Dear All, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 21st November. We are delighted to welcome Michelle Dempsey (Villanova), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Sex and Regret'. The abstract is below:
In the philosophical literature, regret is typically discussed in the context of *agent-regret* – that is, the regret that one appropriately feels for having one’s agency causally related to a negative consequence that was beyond one’s control. (Williams gives the example of a lorry driver, who ‘through no fault of his own’ runs over a small child, killing him.) In public discussion of sexual violation, one persistent line of thought concerns what we will call *patient-regret* – as in the claim that most allegations of rape ‘are really just women regretting sex the next morning’. Let us stipulate that post-sex patient-regret does not retroactively negate sexual consent that was present at the time of the act – and thus close off conceptual space for so-called ‘regret-rape’. Still, the question remains: can patient-regret impact the normative position of the agent, such that one’s life goes less well (morally speaking, at least) if one’s partner later regrets having sex? And if so, does the agent come to have any duties in virtue of this regret? Drawing on work by David Enoch (which concerns entirely different topics), we argue that post-sex patient-regret grounds a duty for the agent to ‘take responsibility’ for the regretted sex. In this talk, I hope to explain the grounds, substance, and implications of this duty. 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. If you would like to have dinner with Michelle Dempsey in the evening following her talk at the Moral Sciences Club, please email the secretaries of the club ([email protected]) by midday on Monday. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and it will take place at around 7pm at a location to be determined (those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details by email closer to the time). -- Karamvir Chadha and Cathy Mason 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.
