I discuss what I call ‘reactive luck’: luck that befalls us as bearers of reactive attitudes (such as shame, resentment, pride, or gratitude). Our reactive attitudes play significant roles for our constitution, relationships, and lives overall. Likewise, their weight on us can be significant. Yet we are often lucky with respect to bearing them, in that the objects and circumstances warranting them, and with these our reactive attitudes themselves, are often outside our control. I here discuss the nature and philosophical significance of reactive luck, its relationship to moral luck, and consider ways of addressing problematic forms of reactive luck. 

Join the talk online here

There has recently been a burst of human rights-based climate advocacy, i.e., advocacy appealing to the idea that climate change threatens human rights. I argue that this recent advocacy is fruitfully understood as an effort to accommodate the fact that climate change is a structural threat to human rights. I give a working account of the relevant features of structural threats to human rights, drawing on neighboring literatures on structural injustice to illuminate the distinctive features of the human rights case. I engage the philosophy of human rights literature to argue that there are plausible reasons of human rights theory to evolve international human rights law better to recognize and respond to structural threats to human rights.

Pizza and refreshments will be provided!

"Corporations are legal bodies with duties and powers distinct from those of individual people. Kant discusses them in many places. He endorses universities and churches; he criticises feudal orders and some charitable foundations; he condemns early business corporations' overseas activities. This Element argues that Kant's practical philosophy offers a systematic basis for understanding these bodies. Corporations bridge the central distinctions of his practical philosophy: ethics versus right, public versus private right. Corporations can extend freedom, structure moral activity, and aid progress towards more rightful conditions. Kant's thought also highlights a fundamental threat. In every corporation, some people exercise the corporation's legal powers, without the same liabilities as private individuals. This threatens Kant's principle of innate equality: no citizen should have greater legal rights than any other. This Element explores the justifications and safeguards needed to deal with this threat. "

On Monday 24 November, we will hold a symposium to discuss the work. After a short overview by Garrath, there will be responses by Lucy Allais, Carla Bagnoli, Jordan Pascoe, and Arthur Ripstein.

View a recording of the event here.

View a recording of the event here

"There is perhaps no piece by Martin Luther King, Jr. that is more widely read or more beloved than the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Countless articles and books have been written about its generation and meaning. Despite this, its broader philosophical significance has for the large part been missed. The Emotions of Nonviolence offers a novel interpretation of the Letter: it is not merely a discussion of civil disobedience – as is usually thought – but is also and perhaps even primarily an essay on political motivation. On this reading, the Letter seeks to answer a central question in democratic theory: namely, how can and ought we motivate the racially oppressed to engage in civil disobedience – in what King called nonviolent direct action? King’s answer is that we must appeal to and encourage the political emotions, both positive and negative. Fear, courage, faith, dignity, indignation, and love can together motivate nonviolent action and nonviolent action can reciprocally motivate, channel, and sustain these same emotions. It is through this continuous loop that nonviolence has the potential to transform society and its structures."