Summer talks @VU Amsterdam
Wed 17 Aug, 14-17h
De Boelelaan 1105, main building, floor 11, room 11A36

Dick Timmer (Dortmund): Why Fly – Prudential Value, Climate Change, and the Ethics of Long-Distance Leisure Travel
Rutger van Oeveren (Austin): A New Account of Rule-Following
Lwenn Bussière-​Caraes (UvA): Silence, Dissent, and Common Ground

All welcome, please register at rutgervo@hotmail.com
If you’re working on similar topics and/or interested in providing commentary, please feel free to write to the same address.

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Dick Timmer (Dortmund): Why Fly – Prudential Value, Climate Change, and the Ethics of Long-Distance Leisure Travel (w/ Willem van der Deijl-Kloeg)
We argue that the prudential benefits of long-distance leisure travel can justify such trips even though there are strong and important reasons against long-distance flying. This follows from the fact that prudential benefits can render otherwise impermissible actions per-missible and the fact that long-distance leisure travel provides significant prudential benefits according to dominant theories about wellbeing. However, this ‘wellbeing argument’ for long-distance leisure travel must be qualified in two ways. First, if travellers can justify long-distance trips with the wellbeing argument, they must look critically at their own assessment of how good this trip will be for them. This is because they are epistemically privileged with re-spect to knowledge about what is good for them. Second, the wellbeing argument is unlikely to support prudential arguments for long-distance leisure trips by frequent flyers.

Rutger van Oeveren (Austin): A New Account of Rule-Following
When I conclude from p leads to q, and p, that q, I follow a rule (in this case, a rule of inference). But what is it to follow a rule? I consider two accounts on offer, reductive dispositionalist accounts and non-reductive intentionalist or representionalist accounts. According to the former, accepting a rule consists in, roughly, a disposition to behave in accordance with the rule. According to the latter, acceptance of a rule consists in, roughly, having an intentional state with general prescriptive or normative content. It has been argued that both suffer from a number of issues. For example, dispositionalist accounts are said to suffer from the finitude problem and the error problem, where intentionalist accounts face the inference problem: following a rule always involves inference, but inference always involves following a rule. In response, I offer a non-reductive hybrid account, and argue that this account can overcome these issues.

Lwenn Bussière-Caraes (UvA): Silence, Dissent, and Common Ground
In a certain picture of cooperative conversation, ‘silence gives assent’. However, in adversarial contexts, structured by power dynamics, silence may be a powerful expression of dissent. To reconcile these opposite interpretations, I propose an analysis of silence as the expression of a default attitude. Given pragmatic cues, participants infer the cooperativeness of conversational settings. Depending on cooperativeness, they assign a default attitude (of assent, of suspension of judgment, of dissent) to other participants, that they take intentional silence to express. This analysis takes the main effect of speech acts to be proposals to update the conversational Common Ground, and highlights the necessity of assent in conversational updates. Moreover, it makes sense of the phenomenon of silencing as a conversational injustice which deprives a participant of agency over the course of a conversation.