Speaker: Gary O'Brien (Wolfson)
Title: When Moral Intuitions go on Holiday
Abstract: The use of moral intuitions seems indispensable to doing moral philosophy, yet there is no consensus on what they are or what justificatory force they have. Without such a complete theory of moral intuitions we cannot tell the good ones from the bad. I won't be providing such a theory. Instead I will make some modest, theory neutral claims about what conditions our use of moral intuitions should meet in order to be successful. Using these relatively uncontroversial criteria of successful use I will argue that some of our most commonly used species of moral intuitions are bad ones.
Speaker: Benjamin Lange (Lady Margaret Hall)
Title: Liability and Overdetermination
Abstract: This paper focuses on a variant of what I call Overdetermination cases. In such cases, a sequence of attacking aggressors 'A1, A2,...,An' threaten to kill an innocent victim so that she (or an intervening third party) has to kill all of them in order to survive. These cases cause significant problems for existing accounts of defensive harm (see McMahan (2016)). Against this background, I propose and motivate a view on which there is no limit to the number of aggressors one might justifiably kill in self-defense when such aggressors are fully responsible, but on which there does exist a limit for the number one might permissibly kill when such aggressors are only minimally responsible.
Organising department: Faculty of Philosophy
Part of: The Ockham Society
