Monash Philosophy Departmental Workshop

***UPDATE Ellie Ripley is no longer presenting. The workshop will now start with tea/coffee at 10.20am

***UPDATE change to order of papers, see below

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This is an in-person only event: Clayton Law building, G10.

Lunch will be provided, please contact Gene to confirm your attendance for catering purposes.

Schedule

10.20 tea break and welcome

10.50 Scott Robinson, Should the sky be blue? Solar geoengineering and moral significance

11.40 Lloyd Humberstone, Noncontingency as a Kind of Necessity

12.30 lunch

1.30 Sandra Leonie Field, 'Tyrannies never last long': Spinoza, conquest, and the power of the multitude'

2.20 Rob Sparrow, The difference design makes: How genome editing might be distinguished from MRT

3.10 tea break

3.40 Steph Collins, Interdependent Responsibility for Structural Injustice

4.30 close

Abstracts

Scott Robinson, Should the sky be blue? Solar geoengineering and moral significance

With delayed climate action and overshoot of temperature and emissions targets already guaranteed, geoengineering has become a realistic prospect, if not inevitability. One branch of geoengineering, solar radiation management using the injection of sulphur dioxide injection particles in the stratosphere, has wide-ranging side effects. One of these is whiter skies (Robock, 2008; Kravitz et al. 2012). This is sometimes treated as a problem from an aesthetic point of view (Preston 2011; Betz and Casean 2012). Though non-trivial, I argue that this mis-captures – as do many objections to geoengineering – the moral significance of the blue sky. Extending Alice Crary’s (2007) moral theory, I examine the moral significance of the blue sky that constitutes a novel account of the harm and loss rendered under conditions of solar geoengineering. I propose that the blueness of the sky is morally significant, something both directly perceptible and discernible in (for example) literature. Reckoning with the harms and losses of prospective geoengineering requires cultivating our moral perception. 

Lloyd Humberstone, Noncontingency as a Kind of Necessity

The classes of noncontingent truths and necessary truths coincide: the true statements that aren’t contingently true are precisely those that are necessarily true. But the words true and truths are needed here: when we contemplate statements in general, we see that being noncontingent covers being necessary as well as being impossible (= necessarily false).  Indeed, as the former Monash philosopher Edward Khamara once wrote, “When we say of a proposition (…) that it is necessary (tout court), we may mean that it is either necessarily true or necessarily false.” That would make “necessary” ambiguous in the kind of way that could be confusing and is generally avoided. But instead of finding fault with it, perhaps we can try to find a modal construction semantically engineered to subsume necessity in the stricter narrow sense with necessity as noncontingency. I am envisaging a modal operator O which, applied to a statement A (or some modification of A)  gives something equivalent to prefixing A with a Box (or ‘Square’) – the usual notation for ‘It is necessarily the case that A’, but which, applied to A (or some modification of A) gives something equivalent to ‘It is noncontingent whether A’.  The usual explanation of noncontingency in terms of necessity, as “Box(A) or Box(not-A)” does not do this, if Box is taken as the desired O, because although we use A itself in the first disjunct, and a modification of A, namely its negation, in the second, that would give us a disjunction of  O-statements, and we wanted  O to put in a single appearance.

Sandra Leonie Field, 'Tyrannies never last long': Spinoza, conquest, and the power of the multitude

The paper takes the 1621 Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands as a starting point to reflect on Spinoza's assertion that right is coextensive with power. In particular, I'll explore a suspicion that the appeal of Spinoza's political philosophy might rest on an assumption that wickedness can't succeed in the long term (whereas the Banda case suggests that it can).

Rob Sparrow, The difference design makes: How genome editing might be distinguished from MRT

Steph Collins, Interdependent Responsibility for Structural Injustice

A structural injustice occurs when social, economic, or political processes produce unjust outcomes, where those processes cannot be reduced to identifiable wrongs perpetrated by isolatable agents. Examples include climate change, widespread homelessness, and exploitative work practices. In circumstances of structural injustice, it can be difficult to identify responsible agents. This paper proposes a care-ethical approach to understanding responsibility for structural injustice. On this approach, responsibility derives from the inevitable fact of human interdependency. This responsibility calls upon each of us to perform contextually-embedded and open-ended actions of care, utilising the levers our social roles make available to us. The paper outlines how this approach complements and builds upon existing approaches in the literature on responsibility for structural injustice.