- Wed, Jan 15, 2025
Ethics at Noon
Tim McKee, Social Media Narrativity
► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.Social Media Narrativity
How does social media affect practical agency, the capability to shape your character and actualize a conception of the good? I will answer this question by considering social media as a narrative technology with which users build online autobiographies. My strategy is to examine two central affordances of this technology – the ability to share photographs and the ability to collect audience feedback – and explore how these incentivize users to adopt a particular narrative self-conception, which I call social media narrativity. In this self-conception, users see themselves from an external, impersonal, public perspective, leading them to overlook their particularity and cede self-interpretive authority. This erodes the ability to make commitments. I conclude that social media narrativity undermines practical agency.
► This event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200) or online here.
Tim McKee
Philosophy
12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Sat, Jan 18, 2025
Jens Timmermann, Kant's Fact of Pure Reason
► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.Kant’s Fact of Pure Reason
Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason” marks a significant departure from the foundational project of the “Groundwork”. Whereas the earlier work offers a defence of the categorical imperative as an expression of autonomy, the later work expects us to accept morality as factual. Kant dubs the fundamental law of ethics the “sole fact of pure reason”. Many readers are worried that philosophical justification has given way to dogmatism. In this talk, I try to get to the bottom of this change of mind by addressing, inter alia, the following questions: How does Kant characterise the Fact of Reason? In what sense of the word is the Fact a fact? Why does Kant call the Fact a ‘fact’? What role does the Fact play in the second Critique? How does the Fact relate to demonstration or proof? When and how do we encounter the Fact of Reason? It turns out that Kant does have a distinctive justificatory project in the second “Critique” even if, by his own standards, it falls short of a fully fledged ‘deduction’.
► This event is in-person. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200).
Jens Timmermann
Professor of Moral Philosophy
03:00 PM - 05:00 PM
University of St. Andrews
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin - Wed, Jan 22, 2025
Andrew Lee, The Utility Monster
► To stay informed about other upcoming events at the Centre for Ethics, opportunities, and more, please sign up for our newsletter.The Utility Monster
This paper develops a new impossibility result that connects population ethics to theories of welfare. The result is centered around a puzzle about the utility monster, defined as an individual whose lifetime quantity of welfare goods exceeds the overall quantity of welfare goods across an entire population of excellent human lives. The puzzle is about how to avoid MONSTROSITY, the claim that for any world containing only excellent human lives, there’s a better world containing only a lone utility monster. I show how the puzzle can be formulated with minimal assumptions about which theory of welfare is correct, how welfare and value are structured, and even whether the utility monster has an especially good life. The argument demonstrates that that it’s impossible to deny MONSTROSITY while accepting several other plausible premises. The upshot is that any future axiology must be monstrous, in one way or another.
► This event is hybrid. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200) or online here.
Andrew Lee
Professor of Philosophy
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
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