Sophie Keeling: Reasons control: The research programme and its applications

Tuesday June 25 2024 @12:00 (CEST)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
Responsibility, control, and obligation forum an interlocking nexus that plays a fundamental role in our lives at both the individual and social level. But do we have control, responsibility and obligations regarding our motivating reasons themselves? This question has been largely been overlooked, but the general assumption seems to be that we do not, and that if anything, responsiveness to reasons grounds our responsibility for belief and action. In the face of this, Keeling (2023) argued that the scope of this nexus does in fact extend to believing and acting for a particular reason, also starts to develop an account of the way in which this would be possible. The present paper builds on this earlier work to introduce my monograph project. It spans topics within the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and normativity including higher order reasons, the nature of responsibility, mental action, self-knowledge, moral worth, akrasia, philosophy of psychology and psychopathology, evidence resistance, and testimonial injustice.

Bio
Sophie Keeling is a Ramón y Cajal research fellow at the UNED, and has previously worked for University College Dublin, the University of Barcelona, and the University of Edinburgh. Her research centres on self-knowledge, agency, and reasoning from a range of philosophical perspectives.