Institutskolloquium

How to explain Intentionality
18-20 Uhr

Abstract

Philosophical theories of intentionality typically assume that explaining intentionality or mental representation must answer what I call the ‘question of aboutness’: what makes it the case that one thing is about or represents another? Moreover, this is supposed to be a general requirement on theories of intentionality, regardless of one’s metaphysical position (materialism, dualism etc). In this talk I argue that there is no such general requirement, and that explaining intentionality does not require answering the question of aboutness.

It is not an empirical question, for me, how long I will love my children or my spouse. Indeed, this is not a question for me at all: The question of how long I will love them is not separate from the question of whether I love them. Love, in its self-consciousness, is endless.
Yet how are we to square this with the empirical observation that often love does appear to end? How are we to make sense of broken hearts, betrayal, or just plain falling out of love? And can we reconcile the self-consciousness of love as endless with empirical reflection on its possible end?

Abstract

Can we wrong each other just by entertaining certain beliefs about each other? For instance, does another person wrong me if she believes that my talk will be boring because I am woman? So far, authors who are interested in the possibility of so called doxastic wronging have tried to answer such questions by focusing on issues of control and coordination. In this talk, I raise a different point by discussing whether the idea of doxastic wronging is compatible with a liberal normative commitment. To do so, I first show that there are two ways to interpret the phenomenon of doxastic wronging, a harm-based one and an obligation-based one. Then I argue that only the harm-based interpretation is compatible with the so called liberal principle and, more specifically, freedom of thought. Engaging with this moral issue reveals that the wrong-making feature of doxastic wronging lies in the harm it constitutes for its targets and not, as an obligation-based interpretation would have it, in the violation of a morally grounded epistemic obligation.

Moral equality is often grounded in the possession of some value-conferring intrinsic property of individuals, typically identified in psychological capacities related to the ability to be autonomous agents (Rawls 1971; Carter 2011). While these theories have already been the object of criticism (McMahan 2007), in this paper I argue that the concept of vulnerability can be used to formulate a further objection to them. Like many other parts of moral and political philosophy, such as social contract theory, this debate is also vitiated by a conception of the person centred around self-sufficiency and independence as these theories disregard the fact that the possession of moral autonomy, far from being a natural datum, depends on the existence of certain social arrangements and relationships.

I argue that a better approach to the basis of moral equality is to look at human vulnerability. Unlike other recent proposals, I do not opt for a negative conception of equality, which starts from the wrongness of inequality and conceive of vulnerability exclusively in connection with potential attacks to one’s sense of self (Sangiovanni 2017). Instead, I focus on the fact that vulnerability is also constitutive of very many valuable moral and political relationships, such as those of love, care, mutual recognition and respect. I argue that our commitment to moral equality is justified by the value of these relationships, together with the wrongness and harms of inequality, because only when and if and we treat each other as moral equals we can be part of relationships of love, care, mutual recognition and respect. My aim is to develop a relational account of the basis of moral equality, which fully captures the significance of vulnerability and is immune to the objections moved against traditional accounts (McMahan 2007) and the criticisms of Sangiovanni’s relational proposal (Floris 2019). Abstract NN