Speaker Series 2024-25

ALL TALKS IN MACKINNON 114, 4:00 - 5:30 PM.

September 13: Alison Reiheld, Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville

“That's Not How Any Of This Works: How ideal theory fails to address bioethical issues in gender, reproduction, fatness and, well, most of the rest of it”

Fat folks are positioned as being inherently unhealthy. Folks with mental health conditions like borderline personality are positioned as being “problem” patients. Clinicians who accept that some patients balance health against other life goals and priorities get positioned as bad clinicians. The way we define health makes it largely unachievable for most people. What do these all have in common? They are rooted in ideal theories and the ways of thinking that stem from them. Philosophers from Charles Mills to Allison Jaggar have critiqued a number of philosophical theories that claim to address real-world problems for being “ideal theories” that are so detached from the very real, non-ideal world that attempting to use them actually can make things worse for people trying to do their best. In this talk, Alison Reiheld explores how bioethical thinking about ideal clinicians, ideal patients, and the ideal of health can lead us badly astray when trying to achieve better wellbeing for humans in practice. It might seem odd to use this much theory to talk about how theory goes wrong, but theory is what we use to pick the right tools for the job at hand. To improve our lives in a messy, non-ideal world, we need to give up ideal theories and keep accounting for reality. No clinician is an ideal clinician. No patient is an ideal patient. No one can achieve ideal health. That’s just not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

October 18: Mathieu Doucet, University of Waterloo

"Addiction, Autonomy, and Harm Reduction"

We are in the midst of a drug crisis. Over the past eight years, at least 47,000 people have died in Canada of opioid poisoning. In response, many jurisdictions have turned to Harm Reduction strategies such as supervised consumption sites and opioid substitution therapy; these strategies aim to reduce the harms of drug use without reducing its prevalence. Despite its successes, Harm Reduction has drawn significant political and public opposition. In this paper, I engage with perhaps the most powerful objection to Harm Reduction: even if it reduces the health and social harms of drug use, it cannot address the distinctive autonomy harm of addiction itself. On this view, Harm Reduction contributes to the enslavement of people who use drugs.

I will argue that this objection misunderstands the relationship between addiction and autonomy, and that properly understood Harm Reduction enhances autonomy rather than undermines it. This argument has important consequences both for standard philosophical understandings of the nature and value of autonomy, and for policy-level debates about the best response to the drug crisis.

October 25: Mariam Thalos, University of Tennessee

"Reasoning in Context"

The concept of intelligence has been difficult to get one’s arms around. Surprisingly, the same can be said also of the notion of reasoning. This talk aims at shedding some light on certain aspects of human reasoning - reasoning for practical life. This will put us in a better position to make some comparisons between (some aspects of) human reasoning, and what Large Language Models (LLMs) are doing - they look to be doing quite different things. Reasoning, at least as humans do it, involves architecture that Computer Science has apparently abandoned for the current generation of AI models. By articulating an account of the machinery required for reasoning, we will be able to pose questions about whether this current generation is capable of moving past their present obstacles to reasoning.

November 8: Alice MacLachlan, York University

"Still Sorrier Stories: Public Apologies after #MeToo"

For many survivors, the #MeToo social media upswell in 2017 represented an overdue moment of accountability. The spate of public apologies by high profile perpetrators that followed initially seemed like further evidence of that accountability. Yet it’s hard to deny that many of these apologies were – well – pretty bad apologies. Bad apologies can be frustrating, infuriating, and profoundly painful, and it’s easy to see how they might hinder rather than help the project of moral repair. But what about good apologies?

I have argued that the moral risks of public #MeToo apologies are not limited to the faults and flaws of bad apologies. Indeed, in many ways, good ones are more insidious, given the ways in which “perpetrator” is constructed and understood in our current social imaginary. In this talk, I point to broader cultural change needed to uphold the moral work of public apologies in the aftermath of sexual violence.

November 22: Anthony Skelton, Western University

"Sidgwick's Argument for Rational Egoism"

Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics turns 150 years old next month. The book famously ends with what Sidgwick calls the dualism of practical reason, the claim that utilitarianism and rational egoism are coordinate but conflicting requirements of rationality. Although the details of its precise structure remain disputed, it is uncontroversial that there is a clear attempt in the Methods to provide an argument for utilitarianism. By contrast, it is controversial whether there is an attempt in the Methods to provide an argument for rational egoism. The purpose of this paper is to offer an interpretation of Sidgwick's argument for rational egoism. The paper defends three claims. First, that one prominent interpretation of Sidgwick's argument for rational egoism that appeals to the metaphysical distinction between individuals is inadequate. Second, that Sidgwick defends a philosophical intuition or self-evident axiom of prudence. Third, that this axiom is the basis of an argument for rational egoism, which has a structure similar to his argument for utilitarianism.

January 31: Zeyad El Nabolsy, York University

"James Africanus Beale Horton’s Philosophy of History: Progress, Race, and the Fate of Africa"

Many Victorian philosophers of history attempted to explain what they took to be the evident divergence in the level of civilizational achievement that was attained by different peoples. One prominent paradigm for explaining this divergence was the biological-racialist paradigm. According to this paradigm, endorsed by the likes of Robert Knox, Samuel George Morton, Carl Vogt, and James Hunt, what explains divergence is racial difference. In this paper, I show how one African philosopher, James Africanus Beale Horton, sought to undermine this paradigm and to offer an alternative explanatory paradigm. I argue that Horton presents an alternative paradigm which does not deny that there are divergences that must be explained and which seeks to explain such paradigms by appealing to factors such as environmental changes, cultural contact with other societies (and the severing of such contacts), and failures of social organization due to decadence after a period of high civilizational achievements in a given society. Horton presented an alternative philosophy of history which does not give up on the concept of progress, but which also does not condone colonialism and imperialism.