Joe Cunningham- Philosophy spring research seminar

Philosophy spring seminar series poster

Join us for our last spring research seminars of 2022. The speaker this week is Joe Cunningham, University of Nottingham. 

Title: Responding to Reasons: From Deviance to Disjunctivism

Abstract

An agent who successfully responds to a normative reason is an agent who displays a certain kind of normative achievement: They j as they (pro-tanto) ought, where this is a success attributable to them. But what is it to j in a way that manifests the sort of sensitivity at issue? My aim in this paper is twofold. First, I aim to attack an approach to answering that question codified by what I call the Neutrality Assumption: The claim, roughly, that successfully responding to a normative reason factors into j-ing in response to what appears to one to be a normative reason for one to j plus a set of further independent conditions. I argue that there is no plausible account of the success case which meets the constraints laid down by the Neutrality Assumption. My second aim is to develop a positive account of responding to normative reasons premised on a rejection of the Assumption: An account according to which the success case involves the exercise of essentially successful normative capacities and according to which we should offer a disjunctive account of j-ing in response to what appears to one to be normative reason for one to do so.

All are welcome. The seminars will take place Wednesdays at 3pm-5pm in Humanities A02. 

To sign up for our mailing list, please email the seminar convenor, Craig French: craig.french@nottingham.ac.uk