Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 24th January. We are delighted to welcome Professor Cécile Fabre (Oxford), who will be giving a talk entitled "'Tu Quoque': on the ethics of inconsistency, double standards and hypocrisy in economic foreign policy". Here is the abstract:
In the book of which this paper forms the concluding chapter, I argue that political communities (that is to say, their individual citizens and leaders) are justified, under certain conditions, to impose economic sanctions, and/or to condition the provision of aid, loans, and/or to grant debt relief, as a means to get the other party to respect human rights.Those decisions are routinely based on moral condemnation of the policies which they are meant to stop. Those who conduct those policies (or their supporters) often retort that their accusers are guilty of exactly the same sin, and/or are overly lenient on their equally sinful allies. My aim in this chapter is to evaluate those charges in so far as they are levelled against wrongdoers who resort to economic statecraft as a means to get other wrongdoers to respect fundamental human rights. I begin by providing a general account of the typical forms of conduct which are likely to elicit the ‘tu quoque’ charge in simple, individual cases. I then outline some of the difficulties which we face when we level the charge at collective agents, or at individuals who claim to act on behalf of collectives, rather than at individuals who act in a private capacity. I conclude by setting out the conditions under which the charge holds in these cases. Finally, I examine what, if anything, is wrong with acting in such a way as to elicit the charge in the specific context of economic statecraft. 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. We look forward to seeing many of you there. 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.
