Conférence A. Jaworska

vendredi 18 juin 2010

Dans le cadre du séminaire du CERSES « Approches empiriques de l’éthique » :

Agnieszka Jaworska
Professeur de philosophie University of California at Riverside (USA)

donnera une conférence sur

« Moral Psychology in Practice: Lessons from Alzheimer’s Disease and the ‘Terrible Twos’ »

le vendredi 18 juin, de 13h30 à 16h00
Université Paris Descartes45, rue des Saints-Pères75006 Paris
Salle des thèses, bâtiment Jacob, 5e étage(pour atteindre le bâtiment Jacob traversez le hall et la cours)
Le débat sera introduit par Marta Spranzi (Université de Versailles, CERSES).

The main aim of this talk is to delineate a thus far underappreciated category of motivating attitudes (desires) of special importance in our normative practices. The special status of these attitudes and the need to view them as a distinct category are easily missed unless one notices that even “marginal” agents, such as Alzheimer’s patients and very young children, are capable of holding these attitudes. I show that the attitudes in question, which I call “meaning-laden” desires, have a special normative status in two senses: (1) their satisfaction affects most profoundly the prudential interests of the agents who espouse them, and (2) they are the source of the unique moral standing of these agents as persons commanding special moral respect. Meaning-laden desires are in this way readily distinguished from mere appetites. However, given their special normative status, it is tempting to subsume them under another well-understood category of desires: desires grounded in the agent’s recognition of reasons in their favor. Bringing together multifarious evidence from developmental psychology, I show that meaning-laden desires cannot be equivalent to desires grounded in reasons, because young children who already espouse them are not yet capable of grounding their desires in reasons. Meaning-laden desires thus have a special normative status not derived from the agent’s recognition of reasons; rather, meaning-laden desires likely possess normative authority on their own, and perhaps even function as independent sources of reasons.