Speaker Series: Wayne Sumner (Univ of Toronto), "The Worst Things in Life", Tues, Nov 17, 4:00-5:30 pm (note date and time), in Ross S 421

One test of adequacy for a theory of welfare is completeness: as I have put it elsewhere, a theory ‘should give us truth conditions for all of the different sorts of welfare assessments we make’. These assessments include judgements that life is going well for us but also that it is going badly, that circumstances can make us better off but also worse off.  To be complete a theory must therefore be capable of accounting for both the ups and the downs of life: besides well-being it must also be a theory of ill-being. My aim in this talk is to determine how well equipped the leading theories of welfare are to pass this completeness test, that is, how well they are able to deal with the ways in which life might go very badly.

Wayne Sumner is the author of Abortion and Moral Theory (1981); The Moral Foundation of Rights (1987); Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (1996); The Hateful and the Obscene: Studies in the Limits of Free Expression (2004); and Assisted Death: A Study in Ethics and Law (2011). He has made further contributions to multiple fields of moral, legal and political philosophy in his many scholarly journal articles and book chapters.