Edinburgh speaker series seminar

Speaker: Michael Cholbi (University of Edinburgh)

Title: Adapting to an Unjust World

Abstract: Many philosophers, including several feminist thinkers, have argued that preferences for an unjust state of affairs formed because the preference holder has been acculturated under that unjust state of affairs ought to be discounted in comparison with other preferences. Typical defences of discounting such “adaptive preferences” appeal to the claim that doing so is justified for the sake of adaptive preference holder. I argue that the primary avenues for defending a holder-centred rationale for discounting are unsuccessful: that such preferences are irrational, diminish the preference holder’s well-being or are not autonomous do not provide sufficient grounds for discounting them. But because adaptive preferences concern the assignment of goods or opportunities to others, they function more as beliefs or values and may therefore be discounted for community-centred reasons.