation of the symmetrical war convention is based on three claims.

• Mutual Benefit: an outcome in which the egalitarian in bello code is commonly followed is better to all relevant parties – in terms of welfare and fulfillment of rights – than any other feasible outcome.
• Fairness: the symmetrical war convention does not create or sustain unfair inequalities among states or individuals.
• Effective Consent: soldiers accept a set of mutually-beneficial and fair in bello rules that – by virtue of their acceptance of them – equalize their moral status within wars vis-à-vis each other (at the level of moral rights and duties).

Contractarianism – as I understand it here – consists of Mutual Benefit, Fairness and Effective Consent. I aim in this paper to address several objections to each of these claims.

 

Wednesday 26th of August (2009) at 4pm: John Skorupski

Title: Human Rights

Abstract

What rights exist is not for us to decide. In contrast, which rights to call human rights does seem to be. How then should we choose to use this notion? Human rights cannot be distinguished from rights in general by any philosophical criterion. The question of what rights exist is not a political question; in contrast the usefulness of introducing a special sub-category of human rights recognised in international law is. This paper defines the general concept of a right, argues that declarations of human rights should be levers that help to eliminate serious violations of moral rights in all states, and spells out on this basis some criteria for declaring human rights: universality, cross-state demandability, and efficacy.

 

Wednesday 19th of August (2009) at 4pm: Joel Anderson (Department of Philosophy, Utrecht University, The Netherlands)

Title: Scaffolded Autonomy and the Extended Will

Abstract

Over the past two decades, Andy Clark, David Chalmers, and others have argued for what has come to be known as the "hypothesis of extended cognition." On this view, cognitive tasks are often accomplished not merely by the central nervous system, but rather by a system that extends beyond the boundaries of the skin and skull to include other parts of the body, features of the environment, and even components of our material culture (such as iPhones). One of the central characteristics of this approach is that it denaturalized the notion of cognition, replacing it with a much more open-textured, constructivist understanding of what counts as "the cognitive system". This has important implications for applied ethics, particularly with regard to how we think about evidence for impairment, the status of prostheses, locus of responsibility, and the scope of obligation to provide assistance.  

After briefly reviewing these implications, I examine the possibility that not only cognition but also volition might best be understood along these lines. For example, as Joseph Heath and I have argued elsewhere, our ability to curb our tendencies to procrastinate is largely a matter of structuring our environment (our "motivational niche," as it were) in ways that keep us on track. Similarly, many of the ways in which we rely on others can actually be seen not as diminishing our autonomy but as supporting or "scaffolding" our capacities for guiding our life in accordance with our authentic desires.  

However initially plausible this shift to a notion of the "extended will" may be, however, its success depends on clarifying three further issues: (1) whether a "volitional system" can be characterized in a way that distinguishes it meaningfully from the cognitive system; (2) whether there really is such a volitional system can count as genuinely extended and not merely "embedded" (Rupert, 2004), rather than just a case of an agent that uses tools and other supports (perhaps on a parallel with what Rupert defends as the more modest "embedded" model of cognition); (3) whether one can endorse the stronger hypothesis of the "extended will" without committing oneself to significant and ethically unsettling (functionalist) revisions to standard conceptions of the sovereignty and autonomy of the agent. In this paper, I provide reasons for thinking that all three issues can be addressed and respond to several anticipated objections.

 

Wednesday 12th of August (2009) at 10am: Marilyn Friedman

Title: Moral Responsibility for Coerced Wrongdoing: The Case of Abused Women Who “Fail to Protect” Their Children

Abstract

All moral agents are vulnerable to coercive pressures to do wrong.  Perhaps nearly everyone has a breaking point, a degree of coercion that is so intense it makes her yield control and do the wrong that she is being pressured to do.  There are many different sorts of such coercive pressures.  This paper takes as its point of departure cases of abused women who have been intimidated by the abusive men in their lives into letting those men abuse the women’s children.  In the US, such women are sometimes convicted of the crime of “failure to protect” their children.  In many such cases the men are not convicted of any crime at all or they are convicted of a lesser crime, a misdemeanor instead of a felony.  The coercive pressures those women faced suggest that they were helpless victims rather than morally responsible agents.  Yet we have to be careful not to regard abused women as utterly lacking in moral agency.  What are the relevant conditions for assessing these women’s degree of responsibility for the harms the abusers inflicted on the women’s children?  This paper is a study of some of the vulnerabilities and compromises faced by women under conditions of intimate coercion.

 

Wednesday 5th of August (2009) at 4pm: Larry May

Title: The Nature and Value of Procedural Rights

 

Wednesday 29th of July (2009) at 4pm: Laura Valentini (The Queen's College, Oxford)

Title: In what Sense Are Human Rights 'Political'?

Abstract

Philosophical discussion of human rights has long been monopolised by what might be called the 'natural law view'. On this view, human rights are fundamental, pre-political, moral rights people enjoy solely by virtue of their humanity. In recent years, a number of theorists have started to question the validity of this outlook, advocating instead what they call a 'political' view. My aim in this paper is to explore the latter view in order to establish whether it constitutes a valuable alternative to the 'natural law view'.

In particular, I distinguish between three ways in which human rights can be political: in relation to their (i) iudicandum, (ii) justification and (iii) feasibility constraints. I argue that it makes sense to think of human rights as political in relation to both their iudicandum and their justification but in a way that is not always adequately captured by proponents of the political view. Moreover, I also claim that, paradoxically, if we take the political view seriously, we are forced to engage in the sort of first-order moral reasoning which informs the natural law approach and which proponents of the political view either significantly downplay, or want to avoid.

 

Wednesday 15th of July (2009) at 4pm: Kit Wellman

Title: Rights and State Punishment

Abstract

In this essay, I draw upon the insights of W.D. Ross, H.L.A. Hart and John Simmons to develop and defend a “rights” theory of state punishment. Specifically, in response to the two key questions (1) “Why may criminals be punished?”  and (2) “Why is the state uniquely authorized to treat criminals in this way?”, I argue that (1) criminals cannot righteously object to being punished because, in wronging others, they forfeit their rights not to be punished, and that (2) the state violates no rights in assuming exclusive control over the punitive process only because it is uniquely capable of adequately realizing the morally significant aims that a system of punishment can achieve.  I then explain how this theory confirms the need to revise the prevailing justification for international criminal law.

 

Wednesday 1st of July (2009) at 4pm: Thomas Pogge (Yale University & ANU CAPPE)

Title: Shue on Rights and Duties

Abstract

First published in 1980, Henry Shue’s Basic Rights has remained influential for an unusually long time. It is still frequently cited today in works on rights, development economics, global ethics and justice. And it is widely read and referred to also among practitioners in NGOs and governmental foreign aid departments. More than any other, Shue’s book has played a significant role in reconceiving in terms of rights, rather than charity, the relationship of affluent countries and their citizens to the poverty-related deprivations still so widespread in poor countries. This shift is of great importance, and I support it wholeheartedly. But I also think that there are other, and perhaps better, ways of supporting it than the argument Shue develops in Basic Rights.

 

Wednesday 24th of June (2009) at 4pm: Gerald Doppelt (Professor of Philosophy and Science Studies, University of California, San Diego)

Title: How Can Rawlsian Political Liberalism Rectify Injustices of Class, Race, and Gender? Or: Beyond Juridical Justice to Cultural Roots of Disrespect and Injustice

Abstract

This essay explores Rawls’s intriguing but problematic notion that a just society delivers equality in the social bases of self-respect.  I criticize and revise Rawls’s analysis of self-respect, his treatment of it as an empirical, rather than a normative notion, and his account of the “social” bases of self-respect in modern society.  I argue that Rawls’s paradigm of self-respect as equal rights of citizenship ignores social injuries to self-respect rooted in the organization of labor, gender relations in and beyond the family, and racial patterns of perception and treatment.  The result of my critique is (1) that Rawlsian political liberalism needs to recognize conflicts in the social standards of self-respect and political ideals of personhood in modern liberal-democratic society and (2) that it needs a broader account of “the basic structure” of a just society to incorporate not just structure controlled by law (eg. basic civil rights and income distribution); but also (1) structures created by cultural norms and tradition (eg. norms of manhood and womanhood implying a gendered division of labor in the home and workplace) and (2) structures of belief , attitude, stereotypes in the relations of racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual orientation in-groups and out-groups.  I utilize sociological evidence concerning the social bases of self-respect in modern society to document injuries to self-respect rooted in (1) current irrational standards of respect and (2) normative structures of labor, gender, and race that make respect a social scarcity. The resulting picture of Rawlsian justice involves a widening of the scope of social justice to include changes in the normative and cultural structure of practices beyond Rawls’s legal/juridical paradigm.  This picture also requires a larger account of “public reason” than Rawls provides, to justify changes in our political ideals of persons beyond Rawls’s equal citizenship paradigm.

 

Wednesday 17th of June (2009) at 4pm: Associate Professor Justin Oakley (Monash University)

Title: Virtue Ethics and Conflicts of Interest in Physician-Industry Relationships

Abstract

Relationships between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry are currently the focus of much ethical scrutiny. A significant area of concern has been the medical conflicts of interest created by the pervasive influence that pharmaceutical companies are known to have on the prescribing behaviour of many doctors. The wrongs of doctors prescribing medications on the basis of certain links with pharmaceutical companies can be analysed in terms of how such behaviour harms patients, or how it violates patients’ rights. I argue that both of these approaches fail to identify what is essentially wrong with such behaviour in medical conflict of interest situations. The wrongs of doctors’ prescribing behaviour being influenced by their links with pharmaceutical companies can be properly understood only in terms of the sorts of character considerations central to virtue ethics. I also extend familiar monopoly of expertise arguments in professional ethics by arguing that, in return for being granted a monopoly of expertise on the provision of key goods, doctors are obligated not only to behave in certain ways but also to have certain professional character-traits. Doctors therefore betray society not only when they act (or fail to act) in certain ways, but also when they fail to develop particular character-traits.

 

Wednesday 3rd of June (2009) at 4pm: Chin Liew Ten

Title: The Disunity of the Virtues

 

Wednesday 27th of May (2009) at 4pm: Daniel Cohen

Title: The Puzzle of the Self-Torturer and Newcomb's Problem

Abstract

Attached to your body is a shock generator with 1000 settings, ranging from no pain to excruciating agony. While you are barely able to distinguish adjacent settings, distant settings are easily distinguishable. Every day you are offered $10,000 in return for permanently raising the settings by 1. The puzzle is that while you will clearly be tempted, each day, to advance, you will nevertheless regret advancing beyond a certain point. So what should you do? Is there some point beyond which it is irrational to advance, despite the temptation, or are rational agents committed to advancing all the way to 1000? I will argue that we can better understand this puzzle by seeing an analogy with Newcomb’s problem. According to causal decision theory you ought, every day, to advance, while according to evidential decision theory there is some point beyond which advancing is irrational.

 

Wednesday 20th of May (2009) at 4pm: Simon Keller

Title: The Value of Relationships and the Ethics of Partiality

 

Wednesday 13th of May (2009) at 4pm: Neil Levy

Title: Resisting Weakness of the Will

Abstract

I develop an account of weakness of the will that is driven by experimental evidence from cognitive and social psychology. I will argue that this account demonstrates that there is no such thing as weakness of the will:  no psychological kind corresponds to it. Instead, weakness of the will ought to be understood as depletion of System II resources. Neither the explanatory purposes of psychology nor our practical purposes as agents are well-served by retaining the concept. I therefore suggest that we ought to jettison it, in favour of the vocabulary and concepts of cognitive psychology.

 

Thursday 7th of May (2009) at 4pm: Doris Schroder

Title: Consent: From Medical Research to Traditional Knowledge
(Co-authored with Roger Chennells)

Abstract

Informed consent processes have become an essential part of modern medical practice. As the Nuremberg Code (1947) stated categorically in its first sentence: ‘The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.’

Although the concept developed from the relationship between doctors and patients, it has since gained significance outside the medical field. Since the late 1980s, it has been employed between states to control the movement of hazardous materials across borders. And since the early 1990s, it has been employed more systematically in connection with indigenous peoples’ rights of self-determination, in particular in the context of logging, mining, dam building, resettlement and access to genetic resources and traditional knowledge.

One of the main obstacles to realising the spirit of justice of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are practical challenges in obtaining informed consent from indigenous populations prior to accessing their traditional knowledge. This paper will:

• Outline the main challenges with practical examples from Roger Chennells’ work as a legal consultant for the San peoples.
• Discuss whether important lessons can be learned from the medical field.
• End with open questions to be discussed with the audience.

 

Wednesday 29th of April (2009) at 4pm: Edward H. Spence (Department of Philosophy, University of Twente, Netherlands, and, CAPPE, Charles Sturt University)

Title: Understanding Luciano Floridi’s Metaphysical Theory of Information Ethics: A Critical Appraisal and an Alternative Neo-Gewirthian Information Ethics

Abstract

This paper falls into three main parts. Part one, offers a critical analysis and evaluation of Luciano Floridi’s metaphysical theory of information ethics (IE). Drawing on part one, part two provides a discussion of what I consider to be the main conceptual and practical difficulties facing Floridi’s IE theory. Although in agreement with the overall motivation and objective that informs Floridi’s IE position, namely, that  “all entities, qua informational objects, have an intrinsic moral value…” and that “there seems to be no good reason not to adopt a higher and more inclusive, ontocentric  [moral] perspective” (Floridi, 2007, 10), part three of the paper  proposes an alternative New-Gewirthian approach to Information Ethics that avoids some if not all of the difficulties facing Floridi’s own position.

 

Wednesday 22nd of April (2009) at 4pm: Morgan Luck (CSU)

Title: Why a Victim's Age is Irrelevant When Assessing the Wrongness of Killing (co-authored with Daniel Cohen.)

Abstract

Intuitively, all killings are equally wrong, no matter how old one’s victim. In this paper we defend this claim – The Equal Wrongness of Killings Thesis – against a challenge presented by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen. Lippert-Rasmussen shows The Equal Wrongness of Killings Thesis to be incompatible with two further theses: The Unequal Wrongness of Renderings Unconscious Thesis and The Equivalence Thesis. Lippert-Rasmussen argues that, of the three, The Equal Wrongness of Killings Thesis is the least defensible. He suggests that the most convincing considerations apparently in favour of the Equal Wrongness thesis may be satisfied just as well if we adopt an alternative principle, a ‘Prioritarian View’ about the wrongness of killing. We argue that The Prioritarian View does not resolve the trilemma: it too is inconsistent with the other two theses. Instead, we argue, the most plausible resolution of the trilemma involves a rejection, rather, of The Unequal Wrongness of Renderings Unconscious Thesis. In its place, we offer an attractive principle that is compatible with both The Equal Wrongness of Killings Thesis as well as The Equivalence Thesis.

 

Wednesday 25th of March (2009) at 4pm: David Hodgson (Court of Appeal, Supreme Court of New South Wales)

Title: Virtues of Retribution

Abstract

In this paper, I will identify retributive and consequentialist purposes of the criminal law; and I will outline arguments that retribution should be abandoned, including arguments, based on philosophy and neuroscience, that free will and responsibility are illusions.  I will suggest there are good reasons to retain retribution as an objective of criminal law, and identify and discuss ways in which this can be supported philosophically.

 

Wednesday 18th of March (2009) at 4pm: Toby Handfield

Title: Order and Affray: Defensive Privileges in Warfare
(Co-authored with Patrick Emerton.)

Abstract

This paper will draw upon the morality of individual self-defence to explain certain important features of the traditional jus in bello: the permissibility of killing, even by soldiers who lack justice on their side; the principles that govern surrender and the taking of prisoners of war; and the principle of discrimination between soldiers and civilians. Our explanation will not leave all aspects of the jus in bello undisturbed: it has consequences that are revisionary in at least some respects, this being the upshot of trying to explain the jus in bello in individualist terms. The paper will also explore the way in which the morality of warfare is conditioned simultaneously by the operation of certain institutions and the absence of others. Resolution of this seeming paradox, that warfare is at one and the same time an instance both of order and of affray, is central to the paper, both to its explanation of how mass killing may be morally permissible, even in a wicked cause, and to its explanation of the limits that the jus in bello imposes on that killing.

 

Wednesday 11th of March (2009) at 4pm: Nicholas Barry

Title: Equality, Responsibility, and the Welfare State

Abstract

Luck egalitarianism is a theory of egalitarian justice that is sensitive to notions of individual choice and responsibility, and it has attracted attention from a number of prominent supporters and critics in recent years. Despite the level of interest in the theory, there have been relatively few attempts to explore its implications for public policy. In this paper, I will address this under-explored issue, investigating which model of the welfare state luck egalitarians should support. I will argue that the social democratic model, which emphasises universal forms of social provision and labour market decommodification, is most just from a luck egalitarian point of view. This conclusion has significance in light of the “intrusive state” objection to luck egalitarianism, and the widely held belief that the liberal, residual approach to social protection is most consistent with the notion of individual responsibility.

 

Wednesday 4th of March (2009) at 4pm: Per Sandin

Title: Firefighting Ethics

Abstract

Firefighting ethics is not a separate field of study, but it should be. This is highlighted by a comparison between the ethics of firefighting and the ethics of medicine. Despite similarities, there are also important differences: Firefighting is less professionalized than medicine, the caregiver-patient relationship is not central in firefighting, firefighters need to concern other values than life and limb, they face great risks to themselves and the firefighters have to make almost every operative decision under stress, with limited possibilities for consulting colleagues. Thus considerations from medical ethics cannot be transferred straight away to firefighting, but some elements from medical ethics might nevterheless be adapted for use in the firefighting ethics. I show this by applying the four mainstream medical ethical principles of autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence, and justice to firefighting. I argue that they are indeed applicable, but they need modification and their relative weight is different. Respect for autonomy is of limited importance, and beneficence is central. As regards justice in firefighting, I discuss the issue of triage, i.e. the sorting of casualties in order to decide whom to treat first. Two main approaches to triage have been discussed: utilitarian and egalitarian triage, with utilitarian triage being the most widespread variety. Among the proposed egalitarian alternatives to utilitarian ‘save-the-greatest-number approaches’ are different types of lotteries, e.g. a flu-vaccine lottery. I argue that firefighting triage should be utilitarian in most operative situations but that there is room for more egalitarian approaches on the policy level (in the form of a principle of decent minimum aid). I also argue that the widespread idea that life takes precedence over limb and limb over property is not altogether unproblematic in firefighting triage, and that the lexical ordering needs to be supplemented with a weighing mechanism.

 

Wednesday 25th February (2009) at 4pm: Prof. Andrew Vincent

Title: The State and Human Rights

Abstract

The central focus of the paper is the relation of human rights to the state tradition. A convenient way of viewing the relation is via three permutations.  In the first permutation the state is seen as the object of human rights, human rights are the subject. Human rights in this scenario have an independent status; they embody morally prior claims, set over and against the secondary significance of the state. The second permutation takes the converse position, viewing the state as the primary legal (and possibly moral) subject and human rights are the object. This latter argument tends to resist both the category of universalism and claims to independence made by human rights exponents. The third permutation focuses on the proposition that the state can be viewed as both subject and object. This relation between these terms is complex and dialectically nuanced. The central intuition here is that the essential problem of the human rights culture has always been the institution of the state; post-1945 the state has been both the key promoter of human rights, as well as the key offender. The state has thus been both the subject and object of human rights. Various argument which makes sense of this permutation are explored critically. In summary, my argument is that the state tradition stands in a complex and at times paradoxical relation with the human rights tradition during the late twentieth century in particular. The paper concludes with critical reflections of the last permutation.

 

Wednesday 18th February (2009) at 4pm: Clive Hamilton

Title: The Rebirth of Nature

Abstract

Philosophical revolutions can do more than change what we believe; they can change how we perceive the world. Some argue that prevention of climate catastrophe requires a shift to a new ecological consciousness, one that centres on a different conception of nature. To understand how this might occur, it helps to consider the previous historical transition that got us to where we are. The triumph of the mechanical philosophy in the second half of the 17th century changed how we conceive of the world. Previously nature was seen as alive and intentioned; the new science saw it as dead. Isaac Newton was the seminal figure in this transition, yet he did not reject the old for the new but held to versions of both. While writing the Principia he also devoted himself to alchemy. If Newton could simultaneous be the father of modern science and conceive of the world as alive, could this be the basis for a new ecological consciousness?

 

Wednesday 14th January (2009) at 4pm: Alan Thomas (University of Kent)

Title: Non-monotonicity and Moral Particularism

Abstract

This paper makes the non-monotonicity of a wide range of moral reasoning the basis of a case for particularism. Non-monotonicity threatens practical decision with an overwhelming informational complexity to which a form of ethical generalism seems the best response. It is argued that this impression is wholly misleading: the fact of non-monotonicity is best accommodated by the defence of four related theses in any theory of justification. First, the explanation of and defence of a default/challenge model of justification. Secondly, the development of a theory of epistemic status and an explanation of those unearned entitlements that accrue to such status. Thirdly, an explanation of the basis of epistemic virtues. Finally, an account must be given of the executive capacity of rational decision itself. This overall set of views can accommodate a limited role for generalizations about categories of evidence, but not such as to rescue a principled generalism. In particular, the version of particularism defended here explains why one ought not to accept the principled holism of Holton, McKeever and Ridge that has proved to be a problem for Dancy’s form of particularism. Ethics certainly involves hedged principles. However, principles cannot be self-hedging: there cannot be a “that’s it” operator in a principle. Practical reasoning is concluded by the categorical detachment of the action-as-conclusion itself.

 

 

2008

 

Wednesday 3rd of December at 4pm: Dr Catherine Legg (Waikato University).

Title:  Scientific Integrity

Abstract:

This paper asks: i) Is there an ethics of scientific inquiry? ii) If so, how does it relate to general ethics? One might think the answers are simply: i) Yes – for there is a lot of scientific inquiry about, and it is obvious that some scientists perform it more responsibly than others. ii) The ethics of scientific inquiry is merely a special case of general ethics, derivable from its general rules plus accidents of the particular situation of research. However, looking at case studies of scientific misconduct (e.g. Elias Alsabti, who published over 50 entirely plagiarized cancer ‘research’ articles) a delicate question arises. Should identification and correction of these abuses come from a) ethicists or b) scientists? Should budding scientists be required to take a course in ‘research ethics’ as part of their training? But isn’t apprenticeship in a research community in some sense already a moral education? Conversely, isn’t ethics itself a branch of inquiry, in which case ethicists should be forced to take their own courses? To address this tangle some ideas about the relationship between theory and practice in classical pragmatism are raised, and position b) is argued for.
 

Wednesday 26th of November at 4pm: Dr Lisa Bortolotti (Birmingham/Macquarie).

Title:  Agency and the Meaning of Life

Abstract:

Contemporary philosophers and bioethicists argue that life extension is bad for us. According to the agency objection to life extension, being constrained is a feature of agency that adds to the value and meaning of human life. Given that life extension would remove limits to agency, then it would also deprive life of value and meaning. I shall concede that constrained agency contributes to the value and meaning of human life, but argue that even in a life where death is postponed, or altogether removed, many constraints on the fulfilment of an agent's goals and on decision making would be preserved. Agents with longer lives would have more time at their disposal to achieve their goals, but they would also be presented with new challenges. For instance, according to the boredom objection to life extension, in a much longer or immortal life it may be harder for agents to avoid chronic boredom, to sustain their motivation to act in order to satisfy their life goals, and to identify new life goals when the previous ones have been satisfied. Although objections from agency and boredom are both aimed at showing that a much longer or immortal life would be meaningless, they cannot be used in combination, as one undermines the other.
 

Wednesday 19th of November at 4pm: Dr Graeme McLean (CSU/CAPPE).

Title:  The Will to Disbelieve

Abstract:

William James famously discussed the will to believe (in God). This paper offers some philosophical examination of the will to disbelieve (in God).
 

Wednesday 12th of November at 4pm: Dr Cordelia Fine (CAPPE/Melbourne).

Title:  Don't I Know You From Somewhere? The Modern Face of Neuroscientific Explanations of Gender Inequality

Abstract:

Neuroscientists are from Mars, gender egalitarians are from Venus? Differences between male and female brains (sometimes real, often contested, occasionally fabricated) have been used for centuries to justify gender inequalities. Contemporary brain imaging studies are now documenting both structural and functional sex differences in the brain, yet the implications, interpretation, and communication of these findings have so far received little attention within neuroethics. I will explore a number of reasons why findings of sex differences in the brain arising from this relatively new technology need to be interpreted cautiously, and discuss examples from both the academic and popular literature.
 

Wednesday 5th of November at 4pm: Professor Marilyn Friedman (CAPPE/Washington, St Louis).

Title:  How to Blame People Responsibly

Abstract:

Typical philosophical accounts of blame emphasize the requirements for someone to be blameworthy, that is, a deserving recipient of blame. Those accounts usually cite something like the ability to grasp and apply moral norms and the ability to be motivated to act accordingly. Far less attention is paid to the requirements someone should meet in order to blame others in a responsible manner. This paper proposes an account of responsible blaming. The paper then focuses particularly on blaming that is part of public discourse over internationally divisive issues such as terrorist attacks. The paper ends by listing some factors that impede responsible blaming in those public contexts.
 

Wednesday 29th of October at 4pm: Associate Professor Igor Primoratz (CAPPE, University of Melbourne).

Title:  The Bombing of German Cities in World War II: The Moral Issue

Abstract:

The bombing of German cities by the Allies remains one of the most controversial issues of World War II. I look into the main ways in which the bombing campaign might be morally defended: as a way of ensuring a more equitable distribution of suffering and loss brought about by war; by the complicity of the victims; as retaliation or reprisal; as a violation of civilian immunity justified by a “supreme emergency"; as a means justified by the aim it was to achieve. All these attempts at justification fail. The bombing of German cities was an utterly unjustified atrocity. It was a case of state terrorism – perhaps the longest and deadliest campaign of state terrorism in wartime. In terms of the spirit if not the letter of international law at the time, it was a war crime. Viewed historically, it was a crucial stage in a process of ever more comprehensive and systematic victimization of enemy civilians as a supplement to, or even a substitute for, fighting enemy soldiers.
 

Wednesday 22nd of October at 4pm: Professor Larry May (CAPPE/Washington, St Louis).

Title:  Habeas Corpus and Global Justice

Abstract:

Global justice is normally discussed as a mater of substantive rights: the criminal justice rights of those who are the victims of mass crimes like genocide or the economic rights of victims of inequality. It is undeniable that these substantive rights are very important and should be protected globally. My earlier work in international justice has concerned substantive rights such as the right not to be the subject of genocide, aggression, war crimes, or crimes against humanity. In my new book, from which this paper is drawn, I explore the value of procedural rights in the debates about global justice.

In this paper I focus on habeas corpus, which was at first merely the right to be brought out of the dungeon and to have the charges against one publicly read. One could be immediately retuned to the dungeon after the reading and no other rights were involved. Yet, Bracton and Blackstone, the great legal theorists of the 13th and 18th centuries, say that habeas corpus was fundamentally important, as have many legal theorists since. Yet, habeas corpus rights are consistent with fairly great iniquity. Nonetheless, there is something very valuable indeed to this right. One needs only to think about Guantanamo in order to see what can happen when this right is systematically abridged – the challenges against detention at Guantanamo were all drawn in habeas corpus terms. I try to explain why this procedural right is of the first importance for global justice.
 

Wednesday 15th of October at 4pm: Dr Louise Collins (Indiana University).

Title:  Is close friendship possible online? Is it desirable?

Abstract:

According to anecdotal and social-scientific reports, some valued personal relationships, such as friendship and romance, are today conducted entirely online, using computer mediated communication (CMC) tools, such as e-mail and chat-rooms. Are such relationships merely ersatz simulacra of their offline counterparts, or are they equally real and capable of contributing to human flourishing? Close friendship offers an interesting case for consideration.

Cocking and Kennett (1998) develop a novel account of close friendship, which they dub the “Drawing” model. According to this model, close friendship is characterised by a distinctive process of reciprocal interpretation and shared activity. Through this process, friends also contribute to each other’s self-development. If the Drawing model is correct, then whether close friendship is possible online depends on whether this distinctive process of interpretation and activity is possible online.

Cocking and Matthews (2001) analyse text-only CMC relationships to clarify what is important in the everyday conduct of close friendships. They argue that the reciprocal interpretation central to close friendship on the Drawing model (and others) is not possible in text-only CMC. For, structural features of text-only CMC stymie the interpretive efforts of even the most sincere would-be friends in cyberspace. Contra Cocking and Matthews, I argue that would-be friends can develop fine-grained interpretations of each other, even in text-only CMC contexts.

The Drawing model also emphasises the contribution of shared activities to close friends’ reciprocal self-constitution. Following Cocking and Matthews’ method again, I consider the possibility of sharing activities in text-based CMC. Since would-be close friends can share a range of activities online, it seems that close friendships can be conducted entirely online, even in text-only CMC contexts.

Since I find this conclusion counterintuitive, I return to speculation on the goods (and liabilities) of close friendship, derived from an expanded Drawing model.
 

Wednesday 8th of October at 4pm: Dr Michael Smithson (ANU, School of Psychology).

Title:  Ignorance and Uncertainty: Tradeoffs and Dilemmas

Abstract:

Western intellectual culture has several blindspots regarding the unknown. Chief among them is a tendency to regard ignorance and uncertainty as invariably negative and marginal. In actuality, ignorance and uncertainty play "positive" roles in human cognition and emotion, and also underpin several forms of social capital. Therefore, managing uncertainty does not reduce to simply eliminating as much of it as possible. Instead, dealing with uncertainty is a mixed-motive undertaking, invoking important tradeoffs and dilemmas.
 

Wednesday 1st of October at 4pm: Professor Justin O'Brien (CAPPE, Charles Sturt University).

Title:  Re-arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic? The Future of Financial Regulation

Abstract:

Effective and efficient capital markets depend on confidence in the integrity of financial institutions, the regulatory apparatus and, ultimately, trust between market participants and financial intermediaries. The ongoing crisis in global commercial debt markets has exposed glaring deficiencies in operational and strategic risk management systems. Self-evidently, trust like liquidity and solvency is now in very short supply, and confidence has evaporated. While the appropriate pricing of risk is, arguably, a commercial calculation best left to the market, it is necessary for the providers of dubious, if not criminal, products and services to recognise responsibility for a systemic crisis. The seizing of the global securitisation market demonstrates the malign consequences of an emasculated approach to corporate governance and risk management at the level of individual institutions. It also reveals defects in the current regulatory paradigm. Irrespective of whether rules or principles were privileged, control failed within and between four distinct orders of accountability: legal, managerial, political and bureaucratic. The paper evaluates whether the credit crisis has falsified the underpinning premise of financial regulation, and, if so, as argued, the implications for regulatory design.
 

Wednesday 24th of September at 4pm: Dr Andy Hamilton (Durham University).

Title:  Liberal Elitism

Abstract:

Elitism today is the residue of the liberal scepticism concerning democratic government. Classical liberals in the early decades of the 19th century had profound forebodings concerning the apparently inevitable advent of democracy. In response, they advocated elitism as a brake on the "tyranny of the majority". While other liberals were concerned with the danger of "democratic despotism", J. S. Mill meant diagnosed a culture of mediocrity engendered by democratic forms of government. Mill at first followed Coleridge and Comte in espousing illiberal elitism, the view that the intellectual and cultural elite should constitute an estate of society - a Church or Caste with formal powers. He subsequently rejected illiberal elitism on the grounds that it did not foster individual autonomy, but still maintained liberal elitism, according to which the intellectual elite must exert influence through recognition of their authority in their sphere. In On Liberty his position is further nuanced, so that it is questionable whether he really was an elitist at all. I advocate a position that constitutes a middle way between elitism and populism. Elitism should be contrasted with populism, and not with (i) egalitarianism, or (ii) individualism in the sense of Mill's Liberty Principle. I conclude by considering the relation between elitism and a meritocratic standpoint which affirms individual autonomy, and by discussing the cultural implications of elitism today.
 

Wednesday 17th of September at 4pm: Dr Christian Barry (ANU/CAPPE).

Title:  A new analysis of the distinction between doing and allowing

Abstract:

In ordinary discourse it is common to distinguish between harms to which the conduct of some agent has “contributed” from those to which this agent has merely “allowed to occur” or “failed to prevent”. Some deny that this distinction has any basic moral significance, but this is very much a minority view. Even those who grant that this distinction has a great deal of moral relevance have had a very difficult time providing a clear and convincing analysis of the distinction, and of explaining why it has moral significance.

In this paper (co-authored with Gerhard Øverland of CAPPE/UM), I develop a new analysis of the distinction between contributing to and failing to prevent harm that, we argue, improves significantly upon existing analyses. We argue first that the distinction between contributing to and failing to prevent harm is not a sharp binary as many theorists have supposed, but is instead scalar, admitting of degrees. Second, we show that intuitive judgments about whether some agents’ conduct has contributed to or failed to prevent some harm depend not on the presence or absence of any single factor, but on a diverse range of empirical and normative factors that are related to one another in interesting ways.
 

Wednesday 10th of September at 4pm: Dr Brian Rappert (University of Exeter).

Title: Promoting ‘Ethics Talk’ - Lessons from Engagements with Bioscientists about the Dual-use Dilemma

Abstract:

In recent years, the relation between national security and science research has been a topic that has received considerable attention. As part of this, questions are being raised by national scientific academies, international science organizations, and security agencies regarding whether the knowledge and techniques generated through fundamental and applied life science research might facilitate the production of bioweapons. Consideration of the so-called ‘dual use’ potential of life science knowledge and techniques is itself part of growing concern about biosecurity. This has resulted in debate regarding whether controls should be placed on what gets done, how, and whether information is widely circulated. Arguably this sort of discussion challenges many of the traditional presumptions of biologists and others regarding the implications of their research and its proper governance.

This presentation elaborates the methods employed in and findings of some 100 seminars with practicing scientists and students in 12 countries about dual use issues. There have been two aims to these seminars: one, to inform participants about current ‘biosecurity’ debates and second, to generate interactive discussion about the merits of proposed policy responses. My presentation recounts some of the interactions in the seminars with a view to considering the tensions and lessons associated with efforts to promote responsive life science and social research.
 

Wednesday 3rd of September at 4pm: Dr John Hadley (CSU/CAPPE).

Title: Animals and self-defense

Abstract:

Is it permissible to forcibly restrain people engaging in animal cruelty? Would using any degree of violence be permissible? If we allow intervention on behalf of animals in cases of gratuitous cruelty are we then on a slippery slope leading to intervention during socially acceptable practices such as food production or biomedical research? In this paper I extend recent self-defense theory to nonhuman animals. The aim is to reconcile species-egalitarianism* with common sense views about violence on behalf of nonhuman animals. In the process I defend the following claims:

• Violence towards animals raises many important questions that self-defense theory can help to address.
• There is no fundamental logical obstacle to extending self-defense theory to animals.
• Extending a right of self-defense to animals is consistent with commonsense views about animal cruelty, the spirit of anti-cruelty statutes and animal welfare legislation, and traditional moral theory about the immorality of gratuitous cruelty to animals.
• McMahan’s recent ‘foetal self-defense reductio’ shows that extending self-defense theory to animals poses a serious theoretical problem for species-egalitarians of any stripe (deontological, utilitarian, Nozickian hybrid), including McMahan himself.
• Species-egalitarians can avoid the problem by extending a diminished responsibility-type thesis to persons who harm animals during so-called ‘socially acceptable practices’ such as food production and biomedical research.
• The ‘diminished responsibility’ thesis reconciles species-egalitarianism with commonsense views about liability to violence on behalf of animals.

* Species-egalitarianism is the view that individuals are entitled to utility-trumping rights (deontological version) or equal consideration of interests (utilitarian version) in virtue of possessing a psychology above a threshold level of complexity, irrespective of species. On this view, species, like race or gender, is as an arbitrary biological property that plays no decisive role in determining an individual’s moral status (Singer, 1975; Regan, 1983; Sapontsis, 1987; Rachels, 1990; Pluhar, 1995; DeGrazia, 1996; Francione, 2000; Rowlands, 2002; McMahan, 2004; Franklin, 2006).
 

Wednesday 27th of August at 4pm: Dr Philip Cook (London School of Economics).

Title:  In Defence of Child Citizenship

Abstract:

Brighouse, Swift, and Clayton have argued recently that children are owed educational equality because it is a positional good that affects adult life-chances. These arguments treat schooling as instrumental to education, and have neglected what children are owed qua children as a matter of justice. This paper argues that schooling is intrinsically valuable to children qua children, and that children are owed compulsory non-selective state schooling as a matter of justice. It proceeds in four stages: firstly, it argues that children are owed certain goods as a matter of justice in virtue of their child-citizenship; secondly, that schools are intrinsically valuable to children qua children because they are a domain of the state where child-citizens may relate to other child-citizens as equals, free from inescapable inequalities with adults; thirdly, it argues that justice requires schooling be compulsory, non-selective, and public; and finally, that schooling, unlike education, is not a positional good
 

Wednesday 20th of August at 4pm: Dr Stephen Clarke (Oxford University and CAPPE, Charles Sturt University).

Title:  Are Philosophers' Intuitions Reliable?

Abstract:

Philosophers make frequent appeals to intuitions. Many of these appeals are to intuitions as a source of evidence. The credibility of intuitions as a possible source of evidence has come under attack in recent years by some members of the experimental philosophy movement, who have produced evidence that ordinary intuitions about philosophical issues can vary significantly in response to cultural background, educational level, variations in affective states and the order of presentation of thought experiments. All of these are factors that appear to be philosophically irrelevant, so it seems hard to square these findings with the claim that ordinary intuitions are plausible candidates to provide a reliable basis for philosophical claims.

In this paper I examine one influential line of response to the challenge to ordinary intuitions about philosophical issues presented by experimental philosophers. This is the response that Alexander and Weinberg refer to as ‘intuition elitism’. It involves denying that studies of ordinary intuition are relevant to philosophical claims and arguing that the considered intuitions of professional philosophers are the evidential source that philosophers implicitly appeal to (and should appeal to) when they deploy intuitions as an evidential source.

I consider this line of argument from three angles. First, I ask whether it plausibly accounts for our practices when we appeal to intuitions as an evidential source in philosophy. Second, I ask whether this argumentative move genuinely relieves those who employ it from the onus of responding to experimental philosophers’ findings about biases that affect ordinary intuitions. Third, I consider empirical research on the intuitions of other professionals to see if lessons can be learned about the suitability of philosophy as a context for the generation of reliable intuitions and about the reliability of the intuitions of professional philosophers.

 

Monday 11th of August at 4pm:  a JOINT CAPPE/SPT Seminar: Professor Chandran Kukathas (London School of Economics).

Title:  The Theory and Practice of Open Borders

Abstract:

Why can't all borders be open? The point of this paper is to address this question, both as a conceptual question and as a theoretical - normative- question. Its concern is the movement of people - not of goods or money - across political boundaries. In the end, it tries to offer a defense of open borders. But any such defense must rest on some account of what open borders means, and how such a thing is possible. Thus the aim of this paper is to offer an account of the theory and practice of open borders.

 

Wednesday 6th of August at 4pm: Dr Rob Sparrow (Centre for Human Bioethics,
Monash University).

Title:  Should human beings have sex? Sexual dimorphism and human enhancement

Abstract:

Until recently, we could more or less take it for granted that the human species was made up of men and women and that an individual's sex is fixed by fate at conception. Since the early 1950s, however, when the first sex reassignment operations were performed, individual sex has come to be, to some extent at least, a technological artefact. The existence of sperm sorting technology, and of prenatal determination of foetal sex via ultra sound along with the option of termination, means that we now have the power to choose the sex of our children. An influential contemporary line of thought about medical ethics suggests that we should use medical technology to serve the welfare of individuals and to remove limitations on the opportunities available to them. In this talk I will argue that, if these are our goals, we may do well to move towards a “post sex” humanity. Until we have the technology to produce genuine hermaphrodites, the most efficient way to do this is to use sex selection technology to ensure that only girl children are born. There are significant restrictions on the opportunities available to men, around gestation, childbirth, and breast-feeding, which will be extremely difficult to overcome via social or technological mechanisms for the foreseeable future. Women also have longer life expectancies than men. Girl babies therefore have a significantly more “open” future than boy babies. Resisting the conclusion that we should ensure that all children are born the same sex will require insisting that sexual difference is natural to human beings and that we should not use technology to reshape humanity beyond certain natural limits. The real concern of my presentation, then, is the moral significance of the idea of a normal human body in modern medicine.

 

Wednesday 30th of July at 4pm: Professor Christopher Wellman (Washington University and CAPPE)

Title:  What Is Really Wrong with Slavery?

Abstract:

Although R.M. Hare’s landmark essay, “What Is Wrong with Slavery?” discusses slavery at length, it is really about utilitarianism, as Hare is principally concerned to show that utilitarianism should not be dismissed for its inability to rule out the moral permissibility of things like slavery. Similarly, while I discuss slavery in this paper, my chief aim is to argue that even the most sophisticated versions of utilitarianism are unable to adequately capture what is wrong with slavery. That is, even if we grant arguendo that utilitarianism can furnish us with a satisfactory guide for moral action, it fails as a standard because it has no room for relational duties. In other words, utilitarianism must be dismissed for its inability to register the fact that slaves are wronged by slavery.

 

Wednesday 23rd of July at 4pm: Dr Daniel Star (CAPPE)

Title: Two Levels of Moral Thinking: A New and More Satisfactory Approach

Abstract:

It seems possible to be a good person who responds well to moral reasons without engaging in philosophical reflection. It also seems to be the case that normative ethicists are engaged in a legitimate and valuable activity when they endeavour to discover universal moral principles concerning right and wrong actions, principles that are likely to be surprising and complex (i.e. not the kind of principles we would think that ordinary people already follow). It seems we must choose between an anti-theoretical stance that reigns normative ethics in, or give up on the thought that our friends can be good people without the aid of philosophy. Neither of these options is attractive. Fortunately, there is an alternative.

 

Thursday 17th of July at 2pm: Professor Julian Savulescu (Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford)

Title: The Welfarist Account of Disability

 

Wednesday 2nd of July at 4pm: Dr Neil Levy (CAPPE, University of Melbourne)

Title:  Explaining Intuitions about Cognitive Enhancement

Abstract:

Many people have the intuition that cognitive enhancement – the use of mechanistic means to boost aspects of cognition – is objectionable. Yet the arguments often put forward in support of this intuition are typically rather weak. In line with Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionist model of moral judgment, I suggest that when people are satisfied with weak arguments for their views, the argument does not reflect the real causes of the intuitions they support, and is instead a post facto rationalization of it. I suggest that opposition to cognitive enhancement is caused by the perception that it violates our intuitive (substance) dualism. Since mind is felt (though not necessarily believed) to be a different substance to brain, mechanistic means of boosting cognition arouse unease in us, which causes or is mistaken for a moral judgment that such means are wrong. I suggest methods whereby this suggestion could be tested.

 

Friday 20th of June at 4pm: Professor Carol Gould (Center for Global Ethics and Politics, Temple University).

Title:  Envisioning Transnational Democracy: Cross-Border Communities and Regional Human Rights Frameworks

Abstract:

Two sources converge on an image of transnational democracy—one arising from the practice of contemporary activists and solidarity movements, and the second from a theoretical reflection on the requirements of global justice and human rights, along with the acknowledged need for more responsiveness of the institutions of global governance to those affected by their decisions. In this paper, I focus primarily on this second, primarily theoretical, source of thinking about transnational democracy and sketch some of its implications for institutional design. In this account, transnational democracy will be seen to have four elements, which I argue are each normatively required and cohere reasonably well with the other elements in practice. They are: a multiplicity of democratized overlapping cross-border social and economic associations and political communities; regional if not fully global human rights frameworks, which guarantee the economic and social rights required for justice; democratic accountability of the institutions of global governance to distant people importantly affected by their policies (with a specific criterion proposed for “importantly affected”), and new forms of overlapping transnational solidarities.

I go on to briefly address four questions posed by this model: 1) Does the proposal for democratizing cross-border communities and associations necessarily come into conflict with the equality that has traditionally characterized citizenship as membership in a polity? 2) Does this sort of multiplicity of contexts for democracy and the concomitant delimitation of the power of nation-states render it impossible to achieve the sorts of economic redistribution required by justice? 3) Would new regional human rights frameworks necessitate regional government or constitutions, which might in turn entail a consolidation or centralization of power? And 4) how can democratic deliberation and participation be understood to occur across groups that are not only culturally diverse but also have very unequal access to power and control over resources?

 

Wednesday 11th of June at 2pm: a JOINT CAPPE/Faculty/RSSS Seminar: Dr Laura Schroeter and Dr Francois Schroeter (University of Melbourne)

Title: A Third Way in Metaethics

Abstract:

What conditions must one meet in order to count as competent with the meaning of a thin evaluative predicate like ‘is the right thing to do’? According to minimalists like Allan Gibbard and Ralph Wedgwood, all that's required for competence is that one use the predicate to express one’s own motivational states. According to analytic descriptivists like Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit and Christopher Peacocke, competence requires speakers to grasp some determinate reference-fixing criterion for an action’s being right. Both approaches face serious difficulties. We suggest that these difficulties derive from a shared background assumption that competence conditions must be explained in terms of a determinate conceptual role. We propose a new way of characterizing competence conditions for evaluative terms: what’s required for competence is participation in a shared epistemic tradition with a term. Our approach, we argue, better explains the nature of evaluative inquiry and the extent of disagreement about evaluative questions.

 

Wednesday 4th of June at 4pm: Assistant Professor Iwao Hirose (McGill University and CAPPE, University of Melbourne).

Title:  Disability Discrimination in Health Care Allocation

Abstract:

I will examine the logical structure of the argument against unequal treatment on the basis of disability in health care allocation. I will first examine, and reject, the "two-level common-sense" objection, which best captures our intuition against disability discrimination in health care. Then, I will propose an argument against disability discrimination in health care. Finally, I will address some problems with my proposal.
 

Wednesday 28th of May at 4pm: Dr Clive Hamilton (Visiting Fellow, Regulatory Institutions Network, ANU).

Title:  Do We Prefer What We Choose?

Abstract:

In this paper I will argue, following David George, that we possess first and second-order preferences, with the latter representing a deeper order of preference. Modern economics recognises only first-order preferences, and advertising tends to persuade us to act on them alone, which is often contrary to our interests.

On this basis I will argue that, in addition to political liberty and individual liberty, there is a third form of liberty, “inner freedom”, defined by Hayek as the freedom to act according to one’s own considered will, by one’s reason or lasting conviction. I will suggest that self-deception and akrasia (weakness of will) erode inner freedom, and that in consumer society we are becoming less free.

 

Monday 19th of May at 2pm: Associate Professor Ian Hunt (Flinders University).

Title:  Why Social Justice Matters

Abstract:

This paper assesses Brian Barry ‘s attempt in Why Social Justice Matters to argue the importance of social justice, and to show what public policies for a modern capitalist society, such as the US or UK, flow from its requirements. Barry deplores the ideological assumptions that have obscured the importance of social justice but he does not address their intellectual roots. I claim that, if philosophers are to argue the importance of social justice for public policy, we must first address the philosophical ideas that have persuaded leaders of public opinion and policy makers in OECD countries to put their emphasis on efficiency, and to dismiss issues of equality or equity on the basis of its supposed efficiency cost. Leaving aside claims about the presumed benefits of perfectly competitive markets, I address Hayek’s nihilistic theory and Nozick’s defence of ‘natural liberty’, and show that both fail to dismiss any question of the fairness of free market capitalist societies other than arising from past wrongdoing.

Though Rawls’s Theory of Justice is forbiddingly complex, it provides a simple criterion of the fairness of the rules by which our societies operate to produce the inequalities Barry deplores. I claim that once we apply this criterion to our institutions, it becomes apparent that the task of achieving justice in accord with Rawls’s criterion requires such substantial change as to be beyond the capacity of changes to public policy. Other contemporary theories of social justice that question the justice of present societies do not clearly identify closer ideally just societies than Rawls’s ideal. I conclude that we have better prospects of achieving an ‘overlapping consensus’ for public policy purposes around a ‘non-ideal’ theory and principles for making unjust societies fairer.

 

Wednesday 14th of May at 4pm: Assistant Professor Fritz Allhoff (Western Michigan University, and CAPPE, ANU).

Title:  Rethinking Torture and Ticking Time-Bombs

Abstract:

It is often assumed that torture is permissible in ticking time-bomb (TTB) cases, though the intuitions undergirding this assumption have not been well-studied. Furthermore, even if the intuitions are widely held, it is not clear why. To wit, TTB cases collapses various morally relevant criterion, both consequential and deontological. Obviously the consequences matter, and there are important consequentialist features of the case, such as the multitude of lives that will be saved, the certainty of the outcomes, etc. However, there are also deontological features, such as the terrorist’s guilt and complicity. Intuitions regarding the permissibility of torture in this case, then, do not sufficiently elucidate what moral considerations are driving the intuitions.

This project offers to clarify which morally relevant considerations are psychologically efficacious. This is accomplished by devising four cases in which various of the features are teased apart. One of the cases is the traditional one, so results will be generated as to whether consent to torture is as ubiquitous as is assumed. A second case, though, trades the torture of the guilty terrorist for the torture of his innocent daughter: the hypothesis is that support for torture in this case will fall, which then shows that the (identical) consequences are not all that matter. Finally, an intervention is proposed which trades the certainty (of saving lives) in the traditional case with uncertainty (while keeping expected outcomes identical). If the lowered likelihood is psychologically efficacious, then that further undermines the claim that the intuitions are fully consequentialist in nature.

These surveys have recently been distributed to approximately 1000 students (in the US and Australia), and the analysis will be completely shortly. In addition to studying guilt/innocence and (un)certainty, we also hope to gain analysis vis-à-vis gender and nationality. Implications for the torture debate will be thereafter considered.

 

Wednesday 7th of May at 4pm: Dr Michael Selgelid (CAPPE, ANU).

Title:  Ethics, Tuberculosis, and Globalisation

Abstract:

This paper reviews ethically relevant history of tuberculosis and recent developments regarding extensively drug resistant tuberculosis.  It argues that tuberculosis is one of the most important neglected topics in bioethics.  With an emphasis on “extensively” drug resistant tuberculosis, it examines a range of the more challenging ethical issues associated with tuberculosis:  individual obligations to avoid infecting others, coercive social distancing measures, third-party notification, health workers duty to treat contagious patients, and international justice.  In each of these cases, key philosophical questions are highlighted and the need for empirical research/information is demonstrated.

 

Wednesday 30th of April at 4pm: Dr Jessica Wolfendale (CAPPE, University of Melbourne).

Title: Torture and Torture Lite

Abstract:

Since the terrorist attacks on September 11 2001, the phrase ‘torture lite’ has appeared in public discourse about torture, used by journalists, military intelligence personnel, and academics to distinguish between two kinds of torture: torture, which is violent, physically mutilating, cruel, and brutal, and torture lite, which refers to interrogation methods (such as extended sleep deprivation, noise bombardment, and forced standing) that are, it is claimed, more restrained and less severe than real torture. In this paper I argue that the distinction between torture and torture lite is attractive to liberal democracies because it bolsters what David Luban has called the “liberal ideology of torture” – the myth that torture can be compatible with the basic commitments of liberal states. However, as I shall demonstrate, torture lite techniques just as cruel and severe as more traditional forms of torture. Furthermore, the language of torture lite and the nature of torture lite techniques encourage a moral psychology in which the violence and cruelty of torture is denied; the victim’s suffering is hidden, minimised, and doubted; and the torturer’s responsibility is diminished. Far from referring to a milder form of torture, torture lite refers to techniques that are likely to encourage the normalisation of torture and the perpetuation of the myth of the liberal ideology of torture.

 

Wednesday 23rd of April at 4pm: Dr Luke Russell (University of Sydney).

Title:  Evil, Monsters and Dualism

Abstract:

In his book "The Myth of Evil", Phillip Cole claims that the concept of evil forms part of a dualistic worldview that divides normal people from inhuman, demonic and monstrous wrongdoers. Such monsters are found in fiction, Cole maintains, but not in reality, so evil is of no explanatory use. Cole is right to claim that there are no actual evil monsters or supernatural demons, but he overlooks the fact that several viable conceptions of evil action, motive and character do not commit us to the existence of monsters, literally speaking. But does the concept of evil implies an unrealistically dualistic worldview, with purely evil people on one side and ordinary people on the other? Cole is wrong to think that the use of extreme moral concepts is incompatible with fine-grained moral evaluations across a broad spectrum between the extremes. Moreover, we need to be more careful than Cole is in unpacking the various ways in which evil personhood could be pure or extreme. I will argue that some actual people are extremely bad, that no actual people are thoroughly bad, that it is very likely that some actual people are fixedly bad, but that this does not imply that anyone is innately bad. Even if we accept Cole's arguments that no one is thoroughly or innately bad, it still seems that some actual people are evil, and hence that evil is an explanatorily useful concept.

 

Wednesday 16th of April at 4pm: Professor Michael Smith (Princeton).

Title:  Secular vs Religious Approaches to Values and Reasons

Abstract:

Pope Benedict XVI has recently attacked the secular ideas of morality that are popular in Europe on the grounds that they are implausibly relativistic. Only if we provide morality with a religious foundation can we avoid this relativism, or so he insists. Pope Benedict is, however, also a firm believer in the idea that morality has a foundation in reason. But putting the idea that morality has a religious foundation together with a view of morality as grounded in reason we are inevitably led to a secular view of morality, or so I argue. I conclude by listing some of the ways in which religious and secular views of morality may differ, even if they agree that morality as such has a secular foundation.

 

Wednesday 2nd of April at 4pm: Dr Daniel Cohen (CAPPE, CSU and ANU).

Title:  Actualism, Possibilism and Newcomb's Problem

Abstract:

Morality often requires agents to perform complex sets of actions. Sometimes, however, performing only part of the set will be morally worse than doing nothing at all. For instance, even when an agent ought to do (x & y), it might be worse for her to do x but not y than for her to perform neither action. This possibility raises a puzzle. Imagine that such an agent knows that she won't actually do y. Given this, should she do x? Possibilists argue that, given that the agent is able to y, she ought nevertheless to do x. Actualists, on the other hand, argue that the agent ought not to x, given that she won't actually y. In this paper I argue that this debate can be modelled as a familiar debate about newcomb's problem. Thus it may be seen that possibilists are committed to evidential decision theory, while actualists are committed to causal decision theory. I close by offering a case where the possibilist solution is far more attractive than the actualist one. Given my analysis, this provides some indirect support for evidential decision theory.

 

Wednesday 26th of March at 4pm: Professor Larry S. Temkin (Rutgers University).

Title:  Is Living Longer, Living Better?

Abstract:

Some day, perhaps soon, we may have genetic enhancements enabling us to conquer aging.  Should we do so, if we can?  I believe the topic is both interesting and important, and that it behooves us to think about it.  Doing so may yield important insights about what we do care about, what we should care about, and how we should seek to live our lives, both individually and collectively.

My central question is this:  Is living longer, living better?  My paper does not offer a sustained argument for a single, considered, thesis.  Rather, it offers a number of snippets of often unconnected thoughts relevant to the issues my question raises.  The paper contains eight sections.  Part one is introductory.  Part two briefly comments on some current longevity research.  Part three indicates the attitudes towards death, and science, with which I approach these questions.  Part four discusses some of Leon Kass’s worries about the perils of immortality.  Part five, addresses Bernard Williams’s speculations about the tedium of immortality.  Part six, points to a number of practical and social concerns that might arise in a society whose members lived super long lives.  Part seven, discusses the shape of human life, and suggests that there may be impersonal reasons to prefer an outcome where countless different generations live finite lives, to an outcome where vastly fewer people live forever.  I argue that this may be so even if everyone in the latter outcome would be better off than everyone in the former outcome.  I end by expressing some doubts as to whether American society is living well, and whether, at least for the time being, longevity research should be pursued.

 

Wednesday 19th of March at 4pm: Professor Thomas Pogge (Yale and CAPPE, ANU).

Title: Growth and Inequality: Understanding Recent Trends and Political Choices

 

Wednesday 12th of March at 4pm: Professor Seumas Miller (CAPPE, ANU and CSU).

Title: Terrorism, War and States of Emergency (Chapter 5 of Terrorism and Counter-terrorism: Ethics and Liberal Democracy, Blackwell, 2008)

Abstract:

This paper addresses a variety of moral issues that arise for a liberal democratic state operating under a state of emergency or engaged in an armed conflict with a non-state actor in a theatre of war. A liberal democracy might justifiably be operating under a state of emergency in because it is confronting a one-off disaster, e.g. the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre, and/or because of a serious, ongoing, internal armed struggle, e.g. the IRA’s campaign of violence in Northern Ireland in the 1970’s.

If a state of emergency is to be morally justifiable it must be comprehensively legally circumscribed, both in relation to the precise powers granted to the government and its security agencies, and in relation to the termination of those powers and their judicial oversight while in use.

A liberal democracy might be engaged in an armed conflict with a non-state actor in a theatre of war because of serious, ongoing, terrorist attacks on the part of an external, non-state actor, e.g. Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on Israeli towns. In theatres of war, terrorists are de facto military combatants (terrorist-combatants). Moreover, since terrorist organisations are, or ought to be unlawful, terrorist-combatants are unlawful combatants. Since the terrorism-as-war framework (as opposed to a terrorism-as-crime framework) applies to theatres of war, it is justifiable to implement (say) a shoot-on-sight policy in relation to known terrorists; moreover, it might be morally justifiable to deploy the practice of targeted killings (assassinations) of individual terrorists.

The terrorism-as-war framework should be applied only under the following general conditions: (1) The terrorism-as-crime framework cannot adequately contain serious and ongoing terrorist attacks; (2) The application of the terrorism-as-war framework is likely to be able adequately to contain the terrorist attacks; (3) The application of the terrorism-as-war framework is proportionate to the terrorist threat; (4) The terrorism-as-war framework is applied only to an extent, e.g. with respect to a specific theatre of war but not necessarily to all areas that have suffered, or might suffer, a terrorist attack, and over a period of time, that is necessary; (5) All things considered, the application of the terrorism-as-war framework will have good consequences security-wise and better overall consequences, e.g. in terms of loss of life, restrictions on freedoms, economic impact, institutional damage, than the competing options.

 

Wednesday 5th of March at 4pm: Associate Professor Bengt Brülde (University of Gothenburg).

Title:  The ultimate goals of public health activities

Abstract:

What is population health, and how can it be measured? This question can be divided into two, namely (a) on what individual variables (e.g. health, life expectancy, or QALY) should such a measure be based, and (b) how we should develop an index of population health based on these individual measures. However, the answers to these questions are, to a large extent, dependent on values, and (a) and (b) can hardly be separated from the normative questions how one should try to benefit the relevant individuals, and what kind of distribution of e.g. health that is most desirable. That is, we end up in the question of the ultimate goals of public health (a question that is not quite identical with the question of what population health is, or how it should be measured).
In what dimension or dimensions should public health try to benefit the relevant individuals? Here, I argue that weighted HALE's is the most relevant individual variable. It is worth noting that some distributive considerations are incorporated into this variable, e.g. ideas of how different life years should be weighted.
The question of the distributive goal of public health: What distribution of the relevant individual variable is most desirable in a public health context? On this question, I argue that the priority view and egalitarianism are the two most interesting views.

 

Wednesday 20th of February at 4pm: Professor John Kleinig (CAPPE, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and CUNY Graduate Centre).

Title:  What Does Wrongdoing Deserve?

Abstract:

The question may seem dated or its answer obvious. In any case, it has a well-worn response, namely, that wrongdoing deserves punishment. For reasons that I will endeavor to make clear, I want to stay with the question. I hope, however, to finesse the answer in some non standard ways .

There are diverse reasons for thinking that the initial question is dated, though the paper will attempt to address only a few of them. Many of them come together, however by urging us to dispense with the idea that wrongdoing deserves punishment. I will not use the present opportunity to discuss some of the more radical responses to the initial question – such as those that would seek to replace our traditional notion of wrongdoing with supposedly more scientific conceptualizations of human behavior and its control. I will assume that it makes good sense hold onto a notion of moral wrongdoing and that when confronted by it we are justified in asking what kind of response to it is appropriate. What I will explore is whether the language of desert can be given a credible place in our thinking about the appropriateness of a response to wrongdoing and, if so, what that deserved response might be. Does it follow seamlessly from the question of what wrongdoing deserves that punishment is the best or only appropriate answer? I suggest that it does not.

 

Wednesday 13th of February at 4pm: Dr Edward Spence (University of Twente and CAPPE, Charles Sturt University).

Title: Meca-Ethics: The Moral Life of Androids

Abstract:

In this paper I shall argue hypothetically and conditionally that insofar as fully autonomous artificial life agents or androids for short are a practical possibility if not now then at least sometime in the future, then they will have a moral status equivalent to that of human beings. I shall argue that if the necessary and sufficient condition for having a moral status is the property or capacity for autonomous purposive agency, then insofar as androids have that property or capacity they should be accorded the same moral status as human beings.

Another issue the paper will explore is trust. Can we trust androids? Specifically, can we trust androids to behave ethically towards us and likewise can we trust ourselves to do the same? Trust is a major problem for Robot-Human Interactions (RHI). For insofar as it is practically possible to create and develop artificial life agents with enhanced intelligence and powers that might exceed that of humans, whom we cannot trust to always behave ethically towards us, we run the serious risk of creating androids that are potentially a threat and a risk to the freedom and wellbeing of human beings even a risk to the survival of the human species.

Can androids trust us and can we trust ourselves not to misuse or abuse androids for our merely self-centered ends, for example, using them as sex-slaves, or armed-combatants in fighting our wars, with or without their willing participation? How can we ensure our own ethical treatment of androids, which if I am right requires us to respect their prima-facie rights to freedom and wellbeing as autonomous purposeful agents and their absolute right to dignity?  The answer, I will argue, is trust. That is, we need to develop and establish a robust trust between humans and androids sufficient for securing our mutual minimal respect for each other thus avoiding or at least minimizing, the risk of ethical misuse, abuse or degradation of each other.

 

Wednesday 6th of February at 4pm: Professor Tom Campbell (CAPPE, Charles Sturt University).

Title:  Rights and Recognition

Abstract:

It is common within grass roots political movements to demand ‘rights and recognition’ for neglected or marginal social groups. The intimation is that there is something that connects these two concepts, the one reinforcing and supporting the other in a mutual and symbiotic relationship that provides a rhetorically powerful combination of terms which appeals to aspirations of both empowerment and social status.  This coming together of the language of rights and the language of recognition prompts interesting questions about the empirical, theoretical and normative relationships between these two salient terms.

 

Friday 1st of February at 4pm:Professor Samantha Brennan (University of Western Ontario).

Title:  Feminist Ethics and Everyday Inequalities

Abstract:

How should feminist philosophers regard the many and various inequalities that structure the everyday lives of women? Some of these inequalities are trivial and others are not, but regardless of whether they are individually trivial, together they form a framework of unequal treatment that shapes women’s lives.  Of course, gender is not the only variable that affects equality of treatment and outcome. Race, physical ability, class, and sexual orientation are other factors that play a role and when these factors combine, the situation is even more complicated. Also, inequality is not the only morally relevant aspect of women’s oppression and feminist theorists and activists may need to make difficult decisions about which aspects of women’s oppression to focus our efforts. This paper focuses on the inequalities that affect women as women and asks what priority we should give them. Specifically, it examines Claudia Card's view that we ought to give evils  priority  over inequalities.

 

 

2007

 

Friday 14th of December at 4pm: Dr Paula Casal (University of Reading).

Title:  Rawls, Cohen, Mill and the Egalitarian Trilemma

Abstract:

Like J. S. Mill, G. A. Cohen has criticised the justice of incentive payments. Cohen’s critique, which focuses on the work of John Rawls, has encountered two core Rawlsian objections. The Liberty Objection holds that if we allow occupational freedom – which we must do – unequal incentive payments are the best, perhaps the only, way of attracting individuals to deploy their scarce talents in a socially efficient manner. Thus, freedom, efficiency and equality cannot be jointly preserved. Faced with this trilemma, Rawlsians sacrifice equality. Their Basic Structure Objection restricts the possibility of rescuing equality further still. It claims that whilst it is mandatory to employ a wide range of public institutions to eliminate various social and economic inequalities detrimental to the least advantaged, it is impermissible to regulate all aspects of our personal lives to eliminate such inequalities.
Cohen, by contrast, not only thinks that equality can and should be rescued. He believes the trilemma can be solved, and has offered a very plausible reply to each Rawlsian objection. Unfortunately, each reply denies what the other one affirms. This leads Cohen to a strategic contradiction. Rawlsians, however, do not fare any better. Their two pronged self-defence also leads them –or so I argue– into a strategic contradiction of their own. Thus, Cohen’s efforts to solve the trilemma, and the Rawlsian attempts to stop him, leave both parties trapped into their respective dilemmas. Fortunately, there is one possible way out of this impasse, and it is one they can both take. It involves following Mill towards a new position, which can be supported both on Cohenian and on Rawlsians grounds.

 

Wednesday 12th of December at 3pm: Assoc Prof Aidan Hollis (University of Calgary).

Title:  Pharmaceutical Innovation without Monopoly

Abstract:

The pharmaceutical industry needs some help. Drug firms invest where they can make a return instead of where the needs are greatest, so the diseases which mainly afflict the poor are of little interest. The business model which is most profitable involves huge expenditures on competitive marketing, well above that which is spent on research. When a useful new drug is developed, firms can only recoup their investment by charging very high prices, which means that many potential consumers are excluded from purchasing the drug. I discuss some alternative mechanisms that have been proposed, focusing particularly on an optional reward mechanism which would involve direct payments based on the actual therapeutic impact of a drug.

 

Friday 7th of December at 2pm: Dr Karen Jones (University of Melbourne).

A Joint CAPPE/RSSS/Faculty of Philosophy Seminar

Title: From Trust to Trustworthiness

Abstract:

Despite much recent work, there is no sign yet of convergence in philosophical accounts of trust. In this paper I argue that philosophers’ comparative silence on trustworthiness is part of the explanation for our failure of convergence on trust. If we think of trust and trustworthiness as paired concepts that are to be investigated in tandem, with each setting constraints on the correct understanding of the other, then we can find the additional constraints we need to help resolve some outstanding disagreements in the philosophy of trust, including most especially disagreement over the motivational structure trust imputes to the one-trusted. We find the extra constraints by first examining the point of having these paired concepts. Once we approach the problem of understanding the pair from the trustworthiness end, their normative role comes more clearly into view. Trustworthiness and trust are not reducible to reliability and reliance because they identify, in order to promote, a distinctive way that our cognitive sophistication make it possible for us to respond to the fact of interpersonal dependency. I argue that this role is best served by an account of trustworthiness as competence together with direct responsiveness to the fact that the other is counting on you. So understood, “trustworthiness” names something less than a virtue, but it nonetheless identifies a source of motivation that it is of vital interest to finite social beings, such as ourselves, who have everything to gain – or to lose – from engaging in relationships of dependency.

 

Wednesday 5th of December at 11am: Professor Latif Samian (Director of the Center for General Studies at the University Kebangsaan, Malaysia).

Title: Negotiating ethnic relations and professional ethics - the Malaysian experience

 

Friday30th of November at 4pm: Professor Paul Griffiths (University of Sydney).

Title: Is there a Problem with Public Understanding of Genetics? (Paul Griffiths, Joan Leach and Polly Ambermoon)

Abstract:

Recent literature on science communication and the public understanding of science has rejected a 'deficit model' in which the aim of science communication is to bring the views of the public into line with those of scientific experts. Instead, it is argued, the aim should be to empower a disparate range of publics to construct representations of science that effectively serve their own needs. In the history and philosophy of biology, however, the shortcomings of prevalent ideas about genetics and genomics remain the focus of considerable concern. We argue that these concerns should not be tarred with the same brush as the 'deficit model'. They do not result from 'privileging' the representations of scientific experts, but rather from questioning the adequacy of current representations of genes, genomes and gene action by all groups, expert and non-expert alike. It is argued that these two literatures complement one another, that the rejection of the 'deficit model' should not lead to complacency about the adequacy of the understanding of genetics, and that the aims of science communication can legitimately include amelioration as well as empowerment.

 

Friday 23rd of November at 4pm: Professor Larry May (Washington University, St Louis and CAPPE).

Title: ‘Instigation, Incitement, and Complicity in the Rwandan Genocide’
Abstract:

If genocide is seen on the model of the Holocaust, responsibility should be primarily assigned to those who directly instigated by planning the genocide. But it appears that in Rwanda there was no central plan to destroy Tutsis. I will argue that those who incited the genocide were more plausibly punished severely than those who indirectly instigated the crime or those who were merely complicit.
It may appear that in genocides like that in Rwanda, the small fish who carry out the violence are aptly named the principals, since there are no true principals who plan the genocide. But while it does indeed make sense to prosecute small fish, those who incited them are more like the principals than are those who carry out the violence, since incitement like planning sets the stage for the violence.
Throughout, I will provide conceptual analyses of instigation, incitement, and complicity, as well as normative arguments for thinking that in some cases, like the Rwandan genocide, those who incited should be considered principally culpable. This paper is drawn from several draft chapters of my book, tentatively titled “Genocide, Social Groups, and Criminal Trials” which is itself the fourth volume of my long-term project on the normative foundations of international criminal law.
 

Friday 16th of November at 4pm: Dr Gerhard Øverland (CAPPE, University of Melbourne).

Title: ‘Contribution and Culpability Divided’
Abstract:

In this talk I try to shed light on the moral difference between doing and allowing harm by looking at a variant that is frequently invoked in the discussion of defensive force, namely the one between innocent contributors and bystanders. I put forward an asymmetrical fair share procedure for solving conflicts between innocent contributors and their victims, according to which a contributor has a duty to shoulder a fair share of the harm in question. I then propose that contribution and moral culpability should be divided, and that the implications of these factors operate independently of each other. Together these two proposals add up to a particular view on the moral difference between doing and allowing. Implications of allowing are restricted to implications of culpability, as there is no contribution, while implications of doing may consist of the combined implications of contribution and culpability.
This first proposal only claims that there is a difference regarding the duty to shoulder cost. I go on to discuss whether moral culpability for doing and allowing is similar when consequences, probabilities, and cost to the agent in having to forbear to act are similar. I indicate one reason for thinking that it is not by invoking the notion of “distance failure”. That is, the distance between the actual cost contributors and bystanders fail to take on and the maximum cost they would have duty to shoulder in the first place.
Much of what I say in the talk will be tentative, as I try to investigate how much of a difference between doing and allowing that can be established by the simple observation that there is a difference between the duty to shoulder cost by innocent contributors and bystanders.

 

Friday 9th of November at 4pm: Dr David Rodin (University of Oxford).

Title: ‘Explaining the Absolute Prohibition of Torture’
 

Friday 2nd of November at 4pm: Laura Valentini (University College London).

Title: ‘Global Justice and Kant’s Doctrine of Right’
Abstract:

Since the publication of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant has enjoyed increasing popularity in liberal political theory, and debates on international justice are no exception. While cosmopolitans often defend principles of global justice by appeal to the universal scope of Kant’s moral law, social liberals draw on Kant’s Perpetual Peace to support their minimalist take on international distributive obligations. These theorists rightly consider Kant’s philosophy as a promising source of ideas for addressing issues of global justice. However, unlike (many of) them, I believe that the most interesting insights Kant has to offer to international political theory do not belong to his accounts of personal and of international morality, but to his views on domestic justice. Following this suggestion, in this paper I (1) outline a general approach to justice based on Kant’s Doctrine of Right, and (2) consider its implications for questions of global justice. I argue that the picture of global justice we obtain following this Kantian approach falls somewhere in between cosmopolitan and social liberalism: while the approach supports the idea that the concept of justice is global in scope, it does not warrant the stronger claim that liberals’ domestic conceptions of justice should apply globally.

Friday the 26th of October at 4pm: Professor Marilyn Friedman (Washington University, St Louis and CAPPE, ANU).

Title: Female Terrorists: What Difference Does Gender Make?
Abstract:

This paper begins with some preliminary comments on the definition and possible justification of terrorism. Then it moves on to consider terrorist acts committed by women, including suicide terrorist bombings. The question explored here is whether terrorist acts committed by women take on any special meanings or morally relevant aspects that are lacking in terrorist acts committed by men.

Friday the 19th of October at 4pm: Professor John Broome (University of Oxford).

Title: Measuring the burden of disease
Abstract:

For many important practical purposes we need to measure how much harm is done by particular diseases, and by disease in general. For one thing, this will help us decide where to concentrate our efforts to control disease. But measuring the 'burden of disease' raises a number of difficult philosophical questions. I shall talk about some of them. My main message will be that we cannot and should not concentrate on measuring just the ill-health that is caused by disease (as the World Health Organization tries to do). We have to include all the other sorts of harm that disease does to people.

Friday the 12th of October at 4pm: Dr Simon Keller (CAPPE, University of Melbourne).

Title: ‘Welfare as Success’
Abstract:

The philosophical debate about the nature of welfare is not in good shape. All the standard theories– mental state theories, desire theories and objective list theories – are subject to devastating objections, and philosophers have had little success in finding attractive alternatives. In the first half of this paper, I identify reasons why the debate has reached this stalemate. I suggest that some of the trouble is due to the presence of two goals, that turn out to conflict deeply: first, the goal of analysing the ordinary concept of welfare (to the extent that there is such a thing), and second, the goal of finding something that can play a certain demanding theoretical role. And, I suggest that trouble arises from the existence of two strong but conflicting intuitions: the intuition that individuals must somehow be the source of the standards for their own welfare, and the intuition that individuals can be thoroughly mistaken about what is good for them.
In the second half of the paper, I try to sketch a way forward. The apparently conflicting subjectivist and objectivist intuitions are also seen, I argue, in the case of norms of belief, and the way to pay justice to both sides on that issue is to recognize that beliefs are constitutively such as to aim at the truth. We could get around the dilemma for theories of welfare, I suggest, if we could ground welfare in similar attitudes: subjective attitudes that generate objective standards for their own success and failure. I look at various ways in which this strategy might be explored, and suggest that it yields about as good a theory of welfare as we could – in light of the material in the first part of the paper – expect.