[PHILOS-L] KantianDESERT WIP with Alexander Andersson, Huub Brouwer and Thomas Mulligan

[ERC Kantian DESERT UKRI]

The next work-in-progress session of the KantianDESERT project will be held on 10^th June at 12 noon. Alexander Andersson, Huub Brouwer and Thomas Mulligan will be presenting their paper, 'Desert is a three-place relation'. The event will be hybrid: some of us will meet in Gillian Howie House seminar room 2 in Liverpool, and it will also run online. If you are interested in attending, please email erc.kantian...@liverpool.ac.uk, and we can send you the invitation. The invitation will also contain a link to the paper, which should be read in advance.

Title: 

Desert is a three-place relation

Abstract

While much remains unknown about the concept of desert, it has been received wisdom for decades that desert is a three-place relation (between subject, object, and basis). In this paper, we scrutinize that received wisdom, making three points. The first is historical: This should never have been received wisdom in the first place. Desert scholars (including ourselves) have wrongly assumed that desert’s triadic structure was established, or at least argued for, in the seminal literature on desert. That was never the case. Second, we fill that gap, providing a rigorous argument for why desert is, indeed, three-place. We show that (i) fewer than three relata are insufficient to capture desert’s essential features (viz. aboutness, proportionality, and fittingness) and (ii) when desert-claims contain more than three relata, those extra relata are superfluous. So desert must be a three-place relation. Third, on the basis of that argument, we critique two recent claims, by Kevin Kinghorn and Toby Napoletano, that desert is not triadic.

 

Keywords: 

desert; adicity; conceptual analysis, fittingness, proportionality

Authors: 

Alexander Andersson: Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg (Sweden)

 

Huub Brouwer: Department of Philosophy, Tilburg University (Netherlands)

 

Thomas Mulligan: Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets & Ethics, Georgetown University (USA)

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