Normativity with Judith Jarvis Thomson

[whatitduz23]

rip judith

[r3em4]

@whatitduz23 Wait, what? When did she die? I'm not seeing anything about this on the internet.

[Braves4321]

The intro music is badass.

[1888junkteam]

excellent work!

[plinden]

She sounds like 50s Oxford philosophy! Linguistic ordinary language philosophy.

[jp2feminist]

Judith apologized at the end for "rambling on." She "ought" not to have spoken for so long. She was a "defective speaker" similar to the toaster that won't toast or the beefsteak tomato that is too small. I would like to pose to Judith the following: If one were to take his working Amercian-made toaster to Italy, and attempt to toast his panini, only to discover that the electrical plug does not work in Italy, would the toaster still be defective? I think not.

[theyangist]

That would probably fall into one of those "unsuitable circumstances."

[carlyrose19]

@jp2feminist hmm very deep

[jp2feminist]

@carlyrose19 Thank you.

[robbriancoleman]

@jp2feminist I think Thomson would reply to your question with one of her own. Is part of a toaster's function to be able to work in all countries with the same type of plug? Since, I'm assuming one would say, it is not, this means a toaster is not defective for not working in Italy, but that this fact can be accomodated for in Thomson's normative theory.

[hannahrichards0904]

The problem I noted was that I don't think Judith's formulation really escapes consequentialism as much as she'd like it to. As I see it, the association of the word 'defective' with the normative 'ought' doesn't avoid the problem of having to assess consequences, and therefore escape the whole problem of the consequentialist holding acceptability of action 'hostage'. This is because in order for us to know whether a particular action IS 'defective', it seems we still need to know its outcome.

[robbriancoleman]

@hannahrichards0904 Do we really need to know the outcome of an action to know if the agent/object responsible is defective? We certainly need outcomes or consequences to PROVE that something is defective. But, say, a broken toaster's defectiveness is not dependent on whether or not it makes toast. This merely comes along for the ride. What makes a toaster defective or not is whether it CAN make toasted bread. This seems to me to be independent of outcomes, whilst producing them.

[bludklahtz]

watch zietgiest the movie... lets change the world in which we live

[borisrecke]

pretty smart