OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Programme this week:
14h15 to 15h15: Student presentation with Rhys Southan
This presentation will not require reading a paper beforehand. The format will be a longer presentation followed by a Q&A.
Abstract: In this talk titled “Death Doesn’t Count Against Life,” I’ll discuss some practical implications of comparativism about the harm of death—the view that death is not intrinsically bad but is instead comparatively bad by depriving us of the goods of life. The main general implication I’ll defend is that death itself is not the sort of harm that counts against bringing someone into existence. If death is bad for depriving us of the goods of life, there is no prudential advantage to never existing just to avoid the deprivation of good things that comes from ceasing to exist. This suggests that if death is the only harm imposed on someone by creating them, nothing about their own prudential value counts against creating them.
Yet, many people implicitly accept the view that death itself counts against coming into existence, and David Benatar explicitly claims that death’s harmfulness makes it so both life and death are bad overall—creating an “existential vise” from which there is no good escape (The Human Predicament, 2017). I’ll contest Benatar’s vise by arguing that without a drastic intrinsic harm of death, there is no way for both life and death to be bad overall, even when we grant Benatar’s claim that death’s annihilation of our very selves is a distinct harm of death. Benatar must either accept that life is good overall, which makes death bad overall, or he must accept that death is good overall because life is bad overall.
I’ll conclude by briefly exploring the limited implications that death’s not counting against life has for the ethics of animal farming and abortion.
15h15 to 16h15: Researcher’ presentation ‘An introduction to empirical bioethics’ with Dr Jamie Webb
Presentation followed by a Q&A
Format:
In person: Uehiro Oxford Institute Seminar Room, Suite 1, First Floor, Littlegate House, 16–17 St Ebbes Street, OX1 1PT. Please press buzzer 1 to access the building.
or via Zoom: email Axelle for the link.
