Agnes Callard

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832 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2009 last heard Jun 2020

Agnes Callard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Elucidations · Episode 100: Agnes Callard discusses aspiration · 22 Sep 2017 podcast

I think Williams was making a more radical criticism of the sort of standing set of assumptions in the ethics, moral psychology literature than I am.

So his thought was, in effect, even if some fact has nothing to do with your agency at all,

you could still be on the hook for it.

So that's why he called it luck, right?

And so in calling it luck, the way to sort of line up his terminology with mine is what he calls luck is what I would call passive or something like that, right?

So if it sort of worked out, then you get a certain kind of credit, Williams thinks, as a result of luck.

Many people, myself included,

find the very idea of moral luck to be something close to a contradiction in terms.

And I guess I don't want to defend that view here.

In fact, I'm not in some moments more convinced by Williams than others.

But what I want to say is even if you are totally unconvinced by that idea, you might still buy the idea of aspiration.

Aspiration doesn't require you to make Williams's separation between

success or failure on the one hand and agency on the other.

It doesn't presuppose that you can succeed but not as an agent.

So instead what I'm saying is there's a distinctive form of agency.

So first, you're right that when I talk about the self, what I really mean is the person's set of values, which in turn I think could be helpfully glossed as what the person cares about, what's important to them.

Where that can also be negative things, like it can be a fact about your values that you don't care about the people around you.

So when I talk about self-creation, what I mean is the creation of those things, of values, of carings, coming to care about things that you didn't care about before.

And now it sounds like I'm just giving the first answer, right?

But I guess I want to add something, which is I think arguably that's just what a person really is.

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