[SydPhil] Usyd talk this Friday

[Brigitte Everett]

Hi all,

On Friday, Oct 13th (tomorrow), we are hosting a guest postgraduate speaker from ANU, Theo Murray on “Balancing Blame’s Epistemic Norm” (see abstract below).

This talk is part of the speaker swap series that has been running between USYD, MQ, and ANU over the last few months.
It would be much appreciated if you’d attend this talk, both to give feedback to our guest speaker and to support this initiative of exchanging experiences between philosophy departments.

When & Where: The talk will take place Oct 13 from 3 pm - 4.30 pm in the Philosophy Seminar Room (N494) in the Quadrangle.

Hope to see you there!
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Title: Balancing Blame’s Epistemic Norm

Abstract: Blame is only fitting if certain facts hold: the action was wrong, the accused is responsible, the blamer has standing (e.g. isn’t a hypocrite), and so on. But as blamers, we only get uncertain evidence of these facts and thus need an epistemic norm of blaming: how strong does the evidence need to be for blame to be fitting? ‘I propose that this norm is just set by weighing up the costs of blaming too readily, and excusing (not blaming) too readily, and that these costs vary case-by-case. I respond to an approach from Coates (2016) who only considers one kind of cost, and fend off a sceptical challenge from Rosen (2004) who claims that we never have enough evidence to blame. Finally, because our practice of blaming admits flexibility, I argue that we ought to modify our blame to be more conversational in response to uncertainty. And because uncertainty is ubiquitous, we always have reason to blame conversationally.

Speaker: Theo Murray, PhD Candidate ANU Theodore.murray at anu.edu.au<mailto:Theodore.murray at anu.edu.au>
Theo completed his philosophy honours at USyd in 2019 on conceivability argument, under the supervision of DBM.


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