Fall 2015
October 8 – Win-chiat Lee, Professor of Philosophy and Chair, Wake Forest University
“Anarchy, World State and International Criminal Law”
International criminal law (ICL) is enforced through the exercise of jurisdiction that lacks political authority. In that sense it is anarchic. However, it does not follow that ICL is illegitimate. The legitimacy of the universal jurisdiction exercised in ICL is based on the legitimacy of vigilantism where there is no relevant legitimate political authority to address problems of impunity. Nor is ICL necessarily anarchic in the sense of being disorderly. Legitimate vigilantism is subject to ethical constraints that explain certain orderly features of international criminal law. Vigilantism, even when practiced within ethical bounds, still creates problems of injustice. That is what justifies the existence of the state and its exercise of political authority to begin with. However, we cannot overcome the problems of possible injustice associated with ICL by entering into a world state that has political authority over all of the states and all of humanity.
October 22 – Agnes Callard, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago
“Can You Choose Who To Be?”
How do we acquire our deepest commitments, values, and ideals? On the one hand, it seems we cannot rationally choose our new values. For what could be the basis for such a choice? If the answer is that we had a prior commitment to a value entailing the new one, then the question simply gets pushed back: how did we acquire that commitment? If the choice has no rational basis, then it does not seem that the acquisition of the value is truly an expression of our agency. And this is equivalent to saying that our values are something that happen to us rather than the products of anything that we do. In this talk, I defend the view that we do indeed have a hand in answering the question as to what things in the world are important to us; and that our answers need not be, and typically are not, arbitrary or random. I will show this can be done without inviting a regress as to how we arrived at the materials for generating the answers we give.
November 5 – Amie Thomasson, Professor of Philosophy and Cooper Fellow at the University of Miami
“What Can We Do, When We Do Metaphysics?”
November 12 – Sharon Street, Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University
“Constructivism in Ethics and the Problem of Attachment and Loss”