MSC Minutes 2020-2021
- Kwame Anthony Appiah
- Amie Thomasson
- Sally Haslanger
- Stephen Yablo
- Roxane Noël
- Hartry Field
- Caspar Hare
- Lisa Bortolotti
- Zoe Walker
- Lucy Allais
- Justin Snedegar
- David Plunkett and Tristram McPherson
- Alexander Bird
- Cian Dorr
- Alexander Horne
- Helen Frowe
- Joe Horton
- Lucy McDonald
- Ralf Bader
- Nancy Cartwright
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 13th October 2020
Speaker: Kwame Anthony Appiah – “The Philosophy of Work”
Chair: Prof Rae Langton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the last meeting were read and approved, and the poem of the previous secretaries was read with great joy. Kwame Anthony Appiah of the New York University gave a talk entitled "The Philosophy of Work". Appiah argued that, in the 20th century, paid work served four critical functions: (1) work was necessary to produce goods and services; (2) it provided income for employees and shareholders; (3) work created a sense of community; and (4) it gave significance and identity to the life of the workers.
Based on this analysis, Appiah introduced, what he called, the Hard Problem, which consists in the fact that, in the 21st century, there are fewer and fewer jobs that can unite all four of these functions. Automation makes labour (partially) redundant for the production of goods; jobs in the gig economy often don't provide the necessary income and communities; and many so-called bullshit jobs lack meaning and significance.
Solving the Hard Problem, Appiah suggested, is, well, hard, and will require the joint effort of philosophy and the other humanities. He proposed that we imagine new ways of serving those four critical functions, like: helping workers to improve their skills and find new opportunities; having the government as an employer of last resort; introducing the UBI; to name just a few.
A discussion followed. Questions were asked about the difficulty of transitioning into new jobs; about the lack of financial support for essential workers; about the analogy to the Hard Problem in the philosophy of mind; about problems of inequality; and about the precise nature of meaningfulness and significance. Matthew Kramer cited his own experience to argue that, despite having to deal with shit, cleaning toilets is actually not a shit job. The meeting closed at 4:15pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 21st October 2020
Speaker: Amie Thomasson – ‘Should Ontology be Explanatory’
Chair: Dr Jessie Munton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez,
and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved. Amie Thomasson from Dartmouth College gave a talk entitled ‘Should Ontology be Explanatory?’. Her answer was as emphatic as it was unsurprising: “No, ontology need not be explanatory!”. Thomasson rejected Quine’s influential criterion according to which we should only accept the existence of entities which play an explanatory role.
Why are the Moral Sciences Club secretaries great? Because they possess the property of greatness. So there are properties. Similar inferences would show that there are meanings, numbers and so on. But according to Quine’s criterion, we should not so easily accept their existence, for the statements in which they figure are not genuine explanations, but merely nominalised descriptions of the phenomena they are meant to explain.
Nevertheless, Thomasson claimed that linguistic studies show that these inferences are acceptable, and that it is a mistake to expect all posits to play explanatory roles. By nominalising we are able to do things that cannot be done otherwise, such as identifying causal relations, qualifying, quantifying, and asking questions about processes, actions and events. In fact, Thomasson observed, science is filled with novel nominalisations. And, if nominalisations are so essential to our language, she argued, then the above-mentioned trivial inferences must be regarded as acceptable; and, pace Quine’s criterion, the relevant entities ought to be admitted into our ontology.
A discussion followed, where mostly sympathy was expressed towards Thomasson’s proposal. Rae Langton, however, noted that we commit to the existence of certain entities on the basis of neither Quine’s criterion, nor Thomasson’s, but of moral considerations—and cited other minds as an example of this. Wouter Cohen, moreover, suggested that Thomasson’s criterion might not help us determine whether God exists or not; and Jessie Munton then lamented that it was already week two of Michaelmas Term and we had not yet settled the issue of the existence of God. The meeting closed at 4.15 pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 27st October 2020
Speaker: Sally Haslanger – ‘Political Epistemology and Social Critique’
Chair: Dr Jessie Munton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved, and Sally Haslanger from MIT gave a talk entitled ‘Political Epistemology and Social Critique’. In her talk, she introduced a practice-based account of ideology and tackled the justification problem for social critique: how does oppositional consciousness arise and how can it be justified epistemologically?
Haslanger’s account consists of eight not necessarily consecutive steps: First, a gut refusal to one’s circumstances. Second, testing whether this refusal is shared and is part of a positional (instead of individual) vulnerability. Third, shifting one's orientation to notice facts that have been occluded. Fourth, where old identities do not suffice, creating new identities. Fifth, reducing biases and epistemic injustices. Sixth, developing a hypothesis about the source of the problem. Seventh, testing this hypothesis. And finally, articulating a pro tanto claim challenging the practice.
A discussion followed, questions were asked, consciousnesses were raised, and ideologies were shifted. Haslanger was asked to clarify the role of objective normative facts and the analogy between oppositional consciousness and Kuhnian paradigm shifts. Some questions targeted possible risks of consciousness raising, such as the creation of echo chambers and the imposition of values. Alex Horne asked whether children’s moral gut refusal towards not getting five cookies is just whining, or can be developed into a legitimate pro tanto complaint against an unjust practice. Finally, a number of questions concerned the nature of consciousness raising and, in particular, whether we need external empirical justification and in what sense it needs to be collective.
The meeting closed at 4:17 pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 3rd November 2020
Speaker: Stephen Yablo – ‘How and Why to be Logically Non-Omniscient’
Chair: Dr Jessie Munton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved. Stephen Yablo from MIT gave a talk entitled ‘How and Why to be Logically Non-Omniscient’. In his talk, Yablo outlined the problem of logical omniscience. Namely, how can we think about belief as to make room for, and explain, the fact that it doesn’t seem to be closed under a number of logical operators? Whilst the secretaries of the Club cannot claim to have experienced the problem – being the omniscient epistemic agents that they are – they were eager to hear Yablo’s solution.
Why was it the case that Richard the III believed he could avoid war with France, whilst not believing he could avoid nuclear war with France? Yablo hoped his topic-sensitive account of belief would answer such a question. But, first, Yablo was careful to show, by way of a comparison to Frege’s puzzle, that his project divides into two: one cognitive and the other semantic.
Beginning with the semantic project, Yablo presented his own semantics of belief. An agent believes a statement iff they bear a specific relation to the content of the statement. According the Yablo, we should conceive of the content of the statement as two sets of states: the set of states which, if they obtained, would make the statement true (the ‘truthmakers’); and the set of states which, if they obtained, would make it false (the ‘falsemakers’.) In turn, agents believe such content, if the agent’s belief state is vindicated by each member of the set of truthmakers and refuted by each member of the set of falsemakers. Turning to his cognitive project, Yablo explained that agents enter a belief-state if her best guess about what the actual states of affairs will be is that they would be truth-makers. Building upon this, Yablo outlined the ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’ strategies for arriving at best guesses about what the actual states of affairs will be.
A discussion commenced, truthmakers and falsemakers were identified, and it seemed that the audience bore the belief relation to the content of Yablo’s talk. Yablo was asked to clarify the spirit of his proposal, alongside its application to other propositional attitudes. Other questions centred upon the relation between the cognitive and semantic parts of Yablo’s account. En route to answering such questions, there was talk aplenty of decapitated heads and betraying friends, and an explanation of why the Bush administration didn’t wish to leave only adults behind was offered.
The meeting closed at 4:16 pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 10th November 2020
Speaker: Roxane Noel – ‘Say It Like You Mean It: An Investigation of Abelard’s Legacy in Twelfth-Century Logic’
Chair: Dr Jessie Munton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved. Roxane Noel from Wolfson College gave a talk entitled ‘Say It Like You Mean It: An Investigation of Abelard’s Legacy in Twelfth-Century Logic’. In her talk, Noel examined the medieval school of Nominales, whose founder Abelard thought that universals, such as genera and species, are names, not things. More specifically, Noel discussed Abelard’s distinction between sermones and voces.
While the terms sermones and voces have a colloquial Latin sense – sermones meaning something like “single word” or “discourse” and voces referring to “vocal sounds” or “spoken words” – Abelard gives both terms a technical meaning. Based on passages from the Summa Dialectica Artis, Noel suggested that Abelard distinguishes sermones and voces by their origin: sermones are phrases who get their meaning from human institution (similar to a Kripkean baptism); voces, on the other hand, have their origin in natural causes, such as the engagement of our vocal cords and the flow of air. Thus understood, voces are singular events, and only sermones can be carriers of universality. Noel showed that this clear distinction gets muddied by later authors, pointing to passages in the text D’Orvillensis.
A discussion commenced, complex sermons were expressed, and voces were uttered. Questions were asked about the structure of medieval arguments, the relevant notion of institution, and the connection to contemporary distinctions. Responding to Ryan Haeker’s question, why the distinction disappeared, Noel hypothesised that Abelard’s unholy lifestyle might have contributed to the downfall of his philosophy.
The meeting closed at 4:07pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 17th November 2020.
Speaker: Hartry Field – ‘Naive Properties’
Chair: Prof Rae Langton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved, and Hartry Field from NYU gave a talk entitled ‘Naive Properties’. In his talk, Field presented his solution to the problem that – in classical logic – the abstraction and instantiation schemata of the naive theory of properties are jointly inconsistent. The first one of these principles says that for any predicate P there is a property that corresponds to it; the second one states that, if there is a property of being P, then, necessarily, an individual x has that property just in case P of x. Renouncing either of these schmata seems unacceptable; so Field suggested to restrict classical logic instead.
Gilmore and Kripke, as well as Skolem and Chang, attempted to keep both of these principles in a non-classical setting; but they succeeded only in logically weak languages: the former in a language without well-behaved conditionals nor restricted quantifiers; and the latter in a language with a well-behaved conditional, but without any quantifiers. According to Field, the fact that these two solutions agree within their common domains suggests that there is a common generalisation. Field devoted his talk to showing how to achieve such generalisation.
A discussion followed. Questions were asked regarding the costs and benefits of non-classical logic, and whether there are any reasons for adopting Field’s logic independent of its ability to accommodate both the abstraction and the instantiation schemata.
The meeting closed at 4.15 pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 24tht October 2020
Speaker: Caspar Hare - ‘Pleasing the Crowd Within’
Chair: Dr Jessie Munton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved, and Caspar Hare from MIT gave a talk entitled ‘Pleasing the Crowd Within’. He presented part of a forthcoming book on the ethical implications of physical and metaphysical theories.
The focal point of Hare’s paper was the problem of the many and its consequences. Hare argued that in any person’s vicinity there are many person-like things with ever-so-slightly different material compositions, past and future-oriented properties or modal properties. The secretaries were surprised to learn that, besides Hare, various other speakers were presenting at the same time, for instance his bald subber Hare-less.
Hare considered whether such ontological explosions imply that we should, for instance, care more about harm to taller people as they tend to have more subbers. A vaguely delineated section of the audience was saddened to hear Hare argue against it. The key to avoiding this conclusion is that all of one’s subbers are directly aware of all the same things. Hence to fully imagine being Hare just is to fully imagine being Hare-less. Together with the premise that what is bad about someone’s suffering is linked to fully imagining being that someone, it follows that what is bad about Hare’s suffering is what is bad about Hareless’ suffering and so no additional harm is done.
The discussion drew millions and millions of interested person-apt subbers. Some questions targeted the limits of mereological explosion, for example whether a lack of eyeballs is a problem. Other questions concerned the resulting semantic indeterminacy even in indexicals such as ‘I’, or whether there is some notion of personhood that unifies all of one’s subbers. Rae Langton suggested that there is an important distinction between how many people suffer and how much is suffered.
The meeting closed at 16:17 and the secretaries spent the rest of the week desperately finishing the unusually long attendance list.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 1st December 2020
Speaker: Lisa Bortolotti- ‘Delusion and Identity’
Chair: Dr Jessie Munton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved, and Lisa Bortolotti from Birmingham gave a talk entitled ‘Delusion and Identity’. In her talk, Bortolotti focused on what features can be used to demarcate delusional from non-delusional belief.
After discussing a range of clinical and non-clinical examples of delusions, Bortolotti explained how many commonly proposed markers for delusional belief were not fit for purpose, these markers being: falsehood, bizarre-ness and being ill-grounded in evidence. Going through each, Bortolotti demonstrated that all of them were neither necessary nor sufficient for a belief to be delusional.
Inspired by the ways in which these markers had failed to capture what makes a belief a delusion, Bortolotti suggested two features which are common to all delusional beliefs, regardless of whether they be clinical or non-clinical. First, it seems that what makes a belief delusional is that it’s impervious to counter-evidence. That’s not to say that individuals with delusions are insensitive to counter-evidence; they rather attempt to explain away such evidence. The second marker is that delusional beliefs are fundamental to the believers identity. Almost all delusions constitute an identity belief, contributing to an explanation of who the person is.
Finally, Bortolotti commented on the relationship between these two features, wondering whether believers found their delusions becoming a part of their identity because they couldn’t get rid of them, or whether they couldn’t get rid of them because they were a key part of their identity.
At the end of the talk, questions were asked and counter-evidence was suggested. Stubborn scientists and conspiracy theorists were discussed in detail, with multiple questions raised about whether stubbornness to abandon a theory could be an epistemic virtue. Bortolotti was pushed on her claim that delusional beliefs are identity beliefs, and it was suggested that delusional beliefs might frequently become a key part of the believer’s identity due to how we react to them as a society. The meeting closed at 4.15 pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 26th January 2020
Speaker: Zoe Walker ‘A Sensibility of Humor’
Chair: Dr Jessie Munton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved, and Zoe Walker from Cambridge gave a talk entitled ‘A Sensibility of Humor’. In her talk, Walker suggested that we should take seriously the way in which humour might be a sense or taste, not reflecting our cognitive attitudes, but instead revealing something about our conative dispositions.
In the literature, there are two extreme views about humour, Walker claimed. In the boorish corner, we find the moralisers, who think that we must believe the assumption of a joke to find it funny. This view is best illustrated by de Sousa’s slogan: “To laugh at a sexist joke makes you a sexist.” At the opposite end, we find a buffoonish corner. There, people think that a person’s humour has no direct implications for her character whatsoever. Laughing becomes like sneezing. Walker argued that both extreme views are misguided, for they can’t capture our feeling of complicity when we laugh at a dark joke.
Following the Aristotelian ideal of the virtuous mean, Walker tried to navigate the extremes of Scylla and Charybdis by developing her own account of humour. While humour doesn’t necessarily reveal anything about our cognitive attitudes it tells us a lot about our dispositions to form evaluative sentiments of amusement. Walker endorsed the incongruity theory to distinguish comic amusement from other types of amusement; what makes things funny to us is that they are unexpected and surprising. Because our cognitive dispositions can come apart from our beliefs, Walker’s account claims to explain why we feel complicit when laughing at dark jokes. Walker closed her talk by – again following Aristoteles’ lead – suggesting that we can mould our comic taste through habit to make it match our beliefs.
After the break, questions were asked, beliefs were changed, and dispositions were altered. Some questions concerned Walker’s account of habituation: What are the limits of habituation? And can we habituate our comedic taste in the same way that we habituate other tastes? Other members pushed Walker on the incongruity theory: Is it really true that incongruity is sufficient to identify comic amusement? And doesn’t the detection of incongruities require a lot of cognitive effort, thus grounding comedic taste in cognitive attitudes after all? The speaker answered all questions with great efficiency and so the meeting closed at 4:05pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 2nd February 2021
Speaker: Lucy Allais - Property, Markets and Freedom in Kant’s Political Philosophy
Chair: Rae Langton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved, and Lucy Allais from UC San Diego and the University of Witwatersrand gave a talk entitled ‘Property, Markets and Freedom in Kant’s Political Philosophy’.
Allais started by noting that her approach is inspired by the work of Charles Mills, in particular his critique of ideal theory and his rethinking of liberalism. She then discussed some central ideas in Kant’s political philosophy, namely (i) that all humans have an innate right to external freedom which leads to a need for the state, (ii) that hence there is a need for property rights, (iii) that property rights require a state, (iv) that dependency relations can compromise consent, (v) that property rights are provisional until we live in a just society, (vi) that law resolves indeterminacies in pre-political property rights.
Allais then introduced two ways of thinking about what makes markets free. On the first, a market is free if there is no governmental interference. On the second, a market is free if it is competitive and participants have equal market power and information. Allais argued that the first of these cannot be Kantian because a market with no governmental interference leads to people making choices in unequal and uninformed conditions and, moreover, because externalities undermine thinking of such markets as free. Finally, Allais argued that on a truly Kantian approach to free markets, there must be laws to enforce civic equality, but these laws do not need to be justified as interventions because there is no prior free market to begin with.
On the Q&A market there was a large supply of questions and high demand for answers. Allais was asked to clarify the role implicit consent could play in dealing with externalities and how to deal with natural resources that become scarce. Several questions centred on the relation between Kant’s philosophy and Allais’ proposal and others concerned the evolution of markets over time and whether we need degrees of freedom. Jane Heal suggested that Allais should spread her message to economists and even to the inconvincable libertarians.
The meeting ended at 4:15pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 9th February 2021
Speaker: Justin Snedegar - Dismissing Blame
Chair: Rae Langton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved, and Justin Snedegar, from the University of St Andrews, gave a talk entitled ‘Dismissing Blame’. As the title might suggest, Snedegar’s talk addressed the following questions: What is to dismiss blame, instead of accepting or rejecting it? The answer that Snedegar offered was that dismissing blame is to dismiss a demand. But what demand is this? Snedegar considered, and rejected, a number of answers.
First, blaming cannot consist of a demand to acknowledge fault: one can acknowledge fault whilst dismissing blame as coming from a specific person—a hypocritical person, for example. Second, blaming cannot be a demand to comply with moral requirements: whereas blame might be legitimately dismissed, a duty to comply with moral requirements cannot. And third: blaming cannot consist of a demand to apologise and make repairs. One can have the intention to apologise and make repairs, and still dismiss blame on the grounds that it comes from a person who lacks the standing to blame.
As an alternative, Snedegar maintained that blaming is a demand of a sincere performative expression of remorse—carried out, perhaps, by lowering oneself before the blamer so as to affirm their moral superiority. When we dismiss blame we are refusing to let the blamer in to our remorse, insofar as we refuse to affirm their moral superiority. This is for instance the case when the blamer has been hypocritical.
A discussion followed. Snedegar demanded to be asked plenty of interesting questions, and the attendees didn't blame him for doing so. Among other things, Snedegar was asked to clarify whether his analysis targeted expressed blaming or also private blaming. He responded that, insofar as blame is conceived of as making a demand, we should focus only on the former: it would be awkward to investigate how a private attitude could demand anything
The meeting ended at 4.15 pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 16th February 2021
Speakers: David Plunkett and Tristram McPherson - Topic Continuity in Conceptual Ethics and Beyond
Chair: Jessie Munton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved. David Plunkett from Dartmouth College and Tristram McPherson from Ohio State University gave a talk on ‘Topic Continuity in Conceptual Ethics and Beyond’. When philosophers engage in conceptual engineering, by pairing existing words with new intensions, they are concerned not to change the topic. But what is topic continuity? In their talk, Plunkett and McPherson tried to engineer a notion of topic continuity that is useful for conceptual engineering.
To begin, Plunkett and McPherson highlight four dimensions of topic breaks that conceptual engineers seem to care about. These dimensions are that the new pairing: 1) produces verbal disputes; 2) is objectionably deceptive; 3) does not enable speakers to continue to speak about what mattered before; and 4) is part of a Kuhnian revolution, introducing a new paradigm.
Plunkett and McPherson observe that an account of topic continuity will be complicated by the diversity of conceptual engineering projects; how the different dimensions weigh against each other will vary in accordance to the project’s aims, as will what counts as having sufficient topic continuity. In response to these complexities, Plunkett and McPherson propose a context-sensitive schematic account of topic continuity. In this account, the underlying dimensions of topic-break are built into the character of topic continuity, but facts about the interests of participants in the context of utterance fix how the dimensions are graded and weighed against each other.
A discussion followed and the context-sensitive nature of the account was much supported. Questions were asked about: whether Plunkett and McPherson’s proposal maintained topic continuity about ‘topic continuity’; how to think about the gradeability of the different dimensions, and; what ‘topics' might mean. And whilst the topic of discussion was generally maintained, brief detours were much enjoyed. Such enjoyable detours included a story from Simon Blackburn about how he coined the term ‘conceptual engineering’ to appease his philosophy-hating, engineer father.
The meeting ended later than usual at 6:17 pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 23th February 2021
Speaker: Alexander Bird “Against Empricism”
Chair: Jessie Munton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved, and our very own Bertrand Russell Professor, Alexander Bird, gave a talk entitled “Against Epicicism”. In his talk, Bird argued, well, against empiricism. More specifically, he suggested that empiricism (about scientific knowledge) is motivated by epistemic internalism; internalism, however, leads to skepticism and scientific anti-realism; and so, if we want to be scientific realists, we have to reject interalism, which, in turn, leaves empiricism unmotivated.
To begin, Bird stated the pessimistic deduction, which rests on three premises: (1) All scientific evidence concerns only what is observable via perception – this is the premise of the empiricist; (2) the conclusions of science concern what is unobservable via perception; and (3) no conclusion about what is unobservable can reasonably be drawn from what is observable. From this we can deduce the pessimistic conclusion that we cannot reasonably believe the conclusions of science.
If we want to avoid this pessimistic conclusion, we must reject the empiricist’s premise that all scientific evidence is based on perception, or so Bird argued. Empiricism, like rationalism, aims at certainty and is thus motivated by epistemic internalism, the view that justification is based on internally accessible states. Epistemic internalism, however, leads to skeptical conclusions about the preferred modes of scientific reasoning: induction, abduction, and testimony. These skeptical conclusions can only be avoided if we reject internalism in favour of epistemic externalism. Since externalism leaves empiricism unmotivated, we should give up the idea that all scientific evidence is based on perception – if we want to be scientific realists, that is.
A discussion followed in which the Faculty expressed a surprisingly strong affection towards the empiricist’s position. Most questions took the following form: Couldn’t one define a version of empiricism <insert version here> that avoids the skeptical conclusions by having a broader notion of experience and observation, a notion that goes beyond mere perception. To these questions, Bird generally responded by saying that one could do that, but that many philosophers of science in fact don’t do that.
The meeting closed at 4:17pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 2nd March 2021
Speaker: Cian Dorr - NYU
Chair: Jessie Munton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved, and Cian Dorr, from NYU, gave a talk entitled “Plural Signification and Semantic Paradox”. When philosophers talk about intentional relations like asserting and believing, they often do so under a uniqueness assumption: they presuppose, for instance, that at most one thing is expressed by an utterance. In his talk, Dorr proposed to reject this assumption and conceive of intentional relations as one-many relations.
One of Dorr’s arguments in favour of this thesis is related to semantic paradoxes. Consider a scenario where someone in Room 7 is saying that someone in Room 7 is saying something untrue. Clearly, this could lead us to a familiar paradoxical result; but, according to Dorr, one can escape it by denying the aforementioned uniqueness assumption, and maintaining the surprising conclusion that someone in Room 7 is saying at least two things—one false, and one true.
Dorr also presented an argument for an even more surprising conclusion. A predicate picks out a certain natural number when this predicate expresses a property instantiated by that number and nothing else. Let P be the predicate defined as ‘the least natural number not picked out by any predicate of fewer than 70 characters’. Suppose for contradiction that P successfully picks out a number. But the definition of P has only 67 characters; so we have arrived at a contradiction. We must conclude, then, that every natural number is picked out by a predicate of fewer than 70 characters; and, hence, that the finitely many predicates of fewer than 70 characters express infinitely many properties.
A discussion followed. Attendees asked a number questions—but probably many more than they thought they had asked. Annie Bosse, for instance, asked what kind of intentions a speaker has when they assert a wealth of propositions by utterning one sentence; and Dorr responded that the speaker surely intends to do something or other with each one of the propositions asserted. All attendees were left trying to figure out how many things Dorr had just said, and what his intentions were in relation to them.
The meeting ended at 4.15 pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 9th March 2021
Speaker: Alex Horne - You can run but you cannot hide: social norms and social normativity
Chair: Jessie Munton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved, and Alex Horne from Cambridge gave a talk entitled ‘You can run but you cannot hide: social norms and social normativity’. He argued that necessarily, if N is a social norm in a group, then all members of the group have a reason to follow N.
Horne started by defining a social norm in a group as a principle that (i) a significant proportion of the group hold normative attitudes toward and (ii) a significant proportion of the group know that a significant proportion of the group hold normative attitudes toward. As an example, Horne mentioned not nose picking in public: most people believe you ought not to, expect others not to, frown upon it, and know others feel the same.
Horne argued that there is always some risk of being observed when one breaks a social norm. Being observed may lead to being held in lower esteem within the community, which in turn might impede the realization of desires. Therefore, Horne argued, we always have a reason not to break social norms.
After Horne considered several seeming counterexamples and some implications of the argument, a discussion followed. Horne’s definition of a social norm was challenged: doesn’t it, for instance, seem possible that there are social norms that everyone agrees should be broken? Other topics of contentions were contradictory social norms, the role of social norms in oppressive societies and whether an agent has reasons to follow the social norms of groups they are not a member of.
In response to Horne’s talk, the British Party for Public Burping and the National Nosepicking Society unfortunately have had to disband.
The meeting ended at 4.15pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 16th March 2021
Speaker(s): Helen Frowe – Refugee Discrimination and Offsetting the Costs of Rescue
Chair: Jessie Munton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved. Helen Frowe from the University of Stockholm gave a talk on ‘Refugee Discrimination and Offsetting the Costs of Rescue’. In her talk, Frowe suggested that when the duty to resettle refugees is thought of as an instance of the duty to rescue, states are morally obliged to consider a refugee’s ability to offset the cost of their resettlement.
To begin, Frowe noted that a state’s refugee quota should be framed as a duty to expend a certain amount of resources, rather than a duty to admit a certain number of people. With this framing at hand, Frowe argued for two claims. First, that states may not exclude, on the grounds of financial costs, those refugees who can offset such costs. The moral force of offsetting comes from the ability to negate a loss; when a victim offers a like-for-like replacement for the cost faced by the rescuer, the rescue becomes costless and, all other things being equal, obligatory.
Second, Frowe claimed that states may not include negated costs when calculating whether they’ve expended the cost required to discharge their duty to rescue. As such, rather than blocking those refugees who are unable to offset costs, focusing on refugees' ability to offset highlights that states have obligations to resettle a greater number of people than previously thought. Insofar as refugees who can offset can be rescued costlessly, they do not compete against other refugees for the resources the state is morally required to expend.
Following Frowe’s talk, a lively discussion took place. Whilst expressing general sympathy for Frowe’s view, members of the Club were concerned that the obligation to resettle refugees who could offset the costs of doing so would, de facto, allow them to jump the queue. A further line of debate formed around Frowe’s distinction between counterbalancing and negating costs, and the assumption that public moral reasons track private moral reasons was questioned.
The meeting ended at 4:18 pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 4th May 2021
Speaker: Joe Horton - New and improvable lives
Chair: Jessie Munton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved, and Joe Horton from UCL gave a talk entitled ‘New and Improvable Lives’.
Horton began by introducing two consequences of weak utilitarianism. First, weak utilitarianism implies that it is morally wrong to harm yourself or deny yourself benefits and, second, it implies that it is wrong not to create happy people. These are weaknesses of weak utilitarianism, Horton argued, because these acts are not in fact wrong.
A picture Horton thought to be more on the right track is that one should minimise the sum of strength-weighted complaints. Despite avoiding the weaknesses of weak utilitarianism, this view as it stands faces several problems. Horton discussed in particular those that revolve around the unreasonable complaints of future people.
Horton then developed his own theory, according to which you should act in a way to which no one can reasonably complain. He finally introduced no less than nine problem cases to sharpen his definition of ‘reasonable complaint’ on, in the end settling on one that can deal with both cases of conditional existence and conditional complaints.
A discussion followed. Alex Horne asked, presumably on his own behalf, whether it is possible to complain on someone else’s behalf and, in particular, on behalf of someone who does not exist. Horton responded that this is possible for those who do not currently exist but are certain to exist in the future. The secretaries couldn’t help but wonder who would be deserving of the luxury of certain existence.
Other questions concerned the harming of whole future generations, the consequences of Horton’s view for environmental ethics and consent, and whether emphasising the idea of complaints and so of openness to different points of view is compatible with representing well-being in terms of quantifiable utilities.
The meeting ended at 4.14pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 11th May 2020
Speaker: Lucy McDonald ‘The Philosophy of Flirting’
Chair: Dr Jessie Munton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved, and Lucy McDonald from Cambridge gave a talk entitled 'The Philosophy of Flirting'. In her talk, McDonald used tools from the philosophy of language to develop an account of the structural features of Western flirting. Such an account, McDonald claimed, is relevant for theoretical reasons: it can help us understand sex, human relationships, and communication; but also for moral and political reasons: it can be deployed in political and legal contexts to undermine sexual harassment apologism.
McDonald presented a number of arguments against the views that flirting is a locutionary act, a perlocutionary act, and an illocutionary act. Afterwards, she proposed to treat flirting not as an act performed by one person, but as an activity that two people do together. According to her, flirting consists of two kinds of moves: push moves, and pull moves. Push moves are actions that presuppose intimacy, such as complimenting, teasing and using terms of endearment. By repeatedly performing these actions, flirters create intimacy through presupposition accommodation. But flirters also tease each other by insincerely blocking presuppositions of intimacy or, in other words, by pretending to pull away.
Towards the end of her talk, McDonald addressed a number of potential objections to her account; and, afterwards, a discussion followed. Paulina Sliwa pointed out that flirting and sexual harassment do not seem to be incompatible: two people might flirt whilst one of them also harasses the other. In light of this, she said, harassment could be understood as flirting gone wrong, and flirting, in turn, as an ethically neutral action. These considerations, she added, are interesting, insofar as they suggest that a possible response to the ‘I was just flirting’ excuse could be ‘Yes, but you were also harassing’. Other interesting points were made, and the meeting ended at 4.16 pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 18th May 2021
Speaker(s): Ralf Bader “Partial Comparability”
Chair: Jessie Munton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved, and Ralf Bader from the University of Fribourg gave a talk entitled "Partial Comparability". In his talk, Bader distinguished between two ways to conceptualise hard choices: either as arising from two genuinely incomparable options, or as being routed in partially comparable options.
Bader first gave a technical account of genuine incomparability. A complete ordering of options, states for every two options A and B, that either A is better than B, B is better than A, or A and B are equally as good. If we intersect two opposed orderings and determine that they differ regarding two options O1 and O2, we can then say that O1 is neither better nor worse nor equal to O2. This means that the two options are genuinely incomparable.
Bader then gave a technical account of partial comparability. Commonly, two choice options A and B are measured along different dimensions D1 to Dn, where option A is better along some dimensions, and option B is better on other dimensions. Hard choices arise if we have different trade-off functions to aggregate the value of each dimension. However, it is only due to our limited epistemic capacities, Bader argued, that we don't know which trade-off function is the correct one.
Following Bader's technical talk, a discussion took place, and Jane Heal demanded some tangible examples for the two kinds of hard choice: what could the As and Bs, the Os and Ds in question be? Bader suggested that a case of genuine incomparability might be a situation where we try to compare two options from an agent-neutral and an agent-relative perspective. An example of partial incomparability might be one where we try to decide between two career paths, struggling to calculate the tradet-off between leisure and salary.
The meeting was completed at 4:17pm.
Minutes of the meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, 25th May 2021
Speaker(s): Nancy Cartwright – Causal Models, Causal Principles and Evidence for Singular Causation
Chair: Jessie Munton
Secretaries: Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Melendez-Gutierrez, and Wouter Cohen
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved. Nancy Cartwright from Durham University and the University of California, San Diego gave a talk on ‘Causal Models, Causal Principles and Evidence for Singular Causation’.
In her talk, Cartwright aimed to vindicate singular causal claims. She began by outlining a catalogue of evidence that can speak in favour of single causal claims. Cartwright highlighted that singular causal claims can be supported by both direct and indirect evidence, and enumerated the various forms each take.
Moving forward, Cartwright sought to explain the theory underpinning how these forms of evidence supported singular causal claims. In doing so, Cartwright generalised J.L Mackie’s account of singular causes as “insufficient but necessary parts of unnecessary but sufficient” (INUS) conditions. In generalising Mackie’s formula for multi-valued variables, Cartwright presented her ‘Singular Causal Equation Model’ (SCEM). SCEMs are richer than a single INUS formula, allowing us to represent the causes of causes and the effects of effects.
Finally, Cartwright outlined what she referred to as the ‘Donald Davidson problem’. Cartwright had previously claimed that not every single causal fact needs to fall under a causal principle, pace Davidson. However, the use of SCEMs in prediction, as opposed to post-hoc evaluation, might seem to assume some sort of causal regularity. Cartwright wondered whether the admission of more liberal, mid-level causal principles would be able to ease this tension.
Following Cartwright’s talk, a lively discussion took place. Questions were asked regarding specific types of evidence for singular causal claims. For example, Cartwright was asked to clarify whether ‘effect characteristics’ have an epistemic component. Likewise, concerns were raised that indirect evidence in the form of the ‘elimination of alternatives’ might misleadingly imply that singular causes aren’t overdetermined. Questions were also asked about whether the evidential requirements for single causal claims might often be unachievable in practical cases.
The meeting ended at 4:17 pm.
Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, Zoom!
You were in our waiting room.
Independent of the weather,
Enjoying philosophy together.
Speakers came from NYU,
Appiah, Field, and Dorr too.
Practice and theory together,
together in our Zoom.
The Yablangers from MIT
Drew crowds to come and see
But pleasing the crowd within,
Was hairless Hare’s hairy twin.
There was Bortolotti on identity,
and Bader on comparability,
each with their unique spin,
spinning thoughts with glee.
Instructing us how to be good,
lessons hopefully not misunderstood,
were Horton, Snedegar, and also Frowe:
to the moral law all must bow.
Consistent in topic, like they should,
McPherson and Plunkett together stood.
Continuity mistakes they won’t allow,
let them slide, they never would.
Allais’s reconstruction of Kant
told us why property’s in demand.
Thomasson made ontology easy,
keeping things light and breezy.
Causes of things, we don’t understand,
unless Cartwright takes us by her hand.
Bird thinks empiricism is sleazy,
sleazy and to be banned.
Lucy, Zoe, Alex, and Roxanne
Ex-secretaries forced to pandemic plan
when it came their time to speak
their intellectual powers made us weak.
Goodbye Zoom, we were not a fan,
You did, however, make it easy to plan.
Over the hybrid system, you will weep.
Paula, Alex, Ronja... good luck!
