Confusion of Tongues: Finlay Book Symposium

Although it is often taken as established that value laden terms like 'good', 'ought' and 'reason' cannot be analyzed in non-normative terms, this claim is opposed by Stephan Finlay in his book Confusion of Tongues: A Theory of Normative Language. Finlay maintains, controversially, that prescribing and evaluating are acts that utterers can perform in making factual statements. The idea that there is a separate or nonfactual realm of value is (he thinks) due in part to the fallacy of trying to build certain pragmatic functions of language use into the semantics of words like 'good' and 'ought'. Normative moral statements not only convey substantive factual content but are often true, contrary to what moral error theorists and fictionalists claim.

Roughly speaking, for something to be good is for it to make some salient end more probable, and one ought to do what conduces to the likelihood of such an end. As for final goods, rather than it being the case that final goodness belongs to fundamental goods that enjoy a prior and non-relational form of value, it turns out that final goods too are valuable in virtue of relations. Imperatives (including moral imperatives) that might appear to be semantically of an irreducibly categorical form are actually embedded in contexts where the relevant ends are somehow implicit.

One might be tempted to characterize Finlay's end-relational view as an instrumentalist theory, but Finlay argues plausibly that it isn't strictly instrumentalist. Nor does the theory make the truth of normative statements depend on an agent's desires and preferences, so it isn't in a narrow sense Humean.

Morality and Mathematics

In this book, I explore similarities and differences between morality and mathematics, realistically conceived. I argue that our mathematical beliefs have no better claim to being self-evident or provable than our moral beliefs. Nor do our mathematical beliefs have better claim to being empirically justified than our moral beliefs. It is also incorrect that reflection on the “genealogy” of our moral beliefs establishes a lack of parity between the cases. In general, if one is a moral antirealist on the basis of epistemological considerations, then one ought to be a mathematical antirealist as well. And, yet, moral realism and mathematical realism do not stand or fall together. Moral questions -- or, at least, the practical ones stake in moral debate -- are objective in a sense that mathematical questions are not, and the sense in which they are objective can only be explained by assuming anti-realism. It follows that the concepts of realism and objectivity, which are widely identified, are actually in tension. I conclude that the objective questions in the neighborhood of questions of logic, modality, grounding, nature, and more are practical questions as well. Practical philosophy should, therefore, take center stage. 

James Doyle, Harvard University
David Barnett, Toronto
Jonathan Schwenkler, Florida State
Lucy Campbell, Warwick

Chairs' Forum/Forum des directeurs et directrices

Book Abstract: In the 21st century, the primary challenge for health care is chronic illness. To meet this challenge, we need to think anew about the role of the patient in health and health care. There have been widespread calls for patient-centered care, but this model of care does not question deeply enough the goals of health care, the nature of the clinical problem, and the definition of health itself. We must instead pursue patient-centered health, which is a health perceived and produced by patients. We should not only respect, but promote patient autonomy as an essential component of this health. Objective health measures cannot capture the burden of chronic illness, so we need to draw on the patient’s perspective to help define the clinical problem. We require a new definition of health as the capacity for meaningful action. It is recognized that patients play a central role in chronic illness care, but the concept of health behavior retards innovation. We seek not just an activated patient, but an autonomous patient who sets and pursues her own vital goals. To fully enlist patients, we must bridge the gap between impersonal disease processes and personal processes. This requires understanding how the roots of patient autonomy lie in the biological autonomy that allows organisms to carve their biological niche. It is time for us to recognize the patient as the primary customer for health care and the primary producer of health. Patient agency is both the primary means and primary end of health care.
Keywords: Agency, autonomy, engagement, empowerment, activation, chronic disease, illness, competence, patient-centered, capability

In his book "Aristotle’s Science of Matter and Motion" (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), Christopher Byrne, (Department of Philosophy, St. Francis Xavier University) argues that Aristotle’s natural philosophy is grounded in three main claims: 1) All perceptible objects are physical objects; 2) All physical objects are made out of a physical material cause; 3) The basic properties of the material elements cannot be understood teleologically. On the basis of these principles, he offers an account of Aristotle’s mechanics, laws of motion, and the role of physical matter in the composition and behaviour of perceptible objects generally. The purpose of this symposium is to examine these claims critically in light of Byrne’s unique contribution and to provide an opportunity for him to respond to critics.

Graduates in philosophy sometimes have surprising career paths. Their expertise opens unexpected doors for them in government, the civil service, industry, and beyond. It also makes them attractive to a wide range of faculties and departments within universities. Yet the training of our graduate students often focusses on access to traditional academic positions within philosophy departments. Without questioning the importance of such positions, how might we better prepare students for the multiplicity of positions potentially open to them, and how do we alert non-traditional employers to the pool of candidates produced by our graduate programmes? The participants in this round-table, who have pursued careers in an impressive range of professional contexts, will reflect on these questions and others, based on their own personal experiences, but proposing paths that might be of general interest. While we will be focussing on philosophy, it is not much of a stretch to imagine the relevance of their reflections for other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Les diplômés en philosophie ont parfois des trajectoires professionnelles étonnantes. Leur expertise leur ouvre des portes inattendues, au gouvernement, dans la fonction publique, dans l'industrie, et au-delà. Elle les rend également attrayants dans d'autres facultés et départements académiques. La formation de nos étudiants de cycles supérieurs est cependant souvent orientée exclusivement vers des postes académiques traditionnels au sein de Départements de philosophie. Sans nier l'importance de tels postes, on peut se poser la question: comment pourrions-nous mieux préparer les étudiants pour la multitude de postes qui s'ouvrent potentiellement à eux? Et comment alerter les employeurs non-traditionnels au bassin de candidats que produisent nos programmes de cycles supérieurs? Les participants dans cette table-ronde ont emprunté des trajectoires de carrière dans une gamme impressionnante de contextes professionnels. Ils réfléchiront à ces questions en partant de leurs propres expériences personnelles, mais en proposant également des pistes susceptibles d'être d'intérêt plus général. Et même si l'accent sera porté sur la philosophie, la pertinence de leurs réflexions pour d'autres disciplines des sciences humaines et sociales ne fait pas de doute.

Annual General Meeting / Assemblée générale annuelle

This panel aims to shine the light of truth on reconciliation in universities.  Reconciliation requires truth; but, historical truth is not enough.  Reconciliation requires honesty in the present.  Talk about reconciliation, when you are still making decisions for Indigenous people, is hypocritical.  To reconcile with Indigenous peoples, universities must decolonize;- to stop constraining Indigenous people’s sovereignty.  Guests on Indigenous lands have to respect and adhere to laws of the land.

This panel will examine the central arguments of Ptolemy’s Philosophy: Mathematics as a Way of Life, the groundbreaking book by Jacqueline Feke (Assistant Professor, University of Waterloo). Just published in October 2018, Feke’s book is the first systematic study of this second-century mathematician’s philosophy. The most significant achievement of this book is Feke’s reconstruction of Ptolemy’s unique and robust philosophical system. This reconstruction yields surprising insights about the--in Feke’s terms--radical and subversive nature of Ptolemy’s philosophical thought. Feke’s book deepens our understanding of Ptolemy as a scholar in two important respects. The first is that Ptolemy was knowledgeable about contemporary philosophical discourses and synthesized ideas from several traditions to construct his own system. The second is that it was ethical concerns that motivated Ptolemy’s mathematical work.

Panelists
Sylvia Berryman (University of British Columbia)
Jacqueline Feke (University of Waterloo)
Daryn Lehoux (Queens University)
James L. Zainaldin (Harvard University)

The Political Philosophy of Harm Reduction
An important task for political philosophy is to identify principles, modes of reasoning, and institutional forms that can contribute in normatively acceptable ways to minimizing the harms associated with non-ideal aspects of social and political life. It would be better, for example, if there were no wars, but international legal instruments such as the Geneva Convention seek to regulate the conduct of war so as to bar its most morally egregious potential consequences. Within the domain of public health, interventions that seek to mitigate harmful effects rather than lowering the prevalence of underlying controversial behaviours are often termed “Harm Reduction.” Our panel aims to investigate the grounds, the scope, and the limits of harm reduction policies.
Harm Reduction first emerged in the 1980s as a grassroots movement aimed both at improving downstream conditions (in particular, susceptibility to HIV/AIDS) for vulnerable communities of drug users and (in many cases) advocating for upstream social and political reform. Examples of harm reduction in this context include needle exchanges, overdose prevention (or safe consumption) sites, and Good Samaritan laws that protect drug users who report overdoses. Each of these examples aim to reduce the harms that accompany drug use without necessarily aiming to reduce the prevalence of drug use itself. Harm reduction has since been adopted as a policy framework by politicians, courts, and public health officials in order to address policy challenges that have heretofore more traditionally been addressed through the criminal law. Similar modes of reasoning, and of policy development based on such reasoning, have emerged in a number of policy areas involving behaviour that is widely seen as problematic, but which is difficult to eradicate through prohibitionist policies, or about which reasonable disagreement exists within a pluralistic society. Thus, three decades after its emergence, Harm Reduction is now applied in domains ranging from drug policy and policy related to sex work, to the constitutional regulation of secessionist politics, and many others besides, including female genital mutilation, polygamy, and abortion.
However, philosophers have been slow to take up scholarly inquiry into harm reduction. In this bilingual panel, we offer avenues for philosophical engagement with one of the most influential public and health policy approaches of the last three decades. Since it has been under-theorized by philosophers, the potential avenues for engagement are diverse. Our panel will consider such questions as: is harm reduction a morally distinct approach, justified by its own set of normative principles, or should it simply be understood as an application of consequentialist cost/benefit analysis? If it is a morally distinct approach, to what extent can the principles that animate it be extended and applied to cases beyond public health? Are there moral limits to harm reduction; are some activities (murder, torture) harmful in a way that makes a harm reduction framework morally inappropriate? Does engaging in harm reduction entail complicity with the harms, and is this a reason to avoid it? What is the connection between harm reduction and stigma; does it apply only to stigmatized activities, or can its reach be extended? How should we understand and count the relevant harms that harm reduction aims to reduce? What is the connection between harm reduction and recovery? Is harm reduction an essentially emancipatory practice, or does it undermine the potential for more radical or liberatory approaches?
Harm reduction is not simply a theoretical model; it is an on the ground set of context-specific practices. Successful philosophical theorizing about harm reduction should therefore be informed by close engagement with the empirical details of those practices. In addition to philosophers, our panel will include scholars from law the social studies of medicine and public health practitioners who work in harm reduction organizations.

Tony Mercer, Public Health England, How Philosophy can inform Harm Reduction policy

Ingrid Olsson, Rain City Housing, 'The Vivian’ and multi-layered Harm Reduction

Mathieu Doucet, University of Waterloo, Harm Reduction is a strategy, not a policy: the case of tobacco control

Nicholas King, McGill University, Harm Reduction is Neither

Lindsay Porter, University of Sheffield, Harm Reduction and Moral Desert

Samantha Brennan, University of Guelph, The Moral Limits of Harm Reduction

Daniel Weinstock, McGill University