Dear all, The Moral Sciences Club's next meeting will be held on Tuesday 22nd November. We are delighted to welcome Professor Jeff McMahan (Oxford), who will be giving a talk entitled "Against Collective Responsibility". Here is the abstract:
"Many people believe that collectives of certain kinds, such as corporations and states, are entities capable of having values, desires, beliefs, and intentions, and that they can act in ways for which they are morally responsible and even blameworthy. These people believe that none of these facts about collectives are wholly reducible to the psychological states or acts of individual persons. According to views of this sort, collectives themselves can be liable to defensive action or deserving of punishment. And our ability to recognize these forms of collective responsibility and collective guilt is, many philosophers claim, especially important in cases in which there is a "shortfall" of individual responsibility for bad outcomes – for example, when a disaster occurs but no individuals in the causal chain leading to it have acted in ways that seem more than minimally culpable. Such views are also thought to be foundational for traditional beliefs about the morality of war. I will argue against these collectivist views and also suggest that their implications for the morality of war are different from what they are commonly supposed to be." The meeting will be held at 2:30 until 4:15, in the Barbara White Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. For those who have not yet paid, there is a yearly membership fee of £7.50 for students and £15 for others, or a one-off fee of £3 (£2 for students). These can be purchased online at: http://onlinesales.admin.cam.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=1&catid=75&prodvarid=87 -- Matt Dougherty, James Hutton, and Li Li Tan Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
