Next Thursday January 26, 2023 will take place the defense of the thesis “The Emotional Self: A Relational View” of our PhD candidate Marta Cabrera, directed by our professors Josep Corbí and Jordi Valor. The event will take place from 11:00 am in the “Sala de Graus” of the “Facultat de Filosofia i Ciències de l’Educació”.

Please note that the event begins 30 minutes earlier than usual.

In this talk, I examine how individual responsibility arises in situations that present the following four features: 

(a) The combined behaviour of numerous individuals causes significant cumulative harm.

(b) The behaviour of any one individual, in and of itself, does not cause this cumulative harm, nor can it have a significant impact on it.

(c) Individuals do not intend the cumulative harm, even though they understand and expect it to result from the combined behaviour of numerous individuals – behaviour such as their own.

(d) Abstaining from behaving in this way is costly for the individual. 

There are numerous examples of situations meeting these conditions. The most paradigmatic (and arguably the most urgent) is that of climate change (Broome, 2012).

Since in our culture (both in our ordinary, minimally theoretic, everyday culture and in our philosophical one), individual responsibility is typically articulated in terms of either intentions or consequences, we face a profound “hermeneutic lacuna” (to adopt Miranda Fricker’s expression) when attempting to make individual responsibility visible or even intelligible in situations of this kind: we simply lack the epistemic resources to account for individual responsibility in such situations. 

This, in turn, has a stultifying or paralysing effect on our agency: lacking the required epistemic resources, we find ourselves unable to articulate clear reasons for changing our behaviour and, since changing our behaviour would be costly (given d), our behaviour remains unchanged. I will therefore employ the term “agency-stultifying situation” to refer to any situation that satisfies the four above-described criteria. 

In this talk, I examine what epistemic resources could be generated so as to overcome this hermeneutic lacuna, focusing in particular on the example of climate change.

Bibliography:

• • Broome, John. Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World (New York: Norton Global Ethics Series, 2012). 
  • Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford University Press, 2007). 
  • Gesang, Bernward. (2021) “Climate Change – Do I Make a Difference?” Environmental Ethics, vol. 39, pp. 3–19

• • Kagan, Shelly. “Do I Make a Difference”, Philosophy & Public Affairs (2011).

First lecture on perception of music by Professor Christopher Peacocke (Columbia University).

More info TBA.

Second lecture on the perception of music by Professor Christopher Peacocke as part of the VLC Philosophy Lab Colloquium series.

More info TBA.