Dans le cadre des ateliers du GRIN, Lisa Tessman (Binghamton University) offrira une présentation intitulée « Failure without Fault ».

Abstract:

People often suffer from anguish or other distressed emotions in the wake of their own moral failures. Drawing on the literature on “moral distress” (in medical ethics) and “moral injury” (in military ethics), I compare situations in which people suffer in the aftermath of what are moral failures only in their own eyes, and situations in which they suffer in the aftermath of wrongdoings for which other people, too, may hold them accountable. When a wrongdoing is completely unavoidable, people often still take themselves to be responsible for it, but other people cannot hold them responsible. The anguished sense of responsibility experienced in the wake of unavoidable wrongdoing expresses an important form of valuing, that, I suggest, other people should respect by refraining from pushing the sufferer to relinquish it. To better understand this, I examine both the first-person experience of being required and the sense of requirement experienced from what, following Darwall, we can call the second-person standpoint. I take first-person experiences of requirement and second-person address to be two different sources of normativity, associated with opportunities for different kinds of failures.

Caroline T. Arruda (University of Texas) offrira une présentation intitulée: “Sticking to it and Settling: Commitments, Normativity and the Future”.

Abstract:

People often think that commitments are designed to secure various aspects of the way we exercise our agency over and through time. These include the following: commitments help us to resist temptation (Holton 2009; Marušić 2015 ); commitments block re-deliberation (Bratman 2004; 2016; 2018 Hinchman 2015; Holton 2009); commitments help us to do what we correctly think that we are unlikely to do (Marušić 2015 ); commitments ensure (or provide one route by which to ensure) the diachronic stability of our intentions or decisions (Morton 2013; Morton & Paul forthcoming). Broadly speaking, we can say that commitments are a source of what we might broadly classify as agential stability. Or, more simply, commitments explain how and why I should “stick to it” or “settle” on a course of action. In this paper, I argue that paradigmatic cases of commitments reveal that commitments themselves cannot nor could not provide any of these kinds of agential stability. Instead, I show that if commitments serve any of these functions, it is in virtue of their relationship to what we care about, what has import for us or what we value. If this is correct, it follows that it isn’t the commitment that does the work in explaining why we should “stick to it”; it is the reasons that we have to form the commitment in the first place.