Siamo entusiasti di promuovere e dare diffusione tra i nostri soci un ciclo di conferenze online sull’Etica dell’argomentazione, organizzato da Andrew Aberdein, professore di Filosofia presso il Florida Institute of Technology, e Katharina Stevens, professoressa di Filosofia presso l’University of Lethbridge, che si terrà ogni primo venerdì del mese (eccetto gennaio, che sarà l’8 gennaio). La serie ospita una varietà di illustri relatori di molte discipline, tra cui filosofia, scienze politiche, studi sulla comunicazione e psicologia.
Gli argomenti includono la discussione dei doveri e delle virtù argomentative, come insegnare agli studenti a comportarsi moralmente durante la discussione nei corsi di pensiero critico e di dibattito, le implicazioni del comportamento argomentativo del clima politico, la psicologia dell’impatto dell’argomentazione sulla conoscenza e il comportamento etico nell’argomentazione giuridica.
Ci auguriamo che questa serie di relatori sia un primo passo verso lo sviluppo di un campo di ricerca interdisciplinare nell’etica dell’argomentazione.
Per ulteriori informazioni, visitare:
https://argumentethics2021.wixsite.com/argumentationethics
Sul sito web troverai il programma e le informazioni sui relatori. Potrai anche iscriverti per ricevere notifiche prima di ogni discorso.
Sul sito web verrà pubblicato un link di zoom per le conferenze.
Di seguito il programma dettagliato:
SPEAKER SERIES SCHEDULE
January 8th 2021, 1PM ET
Dr. Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern University)
The Duty to Object
We have the duty to object to things that people say. If you report something that I know is false or unwarranted, or potentially harmful to others, I may be required to say as much. In this paper, my aim is to explore in greater depth how to best understand this duty. I begin by highlighting two central features of this duty that distinguish it from others, such as believing in accordance with the evidence or promise-keeping. In particular, I argue that whether we are obligated to object is directly influenced not only by what other relevant members of the context or community do, but also by the social status of the agent in question. I then show that these features are shared by the duty to be charitable, and the similarities between these two duties point to a potentially deeper explanation: while promise-keeping is regarded as a classic perfect duty, charity is an imperfect one. I then show how the duty to object can be modeled on a particular conception of imperfect duties, one that takes the distribution of goods, including epistemic goods, to be central.
February 5th 2021 1PM ET
Dr. Duncan Pritchard (UC Irvine)
Virtuous Arguing With Closed Minds
It is widely thought that it is built into the very idea of arguing in good faith that one both desires to change the mind of one’s opponent and that one is, at least in principle, willing to change one’s own mind. More specifically, that there is something inherently suspect about arguing with closed minds, either where one’s own mind is regarded as closed, or where one reasonably believes that one’s opponent’s mind is closed. I think that this way of thinking about the ethics of argumentation is problematic. In particular, I will be claiming that there is a perfectly good sense in which an agent who is intellectually virtuous might nonetheless engage in an argument where there is no reasonable expectation on her part that her opponent’s mind will change as a result, much less that her own mind will change. Relatedly, I will be claiming that such a scenario is quite compatible with our hero possessing the intellectual virtue of intellectual humility, and also manifesting due intellectual respect for her opponent (i.e., this is not a case of mere ‘browbeating’). Finally, I will relate this conclusion to a more general point about intellectually virtuous inquiry. Rather than such inquiry being essentially aimed at resolving doubt, as is commonly supposed (such that one cannot virtuously inquire about that about which one has no real doubt), there is instead a respectable sense in which intellectually virtuous inquiry can be aimed at matters about which one already possesses both knowledge and understanding.
March 5th 2021 1PM ET
Dr. John Duffy (University of Notre Dame)
Teaching Argument as a Virtuous Practice
Argument is frequently represented as an act of opposition, an exercise of power, and a struggle for domination. Argumentation scholar David Zarefsky has written that argument can involve “an attempt to limit freedom of choice” by means of “applying superior to inferior force” in competitions with interlocutors (Zarefsky 2005, 17). Such attitudes are particularly prevalent, contends linguist Deborah Tannen, in an academic culture that prizes intellectual combat and the ability to “position our work in opposition to someone else’s, which we prove wrong’ (2000, 256). Teaching the adversarial model of argument, Tannen asserts, can have a baleful effect upon students, who learn “that they must disprove others’ arguments in order to be original, make a contribution, and demonstrate their intellectual ability” (ibid). In this paper, I propose an alternative understanding of teaching argument, one grounded in intellectual and moral virtues. I suggest that the teaching of argument always and inevitably entangles teachers and students in deliberations and decision-making about such virtues as truthfulness, accountability, open-mindedness, intellectual courage, and prudence. In response to conceptions of argument as domination, I offer an understanding of argument as an act of radical humility, one that commits its participants to practices of constructive, mutually beneficial discourse.
April 2nd 2021 1PM ET
Dr. Michael Morrell (University of Connecticut)
In Defense of Empathy
On January 25, 2020 in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof asked readers to engage in a thought experiment: “What if it were President Barack Obama who was the subject of the Senate impeachment trial? How would we feel then?” He was, in essence, asking people to engage in the process of empathy. Political theorists such as Sharon Krause, Michael L. Frazier and myself have argued that empathy (or the nearly-synonymous “sympathy” as used by Adam Smith and David Hume) must be a central component of democratic politics. Yet in the age of Trump, it might seem naïve to talk of the need for empathy. Furthermore, scholars such as Mary F. Scudder, in her piece “Beyond Empathy: Strategies and Ideals of Democratic Deliberation,” and Paul Bloom, in his book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, not only question the importance of empathy for politics and ethics, but highlight what they see as its dangers. Here, I defend empathy against both its critics and its seeming inappropriateness for contemporary politics. Drawing on previous political theory and advances in social psychology, I argue that critics of empathy: a) do not fully recognize the multi-dimensional nature of empathy, and thereby, both conflate the whole of empathy with only a part of it and end up actually defending empathy as important even when claiming to do the opposite; b) fail to understand that empathy will always be present in political and ethical decision-making, and that therefore the choice we face is not between having empathy or not having empathy, but between having a limited, opaque empathy and a more expansive, transparent empathy; and c) elide the role that empathy can play in leading citizens to respect difference. While we must guard against the possible shortcomings of the process of empathy, the best solution to these is encouraging more citizens to engage in this process rather than rejecting empathy. In a democratic society in which the enforcement of political decisions is backed by a monopoly of violence, we must aim to give everyone equal consideration, regardless of their race, gender, class, ideology, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, among others. The most likely way to accomplish this requires that decision makers engage in the process of empathy; it is the very absence of this that is one of the key drives of the democratic dysfunctions we see in our contemporary political world.
May 7th 2021 1PM ET
Dr. Scott Aikin (Vanderbilt University) and Dr. John Casey (Northeastern Illinois University)
Title and Abstract TBA
June 4th 2021 1PM ET
Dr. Catherine Hundleby (University of Windsor)
Argument Repair: Teaching Interpretation
The “principle of charity” commonly promoted in critical thinking textbooks provides too vague a guide for argument interpretation, especially for teaching contexts, and it has questionable ethical connotations. Instead, students can benefit from learning the practice of Argument Repair developed by Richard Epstein (2013), which he bases on a Principle of Rational Discussion that specifies how interpreters should regard arguers. Teaching Argument Repair can also mitigate the prevalence that Janice Moulton (1983) identifies of an Adversary Method in the discipline of philosophy. The default assumption of the Adversary Method perpetuates the discursive dominance of certain forms of masculinity and of certain men in a way that perpetuates their social privilege. In appealing to the Principle of Rational Discussion, Argument Repair invokes a context in which students can recognize the method’s epistemological value without granting it the problematically singular authority that it tends to receive.
July 2nd 2021 1PM ET
Dr. Whitney Phillips (Syracuse University)
Information Hellscape: Where Do We Go From Here?
Throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, scandal, dysfunction and crisis abounded in the US, with widespread global consequences. As difficult as those years were, 2020 was a class all on its own. From the pandemic to the infordemic to the US election and its reverberating disinformation, American networks, institutions, and civil society were tested again and again. This talk will reflect on what US citizens in particular, and global citizens more broadly, can learn—indeed what we must learn—from 2020, and how we can apply those lessons to the coming challenges. After all, 2020 will be with us long after the clock strikes midnight on December 31; the question is, what policy, educational, and ethical steps can we take to help clean up the mess now and prevent bigger messes later?
August 6th 2021 1PM ET
Dr. Ingrid Haas ( University of Nebraska – Lincoln)
Title and Abstract TBA
September 3rd 2021 1PM ET
Dr. Steven Sloman (Brown University)
Sources of Opinion: The Community of Knowledge and How to Take Advantage of Outsourcing
People have some crazy opinions. Generally, these are the opinions that we disagree with. The standard view in both academia and the wider culture is that people have such opinions due to knowledge deficits; they are lacking information. On this view, providing information and critical reasoning skills is the best way to get opinions to converge, because they’ll converge to the truth. There is already strong reason to doubt this deficit model. I provide more in the form of evidence that knowledge is unrelated to attitudes about issues. In contrast, a person’s ideology influences both their attitudes and their sense of understanding. A competitor to the deficit model, the cultural cognition view, explains the effect of ideology on attitudes, but does not address the sense of understanding. I follow the cultural cognition view in proposing that people outsource much of their reasoning to their communities; I add that it is the resulting sense of understanding that mediates their attitudes. This community of knowledge suggests that people outsource most of their reasoning. I show how this fact can be deployed to bring evidence to bear on policy.
October 1st 2021 1PM ET
Dr. Katharina Stevens (University of Lethbridge)
Dialogue Types, Argument-Roles and Arguing Ethically
This paper discusses the way in which moral reasons apply to arguers and their behavior in argument. It tackles the problem that different argument structures (e.g. deliberations, debates) seem to change the way moral reasons apply to arguers – as for example the moral reasons that require arguers to be charitable in the interpretation of
their interlocutors’ arguments. The paper suggests that ethics in argument should be treated as a kind of role-ethics: Depending on the kind of argument that arguers are engaged in, they play different argumentative roles (e.g. deliberator in a deliberation, proponent in a debate). These roles come with different norms regarding argumentative behavior. Arguers can fulfill their moral obligations during the argument by following the requirements of their roles. However, this does not absolve arguers from moral responsibility for their argumentative behavior. Unless argumentative roles are institutionally prescribed, arguers are responsible for shaping the structure of the argument they are engaged in according to the morally relevant reasons that apply in the context in which the argument arises.
November 5th 2021 1PM ET
Dr. Amalia Amaya (UNAM/Edinburgh Law School)
Virtue and Ambivalence in Legal Decision-Making
Ambivalence -when an agent is torn between two desirable but incompatible courses of action- is a state of incoherence that impedes confident decision-making. However, ambivalence, if properly managed, may be beneficial by helping those who experience it to appreciate the complexity of the values involved and triggers inquiry and deliberation into those values, thereby prompting a deepening and refinement of one’s moral outlook. This paper examines ambivalence and its potential for improving legal argumentation from the perspective of virtue theory. First, I will give an account of ambivalence, its psychology, and sources. Special attention will be paid to ‘collaborative’ ambivalence, which emerges in contexts of group deliberation. Next, I will argue that virtuous deliberators will deal with ambivalence in a way that results in better legal decisions. I will conclude the paper by discussing an objection against the claim that ambivalence plays an important role in virtuous legal decision-making.
December 3rd 2021 1PM ET
Dr. Andrew Aberdein (Florida Institute of Technology)
Is there a Cardinal Virtue of Argument?
Although the application of virtue theory to the ethics of argument is a relatively recent project, it has been around long enough for a variety of approaches to be defended. In this paper, I focus on one of the sources of contention. Many virtue theories of argument maintain that there are many different virtues, apparently or explicitly of equal importance. However, for some virtue theorists a single virtue is fundamental to good argument, whether that cardinal virtue is intellectual humility (Lois Agnew; Kyle Scott); the willingness to be rationally persuaded (Michael Baumtrog); the willingness to inquire (Benjamin Hamby); or something else.
Such a cardinal virtue of argument would not only enhance the conceptual simplicity of a virtue theory of argument, but also its educational utility. I will assess the plausibility of this approach and the competing merits of the candidate cardinal virtues.