https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sclp-seminar-alex-kaiserman-oxford-tickets-175480826877#

The Surrey Centre for Law and Philosophy invites you to a seminar to be delivered by Alex Kaiserman (Oxford). The seminar will take place in person, but we invite people to join us online as well.

You can access the Zoom session HERE, and a draft of the paper HERE (pre-reading optional, but recommended).

“‘You Knew the Risks’: Responsibility, Reasonable Foreseeability, and Probabilistic Knowledge”

Abstract: It’s often claimed that one is not responsible for outcomes one couldn’t reasonably have foreseen. But what does this mean? I’ll distinguish several different ways of interpreting the reasonable foreseeability condition on responsibility and raise problems for all of them. I’ll then sketch an alternative articulation of the epistemic condition on responsibility for outcomes, one which takes as its starting point the idea that one is responsible for something only if one ‘knew the risks’ of it happening.

Alex Kaiserman is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Fairfax Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Balliol College. His main areas of research are metaphysics, ethics and legal philosophy, but he also has interests in philosophy of science and philosophy of mind.