Dans le cadre de nos midis de l’éthique, notre stagiaire postdoctoral Paul Boswell nous offrira une présentation intitulée « Intelligibility and the guise of the Good ».

Résumé
According to the perennially popular Guise of the Good thesis, an agent acts for a reason only if, and because, she sees some good in so acting. Guise of the Good theorists often argue for their view by appeal to a supposed fact about the intelligibility of action for a reason: they hold that action for a reason must be intelligible to its agent in a specific way, and that the Guise of the Good can explain this fact. For according to many Guise of the Good theorists, an action is intelligible to an agent just in case she sees some good in so acting.
In this presentation I argue that, surprisingly, one of the two most popular strategies for cashing out the Guise of the Good theory – known as the « attitude theory » – cannot explain the intelligibility of acting. Time permitting I will also argue that the second of the two most popular theories, the assertoric or perceptual model, can’t explain it either. Together these arguments support a hybrid model of the Guise of the Good.