Ethics and Political Philosophy Group Talk (Jessica Isserow, Notre Dame)

The Ethics and Political Philosophy Research Group is pleased to welcome as guest speaker Jessica Isserow, an associate professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. She has main research interests in metaethics, normative ethics, and moral psychology. Her main research projects center on: moral worth/moral praiseworthiness and “praise-associated attitudes,” such as pride and esteem; the nature of friendship and the relationship/potential conflicts between moral duties and duties of friendship; and the ethics of blame (e.g., hypocrisy, over-blaming) and blameworthiness over time. She also serves as an associate editor for the journal Analysis.

This is an in-person event, but those unable to attend otherwise can join via Zoom.

Talk Title

On Being Overlooked: Praise and the Ethics of Attention

Talk Abstract

 Praise—“the brighter side of moral responsibility” (Montminy 2022, p.28)—has traditionally been regarded as unproblematic. Understandably so; it’s hard to take moral offence at agents expressing pride, esteem, or admiration for one another. But our practices of praise have a dark side. Praise can be self-aggrandizing (Jeppsson & Brandenburg 2022), or hypocritical (Telech 2024). It also plays an under-appreciated role in supporting structures of oppression (Holroyd 2021, 2023). There are, then, good reasons to be critical of our practices of positive recognition. My primary interest in this work is the distribution of praise—specifically, the phenomenon of “being overlooked”: many people receive less praise than others not as a result of their lesser merit, but because their achievements or excellences happen to be less visible. Reflection on such cases reveals something important: our patterns of praise reinforce existing social disadvantages in under-recognized ways, and also tend to compound non-structural forms of bad luck. The remedy, I argue, is not so much to police praise itself as it is to pay greater attention to how we distribute attention.

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.