Upcoming events

           Joint CAVE/CLG Seminar: Friday 30 September 2011

            Antony Duff (University of Stirling)

           Topic, venue and time to be announced

Recent events

          Cave Seminar: Thursday 24 November 2011

         Beate Roessler (University of Amsterdam)

         Authenticity of Cultures and of Persons

Place: W6A room 708
Time: 2 to 4.30 pm

Beate Roessler writes:

In this paper I argue that it does not make sense - either empirically or normatively - to speak of 'authentic' cultures. All we need when talking about cultures is a relatively weak concept that still carries enough normative weight to function as the meaningful background of a person's identity, autonomy and good life. Discussing the authentic culture, I refer to the debates around the German Leitkultur as well as the Dutch populist movement as examples. However, I am interested not only in the concept of the authenticity of a culture but also in the concept of the authenticity of persons: if an 'authentic culture' is not feasible, does this have repercussions on the concept of the autonomy and authenticity of persons? In suggesting that this might be the case, I argue that persons can be autonomous without always being fully authentic.

          Cave Seminar: Friday 30 September 2011

         Jocelyn Downie (Dalhousie University)

         End of Life Law and Policy: A New Arena for Restorative Justice

Place: W6A room 708
Time: 1.30 to 3.30 pm

Jocelyn Downie writes:

In this talk I will suggest that restorative justice might provide a new direction
and a new way to resolve some of the myriad problems with the current approach
taken to euthanasia and assisted suicide in a number of countries.  To that end, I
will first describe the way euthanasia and assisted suicide are currently handled
in the legal system in Canada.  I will then describe restorative justice and
highlight some of the differences in both substance and process as between the
traditional approach currently in use and the proposed restorative approach.  I
will follow this with an explanation of how a restorative justice approach could
actually be implemented in this arena, flagging important challenges to doing so.  
In the end, I will conclude that taking a restorative justice approach to
euthanasia and assisted suicide could enable movement in the seemingly intractable
debate and the adoption of a more effective and compassionate response to
extraordinarily difficult situations.

          Cave Public Lecture: Thursday 11th August 2011

         Thomas Pogge (Yale University)

         Human rights as constraints on global institutional arrangements

Place: Macquarie campus: Theatre One, Building Y3A

Severe poverty and massive disease burdens are human rights violations when they are the
foreseeable effect of active conduct by human agents and an effect these agents could avoid
without undue hardship. By this criterion, the failure of rich countries and their corporations
and citizens to assist very poor people abroad does not violate any human rights of the latter
because the relevant conduct of the former is merely passive: they fail to help. Yet, the rich
countries and their corporations and citizens are violating the human rights of the global poor
if and insofar as they do things that, for the sake of minor gains, foreseeably aggravate severe
poverty and disease. One thing they do together, and with the help of poor-country rulers and
"elites," is design and impose supranational institutional arrangements that -- shaped to
benefit the imposers -- are foreseeably much less avoiding of severe poverty and disease than
they might be. This claim can be illustrated by reference to the regulation of trade
(grandfathering of protectionist barriers), intellectual property, profit-and-loss reporting,
banking deposits, environmental harms, labor standards, sovereign borrowing and resource
exports, and international trade in arms. In view of the harms such supranational institutional
arrangements foreseeably and avoidably inflict on the global poor, their imposition can easily
qualify as the largest (though not the gravest) human rights violation in human history.

• Listen to Thomas Pogge's lecture

          Cave Seminar: 28 July 2011, in conjunction with the Julius Stone Institute (University of Sydney)

         Ken Himma (Seattle Pacific University)

         A defence of traditional conceptual analysis

Place: Macquarie campus: W3A, Blackshield Room
Time: 4.30 to 6 pm.

     Joint CAVE/MACCS seminar: Tuesday 16^th July 2011
 
     WALTER SINNOTT-ARMSTRONG (Duke University)

 
     Do psychopaths make moral judgements?

Place: Macquarie campus: C5C room 498
Time: 4 to 5.30 pm.

Abstract:
Psychopaths are less than 1% of the population but commit
over 30% of the violent crime in most modern societies. Some experts
claim that psychopaths make moral judgments but do not care about
morality. Others argue that psychopaths do not really make moral
judgments but only pretend to do so. I will present recent data as
well as experimental plans to address this dispute. These results can
be important for treatment, prediction, and punishment policies as
well as philosophical debates about the nature and basis of moral
judgment.

    CAVE seminar: Tuesday 7^th June 2011
 
    JESSICA WOLFENDALE (West Virginia University)

 
    The right not to be tortured

Place: Macquarie campus: W6A Room 708
Time: 11 am to 1 pm.
 

Jessica Wolfendale writes:
Jeff McMahan has recently argued that the right not to be tortured can be forfeited in classic 'ticking bomb' scenarios. McMahan claims that the terrorist's responsibility for creating the threat of the ticking bomb makes him 'morally liable' to be tortured, and thus the terrorist has no right not to be tortured. This view of the right not to be tortured was adopted by the Bush Administration in the torture memos, and is shared by other philosophers, included David Rodin and Stephen Kershnar. In this paper I argue that the right not to be tortured is derived from the right to be treated as a person - a right that cannot be forfeited even in cases of extreme wrongdoing. I argue that the right to be treated as a person is grounded in the features of persons that enable them to be rational moral agents capable of maintaining a unified sense of agency. This right generates a correlative duty to refrain from actions that undermine or attack the capacities for personhood, of which torture is a paradigmatic example. The right to be treated as a person (and so the right not to be tortured) cannot be forfeited because there is a fundamental connection between personhood and moral accountability. Holding agents morally responsible requires seeing them as persons, as only persons may be held morally accountable for their actions. This requires that we continue to see them as persons, and as such they are entitled to the respect due to persons by virtue of their capacity for agency.

CAVE seminar: Friday 27^thMay 2011

KAREN JONES (University of Melbourne)

Epistemic Injustice and Self-Trust

Place: Macquarie campus: W6A Room 708
Time: 1.30pm - 3.30pm.
 

"In this paper", Karen Jones writes, "I sketch an account of intellectual self-trust, arguing that it has an
important non-cognitive component and that it is created an sustained socially. Next,
drawing on work in social psychology, I look at the ways in which social injustice
creates epistemic injustice, which in turn undermines self-trust. Finally, drawing
the empirical and philosophical threads together, I make some suggestions for remedy".