Chapel Hill PPE Workshop

An intensive one-day workshop for faculty and graduate students on papers in progress by our PPE Teaching Assistant Professors. You’ll find talk titles and abstracts below.

The registration form is available HERE. Please do register so that we have the information for venue and meal planning.

Agenda:

8:30 am
Breakfast and Conversation

9:00 – 10:20 am
“A Dilemma for Double Effect Reasoners,” Gerard Rothfus

10:30 – 11:50 am
“Epistemic Democracy and the Advantages of Representation: When Less (Evidence) is More (Epistemic Success),” Zev Berger

12:00 – 1:00 pm
Lunch in Caldwell Hall

1:00 – 2:20 pm
“Political liberalism without civility,” Paul Garofalo

2:30 – 3:50 pm
“Prejudiced Testimonial Beliefs: A Tale of Two Principles,” Will Conner

4:00 – 5:20 pm
“How to Avoid Naivety without Falling into Complacency,” Sam Fullhart

6:00 pm
Dinner at Gourmet Kingdom

Abstracts:

“A Dilemma for Double Effect Reasoners,” Gerard Rothfus
According to proponents of double effect reasoning (DER), intentionally inflicting harm is, ceteris paribus, more difficult to justify than merely foreseeably causing it. Intuitive as it may seem, moral philosophers have discovered that such reasoning can generate puzzling deontic cycles. This talk suggests that findings of this sort can be helpfully interpreted in terms of a simple impossibility result: double effect reasoners cannot jointly respect analogues of two well-known principles of social choice, independence of irrelevant alternatives and Pareto dominance. Building on previous work explicating DER in terms of purified utility maximization, the talk then explores the prospects for bringing DER into line with either of these principles taken individually.

“Epistemic Democracy and the Advantages of Representation: When Less (Evidence) is More (Epistemic Success),” Zev Berger
It’s commonly thought that representative democracy is a second-best to a full, Athenian-style democracy which demanding the participation of each citizen during legislative sessions. In particular, representative democracy is commonly seen as epistemically inferior to a pure democracy, since while pure democracy draws on the wisdom of the whole, recruiting an open deliberation of all members, representative democracy draws only from a few, thus degrading the epistemic quality of the deliberative outcome. Since the proposed mechanisms for the epistemic success of democracy recruit models where deliberation produces better results when more agents are involved, it’s natural to think that, when representatives are no better judges of evidence than ordinary citizens, direct democracy is epistemically better on the merits. This paper challenges that presumption. Through representation we identify a host of cases where less evidence yields more epistemic success. Cases where haste, subtlety, or polarization obtain are strong candidates for representation. And to boot, the model here preserves the democratic character of the deliberative system through epistemic proceduralism. We argue that representation’s bad rap is both epistemically and democratically unearned.

“Political liberalism without civility,” Paul Garofalo
Political liberals typically hold, first, that laws and policies are legitimate only if they are justifiable to all reasonable citizens (the public justification principle) and, second, that the public justification principle requires that citizens and officials must engage in public political deliberations using public reasons (the duty of civility). In this paper I question whether political liberals should hold that the public justification principle requires the duty of civility. I argue that the normative underpinnings of the public justification principle do not require the duty of civility and so the public justification principle has, at best, a contingent connection to the duty of civility—the duty of civility is simply one possible means by which a state can assure citizens that the public justification principle is satisfied. Separating the public justification principle from the duty of civility strengthens the political liberal position by allowing it to avoid arguments that attempt to reject the public justification principle through arguing against the duty of civility.

“Prejudiced Testimonial Beliefs: A Tale of Two Principles,” Will Conner
Unfortunately, many agents acquire prejudiced beliefs via testimony. Susanna Siegel and Endre Begby have recently advanced accounts of the epistemic status of prejudiced testimonial beliefs. Each account follows from some general principle that purportedly governs testimonial justification. On the one hand, Siegel endorses a transmission principle, according to which the epistemic status of an agent’s testimonial belief is determined by the epistemic status of the relevant belief of the speaker whose testimony the agent has received. Siegel takes for granted that prejudiced speakers lack justification for their prejudiced beliefs: they are epistemically ill-founded. In turn, testimony in favor of them transmits this ill-foundedness. The upshot: prejudiced beliefs based on testimony are ill-founded. In contrast, Begby endorses a deference principle: owing to individual cognitive limitations and time and resource constraints, agents are epistemically entitled to defer to their community members when forming beliefs. On this basis, Begby argues that agents in prejudiced environments can be—and often are—justified in forming prejudiced beliefs based on testimony.

I argue for a middle path between these accounts. I first dispute the alleged general principles underlying both accounts and then present an alternative account of testimonial justification on which the epistemic status of an agent’s testimonial belief is a matter of whether her evidence supports believing that the speaker whose testimony she has received is trustworthy about the matter at hand. I then argue that while agents in highly isolated communities might have access only to misleading evidence that counts in favor of regarding prejudiced speakers as trustworthy, such cases are quite rare. In more typical cases, recipients of prejudiced testimony have ample evidence that counts against regarding prejudiced speakers as trustworthy about the relevant matters. This suggests that prejudiced testimonial beliefs are most often unjustified. The result of this paper, then, is a thoroughly internalist view of testimonial justification that allows for the possibility that prejudiced testimonial beliefs can be justified, contra Siegel, while avoiding the excessive charity that Begby extends to them.

“How to Avoid Naivety without Falling into Complacency,” Sam Fullhart
Does what you would do bear on what you ought to do? Actualists say “yes,” while possibilists say “no.” I argue that actualists are correct about what you objectively ought to do, given all of the relevant information. However, there is a further question about how fallible, cognitively limited agents should answer this question in their deliberations. I argue that neither actualism nor possibilism provides a satisfying answer. I defend a version of deliberative pluralism, on which practical reasoning—like scientific reasoning—consists in constructing and applying idealized models of one’s practical situation. Actualism and possibilism can then be understood as different modelling frameworks, which serve complementary roles in our efforts to generate tractable models of our situations. Employing these models, we can make decisions that approximate the decisions that we would make if we had all of the relevant information about how to pursue our goals, and how to manage our inclinations to abandon them.

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