Unwitting Yet Praiseworthy Rightdoing: On Posigence, Negligence's Counterpart

In this talk, I argue that agents can be praiseworthy for doing the right thing despite their being unaware of their doing that thing (and not only that it is right). Differently put, I propose that negligence has a positive counterpart, which I dub "posigence". To motivate this proposal, I introduce cases in which an agent has sufficient reason to act in a way that promotes her own well-being but sets back (or at least, fails to promote) the interests of another, but inadvertently omits to do so, manifesting therein good quality of will. Although I take posigence to be independently plausible, my argument is (primarily) conditional in form. At least if we grant that we can be directly blameworthy for negligent wrongdoing, we should accept that we can be directly praiseworthy for posigent rightdoing.

Daniel Telech
https://polonsky.vanleer.org.il/dr-daniel-telech/
Senior Research Fellow, Lund-Gothenburg Responsibility Project
Department of Philosophy
Lund University (Sweden)

About the Speaker:

Daniel Telech specializes in Ethics, Moral Psychology, and the Philosophy of Action. He completed a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Chicago in 2018, writing a dissertation on the nature and norms of praise, “In Praise of Praise”. He argues that philosophical thought on moral responsibility suffers from a legalistic orientation reflected in the tendency to treat blameworthiness as the model for understanding moral responsibility. By attending to individual reactive attitudes of praise (emotions like gratitude, admiration, and pride), Telech develops an account of responsibility in the estimability sense, which characterizes our aspirational stance towards other agents and ourselves. Before his PhD, Telech received a BA in Philosophy from the University of Toronto.

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This is a talk with audience Q&A presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics that is free to attend and open to the public. Refreshments will be provided at the event. Sometimes we look for each other after the talk for further discussion about the topic.

The talk will also be streamed online with live chat here [to be posted].

About the Centre for Ethics (http://ethics.utoronto.ca):

The Centre for Ethics is an interdisciplinary centre aimed at advancing research and teaching in the field of ethics, broadly defined. The Centre seeks to bring together the theoretical and practical knowledge of diverse scholars, students, public servants and social leaders in order to increase understanding of the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life.

In pursuit of its interdisciplinary mission, the Centre fosters lines of inquiry such as (1) foundations of ethics, which encompasses the history of ethics and core concepts in the philosophical study of ethics; (2) ethics in action, which relates theory to practice in key domains of social life, including bioethics, business ethics, and ethics in the public sphere; and (3) ethics in translation, which draws upon the rich multiculturalism of the City of Toronto and addresses the ethics of multicultural societies, ethical discourse across religious and cultural boundaries, and the ethics of international society.

The Ethics of A.I. Lab at the Centre For Ethics recently appeared on a list of 10 organizations leading the way in ethical A.I.: https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/10-organizations-leading-the-way-in-ethical-ai