Dear all, This is a reminder that Claire Benn will be giving a talk entitled 'Psychological Perfectionism and the Paradox of Obligation' at the Graduate Seminar tomorrow.
We will be starting at 4.30pm and finishing at about 6.00pm in the Graduate Common Room. Afterwards we'll probably head to a pub. Hope to see you all there, Carlo Abstract: A part of the difficulty in justifying the existence of supererogatory acts is to justify how an act can be good to do and yet not one that we are required to perform. In this talk, I present one strategy that we might employ to explain how this can be so. I argue that, if we are interested in an action-guiding theory, then we should learn some lessons from the psychological literature on perfectionism. Based on the similarities between a perfectionistic view of the world and a demanding moral theory, I claim that demanding that we meet a high moral standard can entail that we are less likely to reach that standard than if reaching it is considered optional. Just like the paradox of hedonism, whereby aiming directly at pleasure means we are less likely to achieve it, by making it the case that we have to perform a certain action, we can make it less likely that we actually do. I consider a challenge that might be raised to this, that it endorses a sort of moral complacency, a satisfaction with meeting the low bar of being ‘good enough’ or ‘not bad’. However, the psychological literature is of help here too: it gives us reason to hope that we can aim high without considering ourselves obliged. I conclude by painting a picture of an action-guiding theory that encourages us to be moral athletes rather than moral neurotics. _____________________________________________________ Sent by the CamPhilEvents mailing list. To unsubscribe or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents Posts are archived here: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive
