It's common to set out on a challenging pursuit without knowing whether you will succeed. As we confront hurdles and setbacks, we face a crucial decision: give up, or persevere? Optimism about our chances can help us avoid giving into premature despair. But Jennifer M. Morton argues that "grit"—striving in the face of adversity—can be rational only when it doesn't turn into Pollyannaish optimism. To strive rationally, we also need to pay close attention to our abilities and strengths, as well as to whether our circumstances will be conducive to our success. In this talk, Morton will develop a model of striving that aims to capture the multifaceted nature of this critical capacity of agents.
Jennifer M. Morton is Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Philosophy with a secondary appointment at the School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a SAGE Sara Miller McCune Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Morton is interested in how poverty and social class affect our agency. She is currently working on a book on striving in the face of adversity with Sarah Paul (NYU Abu Dhabi) and a series of papers on precarity and poverty. Her book Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility (Princeton University Press, 2019) was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in Education and the Frederic W. Ness Book Award by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Her work has been featured in The Nation, The Atlantic, Vox, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the podcast Hidden Brain. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a SAGE Sara Miller McCune Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Faculty Fellowship at the Princeton Center for Human Values.
