Rethinking Agency: The Ethics and the Rhetoric of Habit
Supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and hosted by SPERI and THUMOS at the University of Geneva. Start date: April 2023.
This interdisciplinary philosophical inquiry aims to elucidate habit as a key dimension of agency by addressing the following questions:
- Where does habit fit within the space of reasons?
- How does habit help make sense of one’s own and others’ agency across different contexts and communities?
- In what ways might habit inform the dialectic of owning up and disowning conduct in order to recognise or transform one’s own or others’ agency over time?
Recent talks (materials available on request):
- Augmenting Agency by Socialising Responsibility? A Second Look at Technologies and Habits. Augmented Agency ∝ Augmented Fairness, University of Kent, 26-27 April 2023
- Trusting and Distrusting Habits: An Ecological Account of Institutional Agency. GECOPOL Retreat, University of Geneva, 1 June 2023
- The Habits of Business: Saving Time in the Digital Era. Pre-reflective Agency conference, Law School, University of Birmingham, 29 June 2023
Meaningful Voices: Identifying and Overcoming Epistemic Injustice in Health and Social Care
Supported by Research England, the Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice, St Catherine’s College, Oxford University and “Future Human”, University of Kent. Start date: January 2023
This pilot research co-creation brings together academics, experts by experience, policy makers and health practitioners. We aim to develop, test and document new collaborative strategies for learning from lived experiences in the context of mental health.
Epistemic justice is both a legitimate and an integral goal of psychiatry: a reply to Kious, Lewis and Kim (2023) (with D Foreman). Psychological Medicine 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1017/S003329172300082X
Online resources, including recordings from the Project's Inaugural Event (18 Jan 2023, St Catherine’s College, Oxford) available here.
Further Work-in-Progress:
Transformative Agency, Retrospection and Agent-Regret
There is a trend in recent discussions to conceive agent-regret as a fitting response to bad moral luck, such as that of a driver who kills a pedestrian through no fault of their own. Following this trend, agent-regret appears to be a lesser kind of guilt evoked by borderline exercises of one’s own agency: although not performed in the light of reasons, it seems callous to just shrug them off. This paper will take a different tack. It will be argued that in paradigm cases agent-regret is a fitting response to a transformative experience undertaken in the light of reasons, which however are subsequently voided by this experience. This approach has three advantages. First, it illuminates the crucial role of retrospection for shaping one’s initial space of reasons. Second, it shows that agent-regret responds to exercises of one’s own agency revealed as core rather than borderline. And third, it enables us to appreciate the distinctive nature of agent-regret, which is irreducible to guilt.
Answerability and Epistemic Dis-Credit
I identify and explore how unjust epistemic inclusions, such as epistemic appropriation and epistemic exploitation may distort responsibility as answerability. Drawing on the notion of deep circumstantial luck I proposed recently, I aim to show that answerability expectations and exchanges get distorted in a distinctive way, even when unjust epistemic inclusions are effectively resisted.
Transformative Agency, Retrospection and Agent-Regret
There is a trend in recent discussions to conceive agent-regret as a fitting response to bad moral luck, such as that of a driver who kills a pedestrian through no fault of their own. Following this trend, agent-regret appears to be a lesser kind of guilt evoked by borderline exercises of one’s own agency: although not performed in the light of reasons, it seems callous to just shrug them off. This paper will take a different tack. It will be argued that in paradigm cases agent-regret is a fitting response to a transformative experience undertaken in the light of reasons, which however are subsequently voided by this experience. This approach has three advantages. First, it illuminates the crucial role of retrospection for shaping one’s initial space of reasons. Second, it shows that agent-regret responds to exercises of one’s own agency revealed as core rather than borderline. And third, it enables us to appreciate the distinctive nature of agent-regret, which is irreducible to guilt.
Answerability and Epistemic Dis-Credit
I identify and explore how unjust epistemic inclusions, such as epistemic appropriation and epistemic exploitation may distort responsibility as answerability. Drawing on the notion of deep circumstantial luck I proposed recently, I aim to show that answerability expectations and exchanges get distorted in a distinctive way, even when unjust epistemic inclusions are effectively resisted.