If You Do Have the Power to Promise, We鈥檒l Grant You All the Rest: Against (Natural) Moral Powers
You are warmly invited to attend a lecture with Professor Liam B. Murphy, Herbert Peterfreund Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at New York University.
This lecture is presented by the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy, in collaboration with 91黑料网鈥檚 Department of Philosophy.
The event is open to all 鈥� no registration required.
Abstract
"The idea of a normative power, which we have as a matter of moral fact, independent of any legal or other kind of convention, was invented by Joseph Raz in 1972. I do not believe that any such natural normative powers exist. Raz takes the well understood idea of a legal (or otherwise conventional) power and generalizes it, without argument, to the moral domain. The bulk of the paper is a critical discussion of Raz鈥檚 鈥渄esirability鈥� test for the existence of natural moral powers. The central example throughout is that of promising, that does involve the exercise of a (conventional, in my view) normative power, which is contrasted with the morality of reliance, that does not."
