Two parallel sessions on the Saturday afternoon will be devoted to short presentations by graduate students (or those who have recently obtained a postgraduate degree).

The 2009 speakers

Session A

14.00 Thomas Porter - University of Oxford : ‘Prioritarianism and the Levelling Down Objection’

ABSTRACT: In this paper I discuss a recent attempt to apply the ‘levelling down objection’ to prioritarianism. I show that the attempt depends upon a particular understanding of prioritarianism. But, as I argue, prioritarians are not committed to this understanding, and so the levelling down objection does not apply to prioritarianism.

14.30 Nadine Elzein - University College London: 'Conflicting Reasons & Freedom of the Will’

ABSTRACT: Incompatibilism has traditionally been seen as incoherent because it’s taken to imply randomness. Whilst randomness could result from the denial of causal determinism, there is another sort of randomness that results from denying rational determinism: Denying that agent’s actions are determined by their reasons for acting. It’s argued that the ability to decide differently allows the agent to make choices that are irrational, and this undermines rather than furthering freedom. I maintain that this argument neglects scenarios in which reasons are in conflict with one another, and in which it is not obvious which course of action is best. In such scenarios, it seems we might preserve the agent’s rationality without claiming that the agent’s choices are rationally determined. We need only maintain that the agent’s actions are rationally limited. This closely parallels what is often said in response to the claim that any denial of causal determinism would be absurd, since it would involve ‘uncaused’ events. In the case of determinism, many theorists are now happy to say that causation could be probabilistic, and so whilst prior causes must limit the range of possible outcomes, they need not strictly determine them. In similar vein, I want to say that reasons must limit the range of choices that a sane agent can make, but need not strictly determine their choices. I maintain that agents could possess incompatibilist freedom when they are dealing with a conflict of reasons, but could not have this sort of freedom more generally.

15.00 Nathaniel Coleman - University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: ‘The political power of sexual preference’

ABSTRACT: One's choice of sexual partner is more a political power than a personal privilege. For other people's actions, when those actions are informed by their benign sexual attraction to us, constitute a social basis of our self-respect. This fact grounds a responsibility, falling disproportionately on each member of a privileged, dominant group, first, to introspect and, second, to divest himself of any sexual aversion to members of a stigmatized, subordinate group he might find himself to have. Neither the nature nor the origin of sexual preferences renders them inscrutable to introspection. For it is their capacity to influence action that makes sexual preferences morally salient; and to claim that sexual preferences are unchosen would be to undermine the ability of those preferences to ground the self-respect of the beloved. For its part, the duty to divest oneself of a sexual aversion to members of a stigmatized, subordinate group, first, does not require the adoption of any corollary sexual attraction to them; second, is not impugned by the possibility that members of the dominant group might divest themselves of a sexual aversion, only to replace it with a sexual indifference; and, third, does not require the impossible, since an individual has a right against the rest of society to provide him with real means of divesting himself of a sexual aversion that threatens to maintain, aggravate, or rekindle stigmatization in his society.

15.30 Kirk Surgener - University of Birmingham: ‘Korsgaard’s Metaethics: A Reply to Hussain and Shah’

ABSTRACT: Nadeem Hussain and Nishi Shah have argued (2005a and 2005b) that Christine Korsgaard’s Neo-Kantianism either represents an attempt to ‘go beyond’ traditional metaethics, or is intended as an alternative view within traditional metaethics. In either case, she seeks to reject certain metaethical positions on the basis of her arguments. This - they conclude - she cannot do, for her arguments do not generate metaethical conclusions. In effect, they seek to show that Korsgaard cannot ‘go beyond’, or offer an alternative within traditional metaethics, because her position is compatible with a number of the traditional metaethical views that she rejects.

Session B

14.00 Alexander Jackson - Rutgers University: ‘The Inflexibility of Relative Truth'

ABSTRACT: The ideology of relative truth is inflexible in two ways. Firstly, what’s true-for-J is closed under entailment. This is a problem for using truth-relativism to solve the preface puzzle about knowledge. Secondly, truth-relativism allows the correct answer to a question to be different for different judges. It does not allow there to be more than one acceptable answer for a fixed judge to give. Intuitively, borderline cases of a vague predicate are thus permissive of different answers. I propose an ideology that is not so rigid. It is preferable to relative truth.

14.30 Richard Pettigrew - University of Bristol: ‘An epistemology for self-locating beliefs’

ABSTRACT: An epistemic agent can have an opinion about which possible world she inhabits; but she can also have an opinion about her location within that possible world. The norms of traditional Bayesian epis- temology apply only to the former sort of opinion. They make no demands on the latter, which may not even be represented in the Bayesian framework. In this paper, I extend the traditional Bayesian framework so that self-locating opinions may be represented, and I propose norms governing these opinions that are analogous to the tra- ditional Bayesian norms.

15.00 Tim Button - University of Cambridge: ‘Restrictivism as Militant Quietism’

ABSTRACT: Can we quantify over everything: absolutely, positively, definitely, totally, every thing? Some authors have claimed that we must be able to do so, since the doctrine that we cannot is self-stultifying. But this treats restrictivism as a positive doctrine. Restrictivism is much better viewed as a kind of militant quietism. I call this version of restrictivism "dadism". Dadaists advance a hostile challenge, which seeks to silence all those who hold positive positions about absolutely general quantification.

15.30 Ole Thomassen Hjortland - Arché Research Centre, University of St Andrews: ‘The Semantic Role of Proof-Conditions’

ABSTRACT: The paper investigates a particular proof-theoretic framework for logical inferentialism, i.e., the idea that logical constants have their meaning fully determined by the rules that govern their use. It is argued that a modest inferentialist can include a notion of truth-conditional content as part of the meaning-theoretic story. The challenge is to detail how proofconditions in a formal setting can determine truth-conditions for logical constants. The paper develops an answer to this challenge by studying the interplay between logics and valuations for truth-functional connectives. It is concluded that the success of the project depends on what sort of structural resources is allowed in the proof-systems.