Philosophy Speakers: John Baker, “Towards an Account of Weight of Reasons for Acting”

The Philosophy Speakers Program presents JOHN BAKER (UCalgary), “Towards an Account of Weight of Reasons for Acting” About the Talk There are (common) situations where there are reasons to do some action but also reasons not to do it–in some cases because there are reasons to do something different. In some cases there is no way to resolve this dilemma and we don’t know what we ought to do. In other cases we can conclude that one set of reasons has greater weight than the other and that solves the problem of what we ought to do. Since 1963 there has been an enormous amount of useful work on what it is to have a reason (and even on what it is for there to be a reason) to do some action. But, until the publication of Mark Schroeder’s Slaves of the Passions in 2007, little or no work had been done on what it is for one reasons to have greater weight that another. Instead one school of philosophers have assumed that weights of reasons will track variations in affective or conative states of the agent. More usually philosophers have found ways either to ignore or to evade the issue, instead focusing their attention elsewhere (most notably on the task of spelling out the conditions under which a fact or putative fact can serve as a reason). There are strong arguments against the suggestion that weights of reasons track the affective and conative states of the agent and it is obvious that ignoring or evading the issue is an unsatisfactory approach. In this paper I will attempt to build on Schroeder’s pioneering study of the issue. About the Speaker John Baker is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary with research interests in Bioethics, Business Ethics, Ethics, Metaethics, Philosophy of Mind and Philosophical Psychology, and Plato and Aristotle. His professional work includes service as an ex officio member of the Executive Committee of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. His chapter”Hard End of Life Decisions for Physicians and Family Members” appeared in The Price of Compassion: Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia in Canada and the United States (Broadview, 2010).

Location:

Social Sciences Building – Room 1253

More information at http://www.ucalgary.ca/events/calendar/philosophy-speakers-john-baker-towards-account-weight-reasons-acting