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KJuris seminar with Carla Bagnoli (Modena) 

The King's Legal Philosophy Workshop, directed by Professor Lorenzo Zucca and Professor Massimo Renzo is a forum devoted to discussing works in progress by today's leading legal philosophers and theorists as well as by promising younger talents from around the world. While our focus is philosophical and jurisprudential, we construe these terms broadly and welcome all rigorous methodological approaches to legal theory.

Anyone with a keen interest in Legal Philosophy is welcome, the format of the event has now changed. Papers will no longer be circulated in advance. There will be a 45 min presentation, followed by discussion.

Abstract

Despite the heavy weight of the past deliberations and decisions, temporally structured agents, such as we are, conceive of themselves as free to revise and alter their plans, free to come to terms with the claims of the past, and free to question whether past commitments still provide compelling reasons for action. Indeed, preserving such a freedom is an ethical and political priority, related to the right to develop a conception of the flourishing life of one’s own. To fully understand freedom to change and develop, we have to take into account temporal constraints on rational agency in ways that have largely escaped current debates. To make sense of normative adjustment, we need a dynamic conception of practical rationality, which draws on a plastic network of normative and cognitive capacities and competences, such as temporally oriented emotional attitudes and meta-cognitive capacities. The resultant view of dynamic self-governance promises a better understanding of diachronic conflicts of value, in contrast to shuffling and radical conversions.

Speaker biography

Carla Bagnoli is a Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford. She has written extensively on moral dilemmas, moral authority, and responsibility, and is the editor of Morality and the Emotions (Oxford UP 2011), Constructivism in Ethics (Cambridge UP 2013), and Time in Action (Routledge forthcoming). Her Ethical Constructivism is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.