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Does non-commitment undermine the hypocrite’s standing to blame?
Welcome to an open Pufendorf IAS Guest Researcher Seminar with Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen is a professor of political theory at Aarhus University. In 2022 he was a guest researcher at the Pufendorf IAS working with the Theme Post Hoc interventions.
Read an interview with Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen
Abstract:
According to an influential account of standing, hypocritical blamers lack standing to blame in virtue of their lack of commitment to the norm etc. which they invoke. While this account is appealing, it is unclear what exactly commitment to a norm in the relevant standing-affecting sense amounts to. First, I show how there are several importantly different commitment accounts and point to some unresolved issues regarding the nature of commitment that must be addressed in any fully worked-out commitment account. Second, I argue that, however these unresolved issues are dealt with, the commitment account has the wrong shape for it to explain why hypocrites lack standing to blame. Third, building on the lessons of that critique I propose a novel account of what undermines standing to blame - the comparative fairness account. This differs from the commitment account and the other prominent account of why hypocrites lack standing to blame offered in the literature: the moral equality account. Finally, I observe that, intuitively, lack of commitment undermines standing to blame and that many hypocrites might lack standing for that reason also. Moreover, typically the hypocrite’s omission to address their own faults is a feature in virtue of which, other things being equal, the hypocrite is less committed to the norm in question. These two observations provide the basis for an error theory of the commitment account’s appeal, despite its inability to explain why, qua hypocritical blamer, one lacks standing to blame.
(Note that the original title of the guestresearcher lecture has been updated)
Om evenemanget
Plats:
Pufendorf IAS, main lecture hall
Kontakt:
Eva [dot] Persson [at] pi [dot] lu [dot] se