You are invited to join the University of Lorraine Philosophy Department for its first online lecture in English, coming to you via Zoom.
When: Monday 18 May, 4pm-6pm (45 mins talk + Q&A)
David Enoch
Professor of Philosophy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Oh, All the Wrongs I Could Have Performed!
Or: Why Care about Morality, Robustly Realistically Understood
To register, please click here
Being a public lecture it should be accessible to all — so do not hesitate to invite friends and colleagues who might be like to come.
Abstract
Suppose someone is brought up as an orthodox Jew, and so only eats kosher, is very conservative sexually, etc. Suppose they then find out that this Judaism stuff - at least in its orthodox, literal reading - is just all a big mistake. If they then regret all the fun they could have had, all the shrimp the could have eaten, all the sex!, - well, if they regret all this now, this makes perfect sense.
Suppose someone finds out that moral realism is false, or maybe even that Mackie was right. And they now regret all the fun they could have had hurting people's feeling, not helping, etc. – This doesn’t seem to make sense. And even if it does, there's a fairly strong disanalogy between the moral and the religious case. This asymmetry is, on a realist picture of morality, surprising. It calls for explanation.
In this paper, I try to explain it. The discussion engages some of the familiar objections to Robust realism form the literature – the why-be-moral challenge, the question whether it’s virtuous to be motivated by the moral de-dicto, and, perhaps most centrally, the question whether and why we should care about the moral properties, when those are understood along robust realist lines.
Organized by Anna C. Zielinska (University of Lorraine).