As Nietzsche observed, our ethical tradition has often been dominated by the idea of evil as malign force, energetic malice. I contrast this essentially Judaeo-Christian conception with the Greek conception of evil as incompetence, suggesting that there is much to be said for the latter.
Bizarre killings, either imagined or historical, feature in Philosophy seminars and in Law tutorials. Philosophers may stress that they are interested in the ethical or conceptual aspects, while lawyers will say that ‘this is a court of law, not of morals’. Legal discussion necessarily takes place within a framework of authority, and national jurisdiction, which has little or no relevance to philosophical debate. Nevertheless, students of both disciplines (and members of the public and juries) may struggle to distinguish the legal and ethical elements, particularly if there is an appeal to intuition or ‘common sense’. In addition, each discipline may sometimes present a simplistic version of the other perspective, for its own purposes. In this paper, Phil will ask what is at stake when different disciplines discuss responsibility for killing, and what we can learn by considering these disciplinary perspectives together.
What is harm? Or, when is it correct to say that a person, or a thing has been harmed? I defend a familiar account against a recently advanced rival.
I claim –a) all and only things having a good of their own – people, animals, plants – can be harmed; b) they enter a harmed condition when their level of well-being becomes less good than it would have been, were some harming event not to have occurred; c) harm involves ones undergoing some intrinsic change – relational change isn’t enough.
Three important consequences of this: death can harm us; there are no posthumous harms; undiscovered betrayal doesn’t harm us.
What can justify these claims? I contend that all there is to harm is what, ordinarily but after reflection, we want to say about it. Hence my title, and the familiarity of much of what I say. An alternative account, that we need a philosophical investigation into the nature of harm, is one that I consider and reject.
This talk will be of interest to all those needing to know what harm is, and when it occurs.
Summary
Moral responsibility is often conceptualised in terms of control. The basic intuition at the heart of this approach is that a person may only be held responsible for things that are under her control, and only in so far as they are under her control. In this paper, I look into some apparent counterexamples, and argue that these are better accounted for by a theory of moral responsibility that, like Aristotle’s, operates with two separate, equally fundamental notions of control rather than by alternative theories that reject control as irrelevant.
Prof James R Hamilton of Kansas State University is the world’s leading philosopher of theatre. Visiting the UK, he will be giving a talk at the Open University entitled ‘What Goes on There?’
Abstract
A general account of spectating conceived as information processing. Approaching spectating as information processing allows for those kinds of activities that require grasp of performer intentions (where “performer” is construed broadly enough to include directors, lighting designers, actors, etcetera), but does not preclude those kinds of activities that neither require such grasp or would be precluded were we to conceive of spectating as essentially involving grasp of intentions. The account is broad enough in scope to include spectating non-narrative theater of almost any kind without denying those features peculiar to the grasp and appreciation of narrative theater.
Professor Dodd works in metaphysics, the philosophy of language and aesthetics, and has a particular interest in truthmaker theory, the ontology of music and the philosophy of music generally. He is currently working on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, McDowell’s identity conception of truth, and topics in the philosophy of music.
There are a number of initiatives worldwide which aim to promote healthy living, compliance with medical or other official advice, or uptake of public services by offering patients, service users and citizens structured personal financial incentives. Examples include incentives to give up smoking, take regular exercise, stay drug-free, or (especially in the developing world) to ensure children’s attendance at primary school or to agree to long-acting contraceptive injections. Some of these objectives are inherently controversial or even immoral; but most are not. Nonetheless the schemes are often controversial even where their objectives are not. The use of money as an incentive seems to involve a problematic attitude to the person receiving the incentive on the part of the payer. But it also seems to involve the payee acting for the wrong (type of) reason. Surely I should give up smoking because I want to give up, not to get hold of some money? And surely I should make sure my child goes to school because it is good to go to school? In this paper I want to examine more deeply this type of objection to incentive schemes: what is it to “do the right thing for the wrong reason”? And when, if ever, do incentive schemes truly fall foul of this objection?
Richard Ashcroft is Professor of Bioethics in the School of Law at Queen Mary, University of London, and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Incentives in Health, funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Argumentation theorists typically think of arguments as verbal exchanges. However, there is an increasing move to consider diagrams and other visual devices in argumentation. A leading figure in this movement is Leo Groarke, who uses the approach to argumentation developed by van Eeemeren and Grootendorst.
In this paper, I argue using mathematical examples that this approach fails. In fact, it excludes the very possibility of visual argumentation properly so called. I offer a diagnosis, and suggest that the approach to argument pioneered by C.S. Peirce offers a way forward that does justice to visual argumentation and satisfies the broad aims of the movement for the study of argumentation. The full paper is available at: http://herts.academia.edu/BrendanLarvor/Papers/803187
The computer scientist Virnor Vinge’s idea of a technologically led intelligence explosion (Vinge 1993) is philosophically important because it requires us to consider the prospect of a posthuman condition succeeding the human one. What is the ‘humanity’ to which the posthuman is ‘post’? Does the possibility of a posthumanity presuppose that there is a ‘human essence’, or is there some other way of conceiving the human-posthuman difference?
