What's the Point of Blaming and Forgiving?

Miranda Fricker, Professor, Department of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the New York Institute for Philosophy, New York University

Blaming and forgiving seem to display opposing energies and purposes. Blaming someone for a wrong done further disrupts your relationship with them; forgiving them restores that relationship, at least in some measure. In this talk, Miranda Fricker will explore these apparently opposed moral-relational energies, examining their various moral-social values. She will argue that, contrary to appearances, if we examine their interlocking functions, we come to see that they indicate a unified ultimate goal: the generation of shared moral understandings, and hence a shared moral world.

Biography: Miranda Fricker is Professor of Philosophy at New York University and Co-Director of the New York Institute of Philosophy. Previously, she was Distinguished Professor in the Philosophy Department at the Graduate Center CUNY, Professor of Philosophy at University of Sheffield, and Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and the President of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) for 2022-23. Dr. Fricker is the author of the pathbreaking book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford, 2007), many articles at the intersection of ethics and social epistemology, and the editor of a number of anthologies on topics such as feminism in philosophy, applied epistemology, and social epistemology.

This lecture is organized by the Department of Philosophy.

Co-sponsored by the Dresher Center for the Humanities.

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