On Friday 26 March\, Zoë Johnson King (University of Southern California) will be joini ng us for a talk and Q&A session in the first event of our 2021 Colloquia s eries.
This talk is about essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The talk is Janus-faced: I use some philosophical ideas to explic ate some empirical phenomena\, and I then use some empirical phenomena to c hallenge some philosophical ideas. I start by summarizing the empirical phe nomena that are my focus: the praise and gratitude lavished on essential wo rkers during the first few months of the pandemic\, the mixed reception wit h which this praise and gratitude was met\, and some data about the hazardo us surrounding circumstances that essential workers face. I then attempt to explain the resistance displayed by many essential workers to their being hailed as heroes\, applauded in public rituals\, and so on\, using the conc epts of supererogation and volitional necessity to reconstruct and ela borate on criticisms that essential workers themselves have leveled against this rhetoric. Finally\, I use essential workers’ reports of their attitud es toward their work during the pandemic to challenge two philosophical dog mas about the nature of virtuous motivation: that a truly virtuous person d oes not need to overcome contrary inclinations to get herself to act well\, and that there is something wrong with being motivated to promote others’ welfare by an explicit sense of the moral importance of your doing so.
< p>Attendance Details: This event will take place on Zoom. Those interested in attending should RSVP to Jillian\, at: phil.ugradengage ment@ubc.ca. CATEGORIES:Featured Events,Featured Homepage URL;VALUE=URI:https://philosophy.ubc.ca/events/event/colloquia-2021-zoe-joh nson-king-university-of-southern-california/ ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://phil.cms.arts.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2021/01/3.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 DTSTART:20210314T100000 TZNAME:PDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR