Ethics and Political Philosophy Group Talk (Garrett Cullity, University of Adelaide)

The Ethics and Political Philosophy Research Interest Group welcomes Garrett Cullity, Hughes Professor of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide. Professor Cullity is a moral philosopher whose work includes publications on eight broad topics in moral philosophy, including practical reasons and rationality, value and fittingness, moral epistemology, and beneficence and aid. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences and the Australian Academy of the Humanities, as well as a former president of the Australasian Association of Philosophy. His latest book is Concern, Respect, and Cooperation (OUP, 2018).

Talk Title

Reasons and Fittingness

Talk Abstract

According to the “fitting response” tradition of thinking about value, good things are fitting objects of favour-responses and bad things of disfavour-responses. What is the relationship between the relation of fittingness, so understood, and the relation of being-a-normative-reason-for? A widespread view treats normative reasons as primitive, and explains fitting responses as those for which there are reasons of the “right kind.” This talk adds to recent efforts to develop a fittingness-priority view with the opposite explanatory direction. Its proposal is that a normative reason for an action, thought, or feeling is a consideration that it is fitting to include in the thought through which one determines what one will do, think, or feel. When this proposal is carefully developed, it provides an appealing explanation of how our normative reasons can have the different sources they do and, more generally, of the relationship between the normative and the evaluative domains.

About the Ethics and Political Philosophy Group

The Ethics and Political Philosophy Group meets periodically throughout the year to discuss topics in value theory and related fields, including meta-ethics, normative ethics, applied ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, moral psychology, practical reason, agency, and identity.