Title: Commitment and the Relegation of Reasons
By Lilian O’Brien (Helsinki and Tempere, Philosophy)
Date: Thursday, November 27, 2025
Time: 1530-1700
Room: H-232
Abstract: Commitments – to ends, people, principles – are central to our lives. In spite of their importance, the topic of commitment has received comparatively little attention. A couple of recent approaches rely on the claim that commitments are intentions of a special sort. Such views need to distinguish “common or garden” intentions from commitment-constituting intentions: they face a “distinction challenge”. One response that has been made to the challenge is to argue that commitment-constituting intentions are related in a special way to practical reasons. Another response is to characterize them as accompanied by a disposition not to re-consider. Both of these approaches get something right, but they also face problems. The alternative approach that is defended is that commitment-constituting intentions have a distinctive origin. They result from a “service” relationship that an agent takes up to some end, person, or principle. As a result of taking up this relationship, the agent undergoes a change in her reflexive evaluative attitudes, and consequently, in her executive thinking: she generates intentions concerning the end, person, or principle to which she is committed.
About the speaker: Lilian O’Brien is Senior Research Fellow at Tampere University and University Researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on issues in the philosophies of action and mind, and has appeared in such journals as Analysis, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, Philosophical Issues, and the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. She is Co-PI (with Arto Laitinen) of the project, Commitment and Self-Evaluation, Individual and Collective, funded by the Research Council of Finland (2024-2028), and member of the project, The Many Faces of Inquiry: Towards a Dynamic and Pluralistic Epistemology (PI Maria Lasonen), funded by the Kone Foundation, Finland (2024-2029).
Organized by the Department of Philosophy
