This year’s annual ethics lecture, sponsored by the UW Program on Ethics, will be delivered by Cheshire Calhoun, Professor of Philosophy at Arizona State University and chair of the American Philosophical Association’s board of officers. The lecture will take place on November 1, 2019 at 5:30 PM at the wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ - Intellectual House in the Gathering Hall.
Professor Calhoun’s impressive body of work offers feminist perspectives on key concepts in moral psychology and normative ethics, including integrity, forgiveness, shame, commitment and civility. She is author of Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet (OUP), the editor of Setting the Moral Compass: Essays by Women Philosophers (OUP), and the co-editor with Robert C. Solomon of What is an Emotion: Classic Readings in Philosophical Psychology (OUP). Her most recent work includes a published collection of her essays under the title Moral Aims: Essays on the Importance of Getting it Right and Practicing Morality with Others (OUP), and a new book titled Doing Valuable Time: The Present, the Future, and Meaningful Living (OUP), with essays on hope, boredom, commitment, finding meaning in life, and contentment with imperfection.
Her talk for the annual ethics lecture, “Responsibilities and Taking on Responsibility” will consider the ways in which responsibilities and obligations differ, with attention to the goods of and pressures to take on non-obligatory responsibilities, as well as the morally problematic nature of meddling as a form of over-reaching regarding responsibilities.