Department of Philosophy

ONLINE JOINT SEMINAR

The University of Hong Kong
Lingnan University
National University of Singapore

David Machek
University of Bern

Vice and Impoverishment: Two Perfectionist Bads

Zoom link:
https://lingnan.zoom.us/j/91761022322

Abstract:
Perfectionism is one of contemporary theories of human well-being. According to perfectionism, well-being lies in perfection or development of characteristically human capacities such as rationality. Perfectionism has been criticised on various grounds. In this talk, I engage with one such objection, namely that perfectionism fails to provide an adequate account of what is bad for us. In contrast to hedonist accounts of well-being, for instance, which can easily identify this badness as pain, perfectionism is only capable of defining badness as a lack of goodness. Given the intuition that an adequate account of what is good should go in hand with an adequate account of what is robustly bad, this is a potentially disturbing shortcoming of perfectionism. In a recent paper, Gwen Bradford proposed that robust perfectionist bads could be understood in terms of ‘malfillment’ of capacities, such as holding false beliefs. In my contribution, I propose an alternative – and possibly more plausible – account of perfectionist bads, drawing on Aristotle as the grandfather of modern perfectionism.

Monday
22 March 2021
4:30-6:15 pm

For inquiries:
Amit Chaturvedi
amitc@hku.hk