Matt Bradley: 'Deliberation, Discovery, Authenticity'
Chair: Barnaby Burleigh
In his book Authority and Estrangement (2001) and elsewhere, Richard Moran has attempted to develop an account of self-knowledge which makes sense of the ‘authority’ of the first-person perspective. He argues that the reason I can authoritatively report on my own attitudes – say, my belief about who I shall vote for at the next election – is because I can exercise my capacities as a rational agent to deliberate and make up my mind on the matter. But much of Moran’s discussion is dedicated to what goes wrong when an agent clings on to irrational attitudes or is otherwise ‘blocked’ from responding to a situation in the manner characteristic of rational agents. In this talk I connect Moran’s work in this vein with some influential thoughts of Iris Murdoch’s about the role of ‘vision’ in (moral) life. Having done so I try to draw out some lessons about the nature of a person’s authentic commitments, including the fact that they often seem the product of a process of discovery, rather than deliberation.
