Speaker: Bruce Beswick

Date, Time: 22/5/2012, 5:15pm

Location: Old Quad Common Room, Melbourne University

Abstract: A paradox results from the combination of two claims frequently made in response to disagreements about aesthetic value. The first claim is that aesthetic judgement is a matter of personal taste and that de gustibus non est disputandum (there is no disputing about taste). The second claim is that some works of art are superior to others. Both claims are commonly held to be true, even sometimes by the same individuals, yet they appear to contradict each other. I will offer a solution to this paradox and, if time permits, some reflections on why it seems so intractable.

Speaker: Martin Kovan

Date, Time: 15/5/2012, 5:15pm

Location: Old Quad Common Room, Melbourne University

Abstract: This essay considers some meta-ethical questions that emerge from a consideration of the phenomena of terrorism in the context of Buddhist metaphysics: what, in the Buddhist view, ultimately causes terrorism (and its subsidiary effects)? What resources do the Buddhist metaphysical claims of non-self, karma, emptiness and related concepts bring to a meta-ethical understanding of terrorism and its effects?

Speaker: Nik Parkin

Date, Time: 1/5/2012, 5:15pm

Location: Old Quad Common Room, Melbourne University

Abstract: It is claimed by some pacifists that modern war cannot be permissibly fought since innocent persons – those who have a legitimate claim-right against others that they not be harmed or killed – are predictably killed in modern war. One response to this claim is that the moral presumption against killing innocent persons is merely prima facie and can be overridden or compromised by other more important moral considerations, namely when killing innocents can prevent other innocents from being killed. ‘The argument from prevention’, raised in this context, asserts that (a) there is no distinction between killing and letting die, and (b) the consequence of refusing to fight is that innocents will be killed by the aggressor. I discuss the merits of this argument as a challenge to the pacifist thesis.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Speaker: Che-Ping Su

Date, Time: 28/2/2012, 6:15pm

Location: Old Quad Common Room, Melbourne University

Abstract: The general question that interests me is how to deal with inconsistent information. To this question, in the discipline of logic, there are at least three relevant areas: paraconsistent logic, argumentation and belief revision. My thesis will focus on argumentation and its connection with belief revision. As I plan now, my thesis has two main themes. One is that I would like to try to connect argumentation with epistemic logic. The other theme is about using argumentation systems to approach belief revision.

Speaker: Anya Daly

Date, Time: 15/11/2011, 5:15pm

Location: Old Quad Common Room

Abstract: Direct Ethics argues for an ethics based on the idea that the most primary level of engagement with another is first and foremost internal, that “subjectivity is an intersubjectivity” (Husserl), and this engagement is pre-reflective; correlatively, current ethical accounts constitute a secondary reflective level which depends on the prereflective. I propose the elucidation of a Direct Ethics is able to reconfigure not only the philosophical landscape, but is also able to throw new light on the domain of ethical debates.

My presentation will give a brief survey of the key stages in establishing this position on the basis of Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology, beginning with his account of alterity, central to which is Merleau-Ponty’s notion of reversibility. The question at stake here is whether the reversibility thesis can guarantee a genuine other, affording both real communication and real difference. I will then go on to elaborate in detail the notion of prereflective percipience, the primary level of moral engagement with an Other, that whereby Direct Ethics becomes possible. It is important to distinguish this from UNrelfective engagement (of the type strongly critiqued by Singer) and also reflective engagement which is the mode of normative ethical accounts.