Reasons for action - making a difference to the security of outcomes

The Research Seminar Series in Philosophy invites you to a seminar with Caroline Torpe Touborg (Umeå University) och Mattias Gunnemyr (Lund University), "Reasons for action - making a difference to the security of outcomes".

Abstract: In this talk, we present a new account of teleological reasons, i.e. reasons to perform a particular action because of the outcomes it promotes. Our account gives the intuitively right verdict in a number of difficult cases, including cases of overdetermination and non-threshold cases like Parfit’s (1984) famous Drops of Water. The key to our account is to look more closely at the metaphysics of causation. We start from the idea that it is a necessary condition for causation that a cause must increase the security of its effect. Building on this idea, we suggest, roughly, that you have a teleological reason to act in a certain way when doing so increases the security of some good outcome. This represents a middle way between the proposal that you have a reason to act in a certain way just in case this would cause a good outcome, and the proposal that you have a reason to act in a certain way just in case this could cause a good outcome.

All interested are welcome to participate in this seminar.

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