Grace as a Relational Virtue of Investment

My project discusses the under-explored secular virtue of Grace. A gracious person forgives those who don’t deserve forgiveness, trusts those who aren’t trustworthy, and loves those who do not merit love. But she doesn’t do so out of naivety. Grace, understood as a disposition to treat people better than they deserve, at the cost of giving up salient agent-centred prerogatives, is a relational virtue of investment. In giving Grace, one invests in another person’s moral transformation into someone who indeed deserves forgiveness, trust, and love.

Yiran Hua https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/philosophy/person/yiran-hua Post-Doctoral Fellow / Lecturer Department of Philosophy University of Toronto

About the Speaker:

Yiran is a philosopher working in ethics and aesthetics. Before coming to Toronto, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good. She received her doctorate from Brown University with a dissertation on "Ordinary Friendship". Yiran’s philosophical work explores intimacy, love, beauty, and social and political relationships. You can find her published work on Philpapers. She is currently working on 3 projects, one about the relational virtue of Grace, one about a right to intimacy, and one about being in love with a chatbot. Outside philosophy, Yiran is a creative writer.

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This is a talk with audience Q&A presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics that is free to attend and open to the public. Free pizza and refreshments will be provided at the event. The talk will also be streamed online with live chat here [link to be posted].

About the Centre for Ethics (http://ethics.utoronto.ca):

The Centre for Ethics is an interdisciplinary centre aimed at advancing research and teaching in the field of ethics, broadly defined. The Centre seeks to bring together the theoretical and practical knowledge of diverse scholars, students, public servants and social leaders in order to increase understanding of the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life.

In pursuit of its interdisciplinary mission, the Centre fosters lines of inquiry such as (1) foundations of ethics, which encompasses the history of ethics and core concepts in the philosophical study of ethics; (2) ethics in action, which relates theory to practice in key domains of social life, including bioethics, business ethics, and ethics in the public sphere; and (3) ethics in translation, which draws upon the rich multiculturalism of the City of Toronto and addresses the ethics of multicultural societies, ethical discourse across religious and cultural boundaries, and the ethics of international society.

The Ethics of A.I. Lab at the Centre For Ethics recently appeared on a list of 10 organizations leading the way in ethical A.I.: https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/10-organizations-leading-the-way-in-ethical-ai