Duty and Discretion
When
The Spring 2020 Philosophy Colloquium Series presents Aaron Segal, a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh.
Abstract:
Discretionary duties are moral duties that allow us significant latitude in the course of fulfilling them, such as beneficence, mutual aid, and gratitude. They have commonly been understood in terms of thresholds for fulfillment: roughly, once an agent has done enough by the lights of some discretionary duty, they aren’t required to do anything further. Recently, Barbara Herman has offered a purported counterexample and an alternative positive proposal to the threshold view. But while her counterexample is compelling, her positive proposal is underdeveloped. After defending the success of her counterexample and working through some ways of precisifying her positive proposal, I argue that understanding discretionary duties as grounded in determinative moral values allows us to make good on (one precisified version of) Herman’s proposal.
This colloquium talk will be hosted virtually on Zoom. If you would like to participate, please contact Jonathan Weinberg.