12 found
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  1. Legislating Taste.Kenneth Walden - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (4):1256-1280.
    My aesthetic judgements seem to make claims on you. While some popular accounts of aesthetic normativity say that the force of these claims is third-personal, I argue that it is actually second-personal. This point may sound like a bland technicality, but it points to a novel idea about what aesthetic judgements ultimately are and what they do. It suggests, in particular, that aesthetic judgements are motions in the collective legislation of the nature of aesthetic activity. This conception is recommended by (...)
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  2. Agency and aesthetic identity.Kenneth Walden - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (12):3253-3277.
    Schiller says that “it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.” Here I attempt to defend a claim in the same spirit as Schiller’s but by different means. My thesis is that a person’s autonomous agency depends on their adopting an aesthetic identity. To act, we need to don contingent features of agency, things that structure our practical thought and explain what we do in very general terms but are neither universal nor necessary features of agency (...)
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  3. The Aid That Leaves Something to Chance.Kenneth Walden - 2014 - Ethics 124 (2):231-241.
    I argue that a crucial point has been overlooked in the debate over the “numbers problem.” The initial arrangement of parties in the problem can be thought of as chancy, and whatever considerations of fairness recommend the reliance on something like a coin toss in approaching this problem equally recommend treating the initial distribution as a kind of lottery. This fact, I suggest, undermines one of the principal arguments against saving the greater number.
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  4. Reason and respect.Kenneth Walden - 2019 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 15.
    This chapter develops and defends an account of reason: to reason is to scrutinize one’s attitudes by consulting the perspectives of other persons. The principal attraction of this account is its ability to vindicate the unique of authority of reason. The chapter argues that this conception entails that reasoning is a robustly social endeavor—that it is, in the first instance, something we do with other people. It is further argued that such social endeavors presuppose mutual respect on the part of (...)
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  5. Morality, Agency, and Other People.Kenneth Walden - 2018 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5.
    Constitutivists believe that we can derive universally and unconditionally authoritative norms from the conditions of agency. Thus if c is a condition of agency, then you ought to live in conformity with c no matter what your particular ends, projects, or station. Much has been said about the validity of the inference, but that’s not my topic here. I want to assume it is valid and talk about what I take to be the highest ambition of constitutivism: the prospect of (...)
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  6. The Euthyphro Dilemma.Kenneth Walden - 2013 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (3):612-639.
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  7. The Poets of Our Lives.Kenneth Walden - 2024 - Journal of Philosophy 121 (5):277-297.
    This article proposes a role for aesthetic judgment in our practical thought. The role is related to those moments when practical reason seems to give out, when it fails to yield a judgment about what to do in the face of a choice we cannot avoid. I argue that these impasses require agents to create, but that not any creativity will do. For we cannot regard a response to one of these problems as arbitrary or capricious if we want to (...)
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  8. Incomparable numbers.Kenneth Walden - 2020 - Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 10.
    This chapter presents arguments for two slightly different versions of the thesis that the value of persons is incomparable. Both arguments allege an incompatibility between the demands of a certain kind of practical reasoning and the presuppositions of value comparisons. The significance of these claims is assessed in the context of the “Numbers problem”—the question of whether one morally ought to benefit one group of potential aid recipients rather than another simply because they are greater in number. It is argued (...)
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  9. Great Beyond All Comparison.Kenneth Walden - 2023 - In Sarah Buss & Nandi Theunissen (eds.), Rethinking the Value of Humanity. New York, US: OUP Usa. pp. 181-201.
    Many people find comparisons of the value of persons distasteful, even immoral. But what can be said in support of the claim that persons have incomparable worth? This chapter considers an argument purporting to show that the value of persons is incomparable because it is so great—because it is infinite. The argument rests on two claims: that the value of our capacity for valuing must equal or exceed the value of things valued and that our capacity for valuing is unbounded (...)
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  10. Kantian constructivism.Julia Markovits & Kenneth Walden - 2020 - In Ruth Chang & Kurt Sylvan (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason. New York, NY: Routledge.
    Theories of reasons and other normativia can seem to lead ineluctably to a tragic dilemma. They can be personal but parochial if they locate reasons in features of the point of view of actual people. Or they can be objective but alien if they take reasons to be mind-independent fixtures of the universe. Kantian constructivism tries to offer the best of both worlds: an account of normative authority anchored in the evaluative perspectives of actual agents but refined by a procedure (...)
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  11. Holism about Fact and Value.Kenneth Walden - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper argues for confirmational holism about facts and values. This position is similar to one defended by (among others) Hilary Putnam, but the argument is importantly different. Whereas Putnam et al. rely on examples of the putative entanglement of facts and values – a strategy which I suggest is vulnerable to parrying – my argument proceeds at a more general level. I argue that the explanation of action can not be separated from our practical reasoning, and for this reason, (...)
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  12. The sublime Clara Mather.Kenneth Walden - 2019 - In Hans Maes (ed.), Portraits and Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge.
    Kant says that there is a close affinity between the sublime and moral feelings of respect. This suggests a relatively unexplored way that aesthetic experience could be morally improving. We could come to respect persons by experiencing them as sublime. Unfortunately, this is not at all our ordinary experience of people, and it’s not clear how one would come to it. In this paper I argue that this possibility is realized in the portraits of Thomas Eakins. Through a handful of (...)
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