11 found
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  1. What is the Difference between Weakness of Will and Compulsion?August Gorman - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (1):37-52.
    Orthodoxy holds that the difference between weakness of will and compulsion is a matter of the resistibility of an agent's effective motivation, which makes control-based views of agency especially well equipped to distinguish blameworthy weak-willed acts from non-blameworthy compulsive acts. I defend an alternative view that the difference between weakness and compulsion instead lies in the fact that agents would upon reflection give some conative weight to acting on their weak-willed desires for some aim other than to extinguish them, but (...)
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  2. Taking Stock of the Risks of Life Without Death.August Gorman - 2020 - In Michael Cholbi & Travis Timmerman (eds.), Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge.
    In this chapter I argue that choosing to live forever comes with the threat of an especially pernicious kind of boredom. However, it may be theoretically possible to circumvent it by finding ways to pursue an infinite number of projects consistent with one’s personality, taking on endlessly pursuable endlessly interesting projects, or by rekindling old projects once you’ve forgotten about them. However, each of these possibilities is contingent upon having certain traits that you are likely not currently in a good (...)
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  3. Depression’s Threat to Self-Governance.August Gorman - 2020 - Social Theory and Practice 46 (2):277-297.
    Much of the literature on impairment to self-governance focuses on cases in which a person either lacks the ability to protect herself from errant urges or cases in which a person lacks the capacity to initiate self-reflective agential processes. This has led to frameworks for thinking about self-governance designed with only the possibility of these sorts of impairments in mind. I challenge this orthodoxy using the case of melancholic depression to show that there is a third way that self-governance can (...)
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  4. Demystifying the Deep Self View.August Gorman - 2022 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 19 (4):390-414.
    Deep Self views of moral responsibility have been criticized for positing mysterious concepts, making nearly paradoxical claims about the ownership of one’s mental states, and promoting self-deceptive moral evasion. I defend Deep Self views from these pervasive forms of skepticism by arguing that some criticism is hasty and stems from epistemic injustice regarding testimonies of experiences of alienation, while other criticism targets contingent features of Deep Self views that ought to be abandoned. To aid in this project, I provide original (...)
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  5. The Minimal Approval View of Attributability.August Gorman - 2019 - In David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 6. Oxford University Press.
    This paper advances a new agentially undemanding account of the conditions of attributability, the Minimal Approval account, and argues that it has a number of advantages over traditional Deep Self theories, including the way in which it handles agents with conditions like addiction, Tourette syndrome, and misophonia. It is argued that in order for an agent to be attributionally responsible, the mental process that leads to her action must dispose her to be such that she would, upon reflec-tion, approve to (...)
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  6. Living Your Best Life.August Gorman - 2021 - Analysis 81 (3):568-576.
    In Almost Over: Aging, Dying, Dead, Frances Kamm seeks to make sense of people’s widely variant choices about which lives they would choose to continue living. She does this by defending the Prudential Prerogative, which, in analogy to the Moral Prerogative, holds that in a fairly wide range of conditions we are under no intrapersonal rational obligation to choose either to die or to live on. I argue against Kamm's case for the Prudential Prerogative in favor of Life Holism, the (...)
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  7.  74
    Neurodiversity and the Ethics of Access.August Gorman - 2023 - In Shelley Tremain (ed.), _The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability_. London UK: Bloomsbury Academic.
    Surveys different potential normative underpinnings of neurodiversity-related access claims, focusing both on their legitimacy and the adjudication of conflicts between them.
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  8.  40
    Against Neuronormativity in Moral Responsibility.August Gorman - 2024 - Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 10 (1).
    The moral responsibility literature frequently relies on both explicit and implicit claims about “ideal” or “normal” agency that import unjustified normative assumptions into our theorizing. In doing so, it both fails to reckon with and misconstrues the reality of agential diversity. In this article I diagnose the root of this problem, which I trace back to the confluence of two factors: the search for fundamental agential capacities, and systemic discrimination toward psychological variance. I then preview three socially and politically important (...)
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  9. Holism, Particularity, and the Vividness of Life.August Gorman - 2022 - The Journal of Ethics (3):1-15.
    John Martin Fischer’s Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life puts forth a view that individual experiences could provide us with sources of endless fascination, motivation, and value if only we could live forever to continue to enjoy them. In this article I advocate for more caution about embracing this picture by pointing to three points of tension in Fischer's book. First, I argue that taking meaningfulness in life to be holistic is not compatible with the view immortal lives would be (...)
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  10. Tragic Life Endings and Covid-19 Policy.August Gorman - 2020 - The Philosophers' Magazine 91:89-93.
    Pandemic-related restrictions can be especially tragic for people whose lives are ending; it seems that the needs and desires of people who are dying should be given extra consideration. Given an additivist view of well-being, however, the last weeks of a person's life can only matter so much relative to the rest of the life they had. This article reflects on the end of my mother's life during the Covid-19 pandemic in order to make the case that the additive view (...)
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  11. The Minimal Approval View of Attributional-Responsibility.August Gorman - 2018 - Dissertation, University of Southern California
    I argue in favor of the Minimal Approval account, an original account of an agent’s moral responsibility for her actions, understood as the conditions that must be met so that an agent’s actions speak for her such that she can appropriately be blamed on their basis. My account shares a general theoretical orientation with Deep Self views, but diverges in several respects. I argue that Deep Self views tend to seriously over-generate exemptions, such that agents are exempt from responsibility even (...)
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