Time and date
Monday, 8 June 2026, 16:30 – 18:15
Venue
Lecture Theatre, The H B Allen Centre, 25 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6NN 📍 Find the venue on Google Maps
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Series title | Moral Pressures: Bending Time, Shaping Wills
Lecture 3 Moral Protagonism: Bending Time in Our Responses to Wrongdoing
Description
Moral address occurs in time, not only in the sense of having a duration, but in another sense that bends our relationship to time. Bernard Williams introduced the idea of a blame’s sometimes functioning by way of a ‘proleptic mechanism’. I will consider proleptic moral address independently from the specifics of Williams’ internalist conception of reasons, and argue that proleptic blame is not, as it at first seems, an unusual variant or deviant case of blame at all. On the contrary, granted blame’s power to reconfigure people’s moral psychology, however slightly, we must allow that all blame is at least a little proleptic. It addresses a hoped-for future version of the wrongdoer—a version who would not do the wrong. Demands for apology too can be seen to operate this same mechanism. In this sense, we cannot help but ‘bend’ time when we respond to wrongdoing with blame, or a demand for apology, for we are effectively willing the hoped-for future other into existence. The resultant picture of moral address reveals moral subjects not as neutral discoverers and sharers of static moral reasons, but rather as moral protagonists, exerting mixed suasive pressures on one another in the construction of a shared moral consciousness.
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