15
Philosophy Speaker Series: Katharina Stevens
By McMaster Philosophy Department
Free Lecture
Overview
McMaster Philosophy Speaker Series Presents
Katharina Stevens
(Lethbridge)
“The Function of Argumentation is Moral”
Abstract
Argumentation theorists regularly motivate their normative theories of argumentation with function-claims: They determine what argumentation is fundamentally good for and then justify the validity of their theory’s norms by showing how following those norms will allow arguers to realize the specified functions. Usually these function-claims center epistemic goods. However, critics of this approach have pointed out that people use arguments for all kinds of purposes, including purposes that have nothing to do with the lofty goals argumentation theorists identify, and that it is difficult to show why these uses are unacceptable. In this paper, I argue that it is possible to defend a set of function-claims for argumentation, but only by doing something that argumentation theorists have shied away from so far: Relying on moral reasons. And as it turns out, the same moral reasons that justify an epistemic function for argumentation also justify a moral one.