In the middle of this month, I organized a workshop on desire and normativity in Tartu. Here’s a short recap.
The first speaker was Ashley Shaw who is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Leeds. In his talk, titled “Urges”, he asked how we know about our urges. In the course of answering this question, he presented his account of urges as having a distinctive phenomenology which allows us to distinguish them from other attitudes and involving motor imagery that enables identifying the content of the urge. The next in line was Patrick Butlin, Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford who talked about individual evaluative perspective and their putative moral significance. His starting point was the issue of how reinforcement learning agents could have such perspectives. After presenting the conditions under which this is possible, he explored the questions of whether having such a perspective is sufficient for moral standing and whether it makes a difference to moral status. After lunch, our very own Francesco Orsi delved into Anscombe’s conception of the Guise of the Good and addressed a variety of interpretive questions, including for instance the issue of whether Anscombe’s conception was attitudinal or content-oriented, what exactly her argument for the Guise of the Good was, and why she distinguished between explanations in terms of mental causes and in terms of reasons. The final speaker of the day was Alex Gregory who is an Associate Professor at Southampton whose talk was about the candidate rational requirements for desire. In particular, he considered the instrumental requirement that one ought to desire means to the ends that one desires, and fended off objections to the feasibility of that requirement. In the course of defending its feasibility, he argued against skepticism about the existence of instrumental desires and against the claim that instrumental requirement overgenerates instrumental desires. Sadly, Elizabet Ventham, who was supposed to be the first speaker on the second day, had to cancel due to illness. The second speaker of that day, Neil Sinhababu, on the other hand, could present, but only online because his flight to Estonia was cancelled. In his wide-ranging presentation, he defended the moral sense theory, according to which our moral cognition is based on pleasure, and argued that pleasure can represent (moral) goodness which is itself a a kind of pleasure because accurate pleasures are qualitatively identical to what they represent.
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