with Dr. Kerah Gordon-Solmon
Friday, October 2nd, 2020
4:00 – 6:00 PM
Note: This talk will take place via Zoom.
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Abstract:
Suppose that two victims are about to be crushed by a collapsing building. Agent has three options:
Save One, allowing her arms to be crushed
Save Both, allowing her arms to be crushed
Save None, keeping her arms.
Call this case All or Nothing, in honour of its paper of origin (by Joe Horton).
Agent is not obligated to perform a rescue, in the circumstances. She has a prerogative not to sacrifice her arms to save two or fewer lives. But if she does make the sacrifice — if she rushes into the collapsing building — she has a duty to rescue both victims. Keeping her arms is her only prerogative-protected interest at stake; it is the only interest of hers that counts against the moral reasons to Save Both. Having undertaken that sacrifice, she must Save Both.
The paper defends the following claims. (1) It is impermissible for Agent to Save One, for the reason that Saving One wrongs the second victim. (2) It is permissible for Agent to Save None. (3) The balance of moral reasons nonetheless favours Saving One over Saving None. (4) More generally, from the moral point of view, impermissible conduct is not always inferior to permissible conduct.
Speaker Bio:
Kerah Gordon-Solmon is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Queen’s University. She received her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2012.
Her research lies in normative and practical ethics, and political philosophy. She has published articles on various topics within these sub-disciplines, including: the ethics of self- and other-defense, the ethics of human genetic enhancement, the value of choice, moral desert, and luck-egalitarian justice. Her work has appeared in such venues as Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, the Journal of Moral Philosophy and Law and Philosophy.
