Events

Guest Speaker: Jules Holroyd, University of Sheffield

Title: 'Oppressive Praise'

Abstract: My aim in this paper is to bring the literature on (oppressive) praise into contact with contemporary literature on functions. Theorists have made claims about what praise is and does, attributing various functions to our practice(s) of expressing praise: communicative functions (Macnamara); agency improving functions (Vargas); community building functions (Calhoun); norm affirming functions (Shoemaker and Vargas, myself). But what sense of function do these theorists each have in mind? And how might this help us understand what our practices of expressing praise should do, if they are to be justified? This paper aims to make a start in answering these questions, and so to clarify functional approaches to moral appraisal.