“Objective Rights and Epistemic Risks: Beyond Subjective Permissions”

客观权利和认识风险：超越主观许可

Renee Bolinger

WHU Philosophy Fall Seminar Series

Thursday 18 October 2018

时间：2018年10月18日 下午15:00-17:00

地点：哲学学院振华楼214

Abstract

This paper argues that our understanding of objective rights must be sensitive to agents’ epistemic limitations. On one popular understanding (which the author calls the `full-information fact-relative' interpretation), considerations about ignorance are relevant only to the `subjective permissibility' of an act, affecting culpability but not whether an act is a rights-violation. Against this view, she argues that subjective permissibility is not an adequate answer to the problems that agent ignorance poses for the deliberative and distributive roles of moral rights. If rights are to fill the theoretical role assigned to them, they must issue fact-relative permissions that are at least somewhat sensitive to agents' evidential and epistemic limitations.

About the Speaker

Renee Bolinger, a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Philosophy at Australian National University, has research interests in ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of language. At the moment, she is working on the moral significance of risk, as part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) project with Seth Lazar, Lara Buchak, Alan Hajek, Philip Pettit, Frank Jackson, and Katie Steele. Starting in September 2019, she will join Princeton University as an assistant professor in the Department of Politics and University Center for Human Values.

She completed her Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of Southern California in 2017, working primarily with Jonathan Quong, Robin Jeshion, and Mark Schroeder.

When and Where

Seminar Presentation:

· When: 15:00-17:00

· Where: B214