Class 9.2: Discord

Spring break is almost here! But not quite. We have one more reading before the break, and again I’m going to awkwardly make you read some of my own work. But I hope that you will see the payoff in today’s class of the attention that we’ve been paying to philosophical work on responsibility of different kinds over the last few weeks.

Our question for today is whether it is possible to give rationalizing explanations of persistent conflicts between well-meaning people who genuinely care about one another - or whether instead this can only happen through either irrationality or bad faith.

Mark Schroeder

Yada, yada, you’ve met me.

Conflict, Discord, and Strife

Our reading for today is my unpublished paper ‘Conflict, Discord, and Strife’. In this paper I try to ask whether it is possible to give rationalizing explanations of persistent conflicts between well-meaning people, and I introduce a concept that I call ‘discord’, which I argue is important in understanding certain kinds of conflict - and possibly, many kinds of conflict.

In class I’ll try to give an even simpler explanation of what discord is and why you might think that it is important. You’ll find that parts of the reading are easier than others, since some parts describe things that we have read and talked about this semester.

Quiz Time!