Speaker Series 2024-25
ALL TALKS IN MACKINNON 114, 4:00 - 5:30 PM.
September 13: Alison Reiheld, Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville
“That's Not How Any Of This Works: How ideal theory fails to address bioethical issues in gender, reproduction, fatness and, well, most of the rest of it”
Fat folks are positioned as being inherently unhealthy. Folks with mental health conditions like borderline personality are positioned as being “problem” patients. Clinicians who accept that some patients balance health against other life goals and priorities get positioned as bad clinicians. The way we define health makes it largely unachievable for most people. What do these all have in common? They are rooted in ideal theories and the ways of thinking that stem from them. Philosophers from Charles Mills to Allison Jaggar have critiqued a number of philosophical theories that claim to address real-world problems for being “ideal theories” that are so detached from the very real, non-ideal world that attempting to use them actually can make things worse for people trying to do their best. In this talk, Alison Reiheld explores how bioethical thinking about ideal clinicians, ideal patients, and the ideal of health can lead us badly astray when trying to achieve better wellbeing for humans in practice. It might seem odd to use this much theory to talk about how theory goes wrong, but theory is what we use to pick the right tools for the job at hand. To improve our lives in a messy, non-ideal world, we need to give up ideal theories and keep accounting for reality. No clinician is an ideal clinician. No patient is an ideal patient. No one can achieve ideal health. That’s just not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
October 18: Mathieu Doucet, University of Waterloo
"Addiction, Autonomy, and Adaptive Preferences"
October 25: Mariam Thalos, University of Tennessee
"Reasoning in Focus"
November 8: Alice MacLachlan, York University
"Still Sorrier Stories: Public Apologies after #MeToo"
For many survivors, the #MeToo social media upswell in 2017 represented an overdue moment of accountability. The spate of public apologies by high profile perpetrators that followed initially seemed like further evidence of that accountability. Yet it’s hard to deny that many of these apologies were – well – pretty bad apologies. Bad apologies can be frustrating, infuriating, and profoundly painful, and it’s easy to see how they might hinder rather than help the project of moral repair. But what about good apologies?
I have argued that the moral risks of public #MeToo apologies are not limited to the faults and flaws of bad apologies. Indeed, in many ways, good ones are more insidious, given the ways in which “perpetrator” is constructed and understood in our current social imaginary. In this talk, I point to broader cultural change needed to uphold the moral work of public apologies in the aftermath of sexual violence.