Disorderly Time: What Death and Midlife Crises May or May Not Reveal about Value

As Susan Wolf (2015 [1999]) suggests, value theory is concerned with questions that are simultaneously universal and personal. Nonetheless, there is little attention paid to the question of the personal uptake of these questions. Arguments that cite the examples of near-death experiences (or, more strongly, the deathbed) and midlife crises focus on the idea that these experiences provide special (albeit defeasible) access to questions about intrinsic value and meaningfulness. These experiences are, it is thought, a helpful corrective to the distractions that interfere with our ability to know what has intrinsic value or what would make our lives (more) meaningful. The problem is that it is not clear why (or, more skeptically, whether) these experiences actually do this.

In this talk, I have three aims. First, I show that though the deathbed and midlife crises are, in line with our intuitions and our everyday parlance, what I dub "vantage points on value," it is not for the familiar reasons. It is (largely) because they highlight what I will characterize as the "personal" aspects of intrinsic value and meaningfulness in life. I show, second, that the 'personal' is not reducible to the subjective aspects of value or to a subjectivist picture of intrinsic value and meaningfulness. I conclude by briefly comparing the argument I give here to alternatives advanced by existentialists and, more recently, Samuel Scheffler.

Caroline Arruda https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/philosophy/people/fulltime-faculty/caroline-arruda Associate Professor Department of Philosophy University of Tulane

About the Speaker:

My research focuses on issues at the intersection of ethics (both normative ethics and metaethics) and philosophy of action. The basic idea that guides my research is the following: examining the central features of agency will inform our answers to fundamental questions about our moral and political obligations to others, the nature of moral motivation and normative reasons as well as the kinds of reasons we have to value our capacity for full-blooded agency. In pursuit of this idea, my research has two foci: 1) Non-Standard Forms and Expressions of Agency: our understanding of agency ought to include not simply fully developed, rational humans but also collective agents, non-human animal agents and those aspects of human agency that fall below full-blooded agency. 2) The Nature of Moral Agency and its Import for Metaethics: our distinctive agential capacities are understood through the lens of their import for understanding moral deliberation, moral motivation, normative reasons and moral truth.

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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 refreshments will be provided at the event. The talk will also be streamed online with live chat here [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…