Programme
3rd July 2019
09.30 – 10.00: Welcome and Registration
10.00 – 11.00: David Owens (KCL)
11.00 – 11.15: break
11.15 – 12.15: Tom Dougherty (UNC Chapel Hill)
12.15 – 13.30: Lunch break
13.30 – 14.30: Heidi Hurd (lllinois)
14.30 – 14.45: break
14.45 – 15.45: Ezequiel Monti (Torcuato di Tella University)
15.45 – 16.15: coffee break
16.15 – 17.15: Jed Lewinsohn (Pittsburgh)
19.00: Conference Dinner
4th July 2019
10.15 – 11.15: Peter Schaber (Zürich)
11.15 – 11.30: break
11.30 – 12.30: Massimo Renzo (KCL)
12.30 – 13.30: lunch break
13.30 – 14.30: Joseph Millum (National Institutes of Health)
14.30 – 14.45: break
14.45 – 15.45: Catherine Robb (Tilburg)
15.45 – 16.15: coffee break
16.15 – 17.15: Ruth Chang (Oxford)
09.30 – 10.00: Welcome and Registration
10.00 – 11.00: David Owens (KCL)
11.00 – 11.15: break
11.15 – 12.15: Tom Dougherty (UNC Chapel Hill)
12.15 – 13.30: Lunch break
13.30 – 14.30: Heidi Hurd (lllinois)
14.30 – 14.45: break
14.45 – 15.45: Ezequiel Monti (Torcuato di Tella University)
15.45 – 16.15: coffee break
16.15 – 17.15: Jed Lewinsohn (Pittsburgh)
19.00: Conference Dinner
4th July 2019
10.15 – 11.15: Peter Schaber (Zürich)
11.15 – 11.30: break
11.30 – 12.30: Massimo Renzo (KCL)
12.30 – 13.30: lunch break
13.30 – 14.30: Joseph Millum (National Institutes of Health)
14.30 – 14.45: break
14.45 – 15.45: Catherine Robb (Tilburg)
15.45 – 16.15: coffee break
16.15 – 17.15: Ruth Chang (Oxford)
Abstracts
David Owens: Property and Authority
It is widely believed that personal property rights are to be justified at least in part by reference to the interest potential owners have in controlling things that matter to them. The first part of the paper develops one form of this view, highlighting its several theoretical merits. I then raise two problems for the control interest hypothesis and defend an alternative, namely the idea that human beings have an interest in being in authority over things that matter to them. On this view, personal property is to be grounded partly in the fact that it is good for us to control our normative situation, to have certain forms of normative power. This authority interest hypothesis shares the merits of the control interest hypothesis whilst lacking its defects.
Tom Dougherty: The Scope of Consent
Consent allows people to perform a range of actions, but this range has its limits. I call the range of permissions generated by someone's consent the scope of her consent. An account of consent should answer the question of which normative principle determines the scope of someone's consent. I propose a principle that focuses on the consent-receiver's evidence concerning what the consent-giver intends to communicate.
Heidi Hurd: We Are All Thaumaturges
By sheer exercise of will, we create moral furniture out of whole cloth. With but a mental nod, we cause the disappearance of barriers that have blocked others’ actions. And, by mere resolve, we foreclose liberties that have expanded others’ freedoms. By virtue of what power do we possess such thaumaturgy? The answer: the capacity we have as willing agents to grant or deny consent. By exercising the power of consent—a power I take to be entirely a product of our will—we conjure up permissions that are liberating and duties that are constraining. Inasmuch as the rights and obligations that are affected by means of consenting largely define the boundaries of others’ permissible actions, our thaumaturgy can significantly affect the lives and liberties of others.
Ezequiel Monti: On the Moral Impact Theory of Law and Two Conceptions of Normative Powers
Mark Greenberg argues that legal obligations are those moral obligations created by the action of legal institutions in the legally proper way (Moral Impact Theory of Law – MITL). However, MITL is not as novel as Greenberg claims it to be. Joseph Raz’s account of legal obligations, I claim, is also a version of MITL. The disagreement between Greenberg and Raz concerns, rather, the conditions under which a moral obligation can be said to be created in the ‘legally proper way’. In this paper, I argue against Greenberg’s triggering version of MITL. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, I argue that the disagreement is rooted in two different conceptions of normative powers. According to Greenberg’s conception, exercises of normative power change the normative situation by manipulating the factual circumstances in a way that triggers pre-existing reasons. According to Raz’s conception, they change the normative situation directly, without explanatory intermediaries. Thus, for Raz, an obligation is created in the legally proper way only if it is explained by the action of legal institutions directly, while, for Greenberg, legal institutions can create obligations in the legally proper way simply by triggering. Second, I argue that the triggering conception ought to be rejected. The main argument is that it is overinclusive. There are many cases in which A triggers a normative change by way of communicating the intention of bringing that change about, but in which, intuitively, no normative power is being exercised. And, after rejecting some possible candidates, I conclude that there is no set of criteria that can rule out all the false positives in a non-ad hoc fashion. Therefore, given that legal institutions create obligations in the legally proper way only when they do so in virtue of their authority, they do not do so by way of triggering.
Jed Lewinsohn: On the 'Natural Unintelligibility' of Normative Powers
This paper elaborates, and defends, a broadly Humean thesis concerning the status of promising – namely, “that it is naturally something altogether unintelligible” – and applies it to the wider domain of normative powers. On the one hand, any successful exercise of a normative power serves to explain the resulting normative relations. On the other hand, given the role accorded to the will in the definition of normative powers, all such exercises are constituted by the performance of normatively insignificant action types (e.g., the utterance of formulas) that cannot themselves bear this explanatory weight. According to a Humean view, it is custom or law that bridges the explanatory gap by assigning normative significance to the otherwise trivial action types. A prominent rival view attempts to avoid this reliance on conventional norms by identifying the exercise of a normative power with the communication of an intention to (hereby) achieve a normative effect. This gambit is unsuccessful. While exercises of normative powers may involve communicative acts, such acts are made possible by the very conventional norms that the proponent of this view seeks to avoid.
Peter Schaber: The Reason-Giving Force of Requests
To make a request is to exercise a normative power. By making requests we give others reasons to do or omit something. The addressee has reason to do as requested because she has been asked to do so. How do requests provide others with reasons for action? Some hold the view that the reasons given by requests depend on the recognition of the communicated intention to give the addressee a reason to act. It will be argued that the second-personal desire expressed by the request is doing the normative work and that no intention to give a reason is needed for a request to provide the addressee with a reason.
Massimo Renzo: Two Kinds of Consent
What does it take to give morally valid consent? According to the “mental state view,” you consent to me φ-ing when you form a certain mental state, such as mentally waiving your right that I don’t φ. According to the predominant “behavioural view”, you consent to me φ ing when in addition to forming that mental state, you behave in a certain way to communicate its content to me. For the mental state view, communication performs simply an epistemic function: It provides the consentee with evidence of the normative change that took place when the consenter formed the relevant mental state. For the behavioural view, communication is necessary for the normative change to occur at all. This paper defends a version of the mental state view – one that accommodates some of the insights of the behavioural view. The main goal of the paper however, is methodological. I suggest that in addressing the question of consent, it’s a mistake to focus primarily on the consenter, as most philosophical theories do. More attention needs to be paid to the role played by the consentee(s). If we do that, we’ll see that two important revisions to the mainstream understanding of consent are called for: First, we should accept that a crucial function of consent is to guide other people’s behaviour, and not simply to control the normative status of certain interactions. (A point surprisingly neglected in the most recent literature.) Second, we should acknowledge that there are two types of consent, grounded in different autonomy-related interests that underlie the justification of this power.
Joseph Millum: Consent and Misunderstanding. The Challenge of Medical Research
Patients and healthy volunteers who enroll in clinical trials of new drugs, devices, and diagnostic tools are normally asked to give their informed consent to participation. Following requirements laid out in regulations and ethical guidelines, they are told about the purpose of the research, the procedures involved, the potential risks and benefits, and a long list of other facts prior to giving consent. Over the last couple of decades a slew of studies have examined how much research participants understand about the clinical trials in which they are enrolled. The results are not encouraging: large numbers of well-educated, competent participants cannot answer simple multiple choice questions about their trials. Did all these people give valid consent to the research procedures they underwent? According to the “standard view” of informed consent they did not. The standard view holds that everything that must be disclosed must also be understood. A failure of understanding therefore invalidates consent. Despite the data showing poor participant understanding, the reaction from researchers and research oversight bodies has been muted. Given that many of them purport to believe the standard view of the informational requirements for informed consent, this is surprising. In this talk, I will argue that the standard view is mistaken. The disclosure and understanding requirements have distinct grounds tied to two different ways in which a token of consent can be rendered invalid. My analysis will explain why it is sometimes permissible to enroll willing participants who have not understood everything that they ought to be told about their clinical trials. It therefore implies that the muted reaction to poor participant comprehension may be justified, after all.
Based on work co-authored with Danielle Bromwich (University of Massachusetts, Boston).
Based on work co-authored with Danielle Bromwich (University of Massachusetts, Boston).
Catherine Robb: The Limits of Consent. A Hybrid View
In this paper I argue for a hybrid account of the limit of consent. When we consent to something, that consent extends over a range of rights and conduct. In some cases, however, the limit or range of consent is unclear or ambiguous. This is practically significant; if we operate with a mistaken conception of consent’s limit, we risk altering rights we would prefer unchanged, or conversely, we risk being unable to rely on expression of consent from others. There seem to be two different approaches when it comes to determining the appropriate limits of consent – subjective and objective. In this paper, I show that the appeal of each approach is grounded in the interests that they offer to realise. The subjective account realises the interests persons have in control over which rights they waive, and the objective account realises the interests persons have in reliance on putative expressions of consent. However, no comprehensive account of the normative limit of consent can afford to ignore both of these interests. A satisfactory account must therefore be hybrid, determined by fairly balancing both our interests of reliance and control. To provide a hybrid account of consent that fairly balances these interests, I propose a contractualist method that is grounded in two principles – the Communication Condition and the Reasonableness Condition. After explaining how these conditions help to determine the limits of consent, I suggest that this hybrid view is appropriate for determining both the legal and moral status of the limit of consent, by providing a normative procedure to rule on what seem to be ambiguous cases of misunderstanding between both reliance and control interests of both parties.
Ruth Chang: Ways of Mattering
In this talk I explore mattering and different ways things can matter. I suggest that the way of mattering that matters most involves appeal to robust or 'genuine' normative powers. I distinguish between ‘ersatz’ and ‘genuine’ normative powers and give some reasons to think that we have genuine normative powers.