Published on
March 31, 2012 in
Events.
Title: A Third Face for Liberalism?
Speaker: Daniel Nellor
Date, Time: 3/4/2012, 5:15pm
Location: Old Quad Common Room, Melbourne University
Abstract: In Two Faces of Liberalism John Gray argues for value pluralism – the thesis that the human good is fundamentally plural – and claims that liberalism should abandon the hope of achieving rational consensus about the good society, and instead focus on arranging a workable modus vivendi among incommensurable ways of life. I endorse Gray’s claim that rational consensus is unachievable, but resist his calls for a modus vivendi. I claim that what our ethical experience reveals is not an irreconcilable plurality of goods, but rather our own limitations before an idea of the good without which we cannot function as moral actors. Further, a political modus vivendi of the kind Gray advocates must inevitably shut down dialogue; and finally, there may be a third way of conceiving liberalism, which seeks neither rational consensus nor modus vivendi, but rather sees humans as engaged in a shared, ongoing search for the good.
Published on
March 26, 2012 in
Events.
Title: Understanding the Obligations of a Democratic State to Participate in Global Governance
Speaker: Clare McArdle
Date, Time: 27/3/2012, 5:15pm
Location: Old Quad Common Room, Melbourne University
Abstract: This thesis sets out to understand the relationship between democratic states and other global governance entities and to ask how such relationships should be institutionalized domestically and globally. It takes the perspective from the viewpoint of a democratic state to global concerns and global governance arrangements that can lay claim to constrain democratic decision-making.
It unpacks conceptions of democracy recognizing that such conceptions are apparent in western democratic states either at the same time or at different times. The conception of democracy frames the viewpoint taken to assess the nature of obligations democracies may have to non-compatriots and to establishing global institutions to address such obligations and other matters of mutual interest.
Published on
March 19, 2012 in
Events.
Title: Bioethics on the Bestseller List
Speaker: Alec West
Date, Time: 20/3/2012, 5:15pm
Location: Old Quad Common Room, Melbourne University
Abstract: I will discuss the contribution of literature and in particular a cluster of middlebrow novels (1990-2000) as contributors to, and barometers of, community attitudes towards end-of-life decision-making, including euthanasia. These novels present realistic euthanasia scenarios that portray the complexities and uncertainties in end-of-life decisions but present situations which fall outside what is generally encompassed by calls for voluntary euthanasia legislation. In doing so, the stories challenge readers to decide where the boundaries lie between clearly acceptable, morally arguable, and unacceptable euthanasia or mercy killings and what could lead them to such action. This seminar will explore the contribution literature can make to moral decision-making in general as well as the extent to which fictional stories challenge the focus and areas of emphasis within academic discourses, especially as illustrated by this particular group of novels.
Published on
March 12, 2012 in
Events.
Title: Are duties of citizenship genuinely associative duties?
Speaker: Robbie Arrell
Date, Time: 13/3/2012, 5:15pm
Location: Old Quad Common Room, Melbourne University
Abstract: Some commentators would argue that the duties we have in virtue of being citizens of a polity are ‘associative duties’, putatively similar in form to the duties we have in virtue of being parents, children, friends, lovers, etc. However, for this to be so, it must be true that citizenship constitutes an intrinsically valuable relationship – that is, a relationship that is valuable in and of itself independent of whatever instrumental benefits it might bestow. I see no reason to think this to be the case, and will seek to provide several arguments to support this conviction over the course of this presentation. If I can demonstrate that citizenship is not an intrinsically valuable relationship of the relevant type (rendering it therefore incapable of yielding genuinely associative duties), then we will be left to conclude that citizenship duties can only belong to the category of non-associative special duties. Why should this distinction matter? 1) it matters for the defensibility of the non-reductionist account of associative duties against the distributive objection; and 2) if the value of citizenship duties inheres in the performance of duties justified by external moral principles, and not the relationship itself, then a major plank of those arguments that seek to justify disproportionate prioritisation of the interests of citizens over those of non-citizens would be removed.
Published on
March 3, 2012 in
Events.
Title: Dostoevsky and De Sade on Wickedness
Speaker: Dina Babushkina (University of Helsinki; Finnish Graduate School for Philosophy).
Date, Time: 6/3/2012, 5:15pm
Location: Old Quad Common Room, Melbourne University
Abstract: Drawing on Timo Airaksinen’s interpretation of a pervert (“Philosophy of the Marquis De Sade”), I will discuss the connection between the philosophical approaches to the wicked will in De Sade and Dostoevsky. After providing a general characterisation of perversion and evil will, I will pay special attention to the phenomenon of the wicked woman.
