The talk:
Wed, Nov 30, 2011: Ethics at Noon
Mainland Chinese Adolescents’ Reasoning about Rights, Freedoms and Democratic Principles
12:00 PM – 2:00 PM, Larkin #200
The Man:
Charles Helwig
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
The bio: here
Monday, November 28, 3-5pm, Larkin 200:
“What the State Speakers, What Should it Say?”
Abstract: How should a liberal democracy respond to hate groups and others that oppose the ideal of free and equal citizenship? The democratic state faces the hard choice of either protecting the rights of hate groups and allowing their views to spread, or banning their views and violating citizens’ rights to freedoms of expression, association, and religion. Avoiding the familiar yet problematic responses to these issues, political theorist Corey Brettschneider proposes a new approach called value democracy. The theory of value democracy argues that the state should protect the right to express illiberal beliefs, but the state should also engage in democratic persuasion when it speaks through its various expressive capacities: publicly criticizing, and giving reasons to reject, hate-based or other discriminatory viewpoints.
Distinguishing between two kinds of state action–expressive and coercive–Brettschneider contends that public criticism of viewpoints advocating discrimination based on race, gender, or sexual orientation should be pursued through the state’s expressive capacities as speaker, educator, and spender. When the state uses its expressive capacities to promote the values of free and equal citizenship, it engages in democratic persuasion. By using democratic persuasion, the state can both respect rights and counter hateful or discriminatory viewpoints. Brettschneider extends this analysis from freedom of expression to the freedoms of religion and association, and he shows that value democracy can uphold the protection of these freedoms while promoting equality for all citizens.
From description of forthcoming book of same title.
“Disorderly Pluralism and the Function of Legal Rights”
James Sherman
SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto
and Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Room 200, Larkin Building
15 Devonshire Place
Bio: James Sherman received his A.B. in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. In May 2011 he received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin, where his dissertation, “Toward an Aristotelian Liberalism,” was nominated for the University’s Outstanding Dissertation Award. His work has been published in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice and The Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. In the fall of 2011, he joined the Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto as a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow.
Andrew Stark, “The Distinction between Public, Nonprofit, and For-Profit: Revisiting the “Core Legal” Approach,” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 21 (2011): 3-26. (link)
Abstract: In studying the characteristics that determine the public, nonprofit, and/or for-profit nature of organizations, public administration scholarship has elaborated upon the “dimensional” approach, to the point where it is now furnishing a rich body of theoretical and empirical material on organizational identity. Yet there was always another “complementary” approach to the same set of issues, namely the “core legal” approach which, as Bozeman, Barry, and Stuart Bretschneider (1994) say, is “equally important.” This article revisits the legal approach, showing that it is as complex and theoretically motivated in its own way as the dimensional approach, and setting out its basic structure. Only once the core legal approach is seen as a more equal partner will it be possible to pursue Bozeman and Bretschneider’s call for “studies employing both core and dimensional models,” in which the two are fully complementary, and the capacities of each are available for conceptualizing the identity of organizations—both when such identity is settled and when it is contested—and for predicting the consequences for organizational behavior that follow.
Douglas Lavin, Department of Philosophy, Harvard University:
“Must There be Basic Action?”
November 15th, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Room 200, Larkin Building
Backgrounder here.
Monday Seminar talk, November 14th, 3-5pm, Larkin 200
“ What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do”
Andrew Sepielli, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto
From the introduction: “There’s been renewed interest in the question of what it’s rational to do in the face of normative uncertainty – uncertainty among moral theories, claims about what to do in particular cases, and even accounts of rationality itself. But some fascinating problems have been raised not for any particular answer to this question, but to the very project of trying to answer this question. One of these problems invokes agents who’ve tried to answer the question for themselves, but have arrived at answers that we might regard as mistaken…”