Early Career Work in Progress Seminar (Tuesday - Week 5, TT26)
Tuesday 26 May, 4.30pm - 6.00pm
Ryle Room (20.339), Schwarzman Centre
Jordan Walters (Nuffield College): 'What’s wrong with misanthropy?'
Abstract: How should we regard one another? Orthodoxy has it that we are owed a special sort of respect or love simply in virtue of our possession of an equal dignity. To fail to see others in this way is to make a serious moral mistake. Yet there is a long line of misanthropes who endorse the idea that hatred, in one form or another, is an apt response to at least some human beings: namely, the dominators, oppressors, tyrants, dictators, and so on. Call this the misanthropic challenge. This paper has three related aims. The first is to develop the misanthropic challenge in its strongest form; the second is to argue that we ought to take it seriously; and the third is to offer an answer to the following question: What, if anything, is wrong with misanthropy? I shall argue that the misanthrope goes wrong in their commitment to taking up a point of view on others that privileges their capacity for cruelty at the expense of their capacity for redemption. The misanthrope thus has an impoverished way of regarding others, one that downplays the role that grace, forgiveness, and love ought to play in a recognizably human life.
Registration: If you do not hold a university card, please contact the seminar convenor or admin@philosophy.ox.ac.uk at least two working days before a seminar to register your attendance.
