WiP - Nick Laskowski / Othering vice
WiP - Nick Laskowski / Othering vice
Wednesday November 15, the Works in Progress meeting has Nick Laskowski, presenting new work on "Othering vice", abstracted below.
We seek to bring philosophical attention to a neglected phenomenon both in and outside of philosophy that we call 'othering vice', wherein an individual makes it harder to see themselves as exhibiting a vice by conceptualizing it only in terms of its most vivid or extreme manifestations. We use three "case studies" involving philosophical theorizing about the metaphysics of dishonesty, the metaphysics of misogyny, and the semantics of slurs to both explain the phenomenon and demonstrate that it is widespread. Several consequences of othering vice, including, especially, how it functions as a form of ego protection, are also highlighted. We conclude by offering several recommendations for how to think about vice in such a way as to avoid othering vice.