The Vagueness of Demandingness Objections

The New St Cross Special Ethics Seminars are jointly arranged by the Oxford Uehiro Centre and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities.  The talks are open to the public, and all are welcome (registration required, please see links below)

Title

The Vagueness of Demandingness Objections

Abstract

Demandingness objections have become a stock argument in ethics claiming that single moral demands or entire moral theories must be given up or altered if they ask too much of agents. But can we clearly distinguish an acceptable level of demandingness from one that is too high? I argue that demandingness objections inevitably fail to make that distinction without borderline cases because they are sorites-susceptible.

First, I show that the heap paradox applies to demandingness objections and the expression “overdemanding” because two conditions are met. There is an ordering of values on one dimension decisive for the expression’s application: the cost to the agent. Also, the expression “overdemanding” is tolerant, because the difference between two neighbouring levels of demandingness is so small that it does not allow us to say that this is the difference between an acceptable level of demandingness and critical overdemandingness.

Second, I discuss attempts to overcome or bypass the vagueness of demandingness objections. I will argue that these strategies are not very promising and that we should rather embrace the vagueness.

Speaker

Professor Marcel van Ackeren (Oxford Uehiro Centre Research Associate; Senior Lecturer for Ethics at the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy at Wuerzburg University)

Registration

Please register to attend either in-person (Bookwhen) or to join the webinar (Zoom). Links below.

 In-person venue:

Lecture Theatre, St Cross College, 61 St Giles’, Oxford.