Tuesday 15th March
Maggie Fife
Maggie Fife is a fifth-year PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation focuses on the roles of hope and imagination in moral revolutions.
Moral Imagination, Social Possibility, and Prison Abolition
The movement for prison abolition requires that we envision a world structured very differently from our current social reality. Abolitionist literature is filled with calls to invoke our powers of imagination: Angela Davis (2003) encourages us to “imagine a world without prisons,” while noted abolitionists Mariame Kaba and Kelley Hayes (2018) call for a “jailbreak of the imagination.” Legal scholar Allegra McLeod (2015) argues that reluctance to take seriously abolition “represents a failure of moral, legal, and political imagination”(p. 1156). Abolitionists are often met by the skeptical view that it is simply too hard to imagine a world without prisons, or that it seems impossible. Given that the theme of imagination comes up so often, what exactly is its role in the movement for prison abolition?
The movement for prison abolition is importantly constructive. Abolitionists share a political vision “with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance, and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment” (Critical Resistance). Appeals to common sense, moral reason, and empathy alone cannot complete this or other similarly constructive political projects. In analytic philosophy, there is some talk of “moral imagination,” though it is not immediately clear what the moral imagination refers to. Here I will use the activist imperative to imagine as an indicator that there is important metaethical work to be done, and accordingly explore the meaning and importance of the moral imagination in radical political projects. By turning to a tangible political movement to guide my metaethical inquiry, I express a methodological commitment that theory should begin from the ground up.
In this paper I will highlight the importance of moral imagination in radical political movements and moral revolutions, and argue that imagination can partially determine what is socially possible. First, I will illustrate the concept of moral imagination by drawing out unique cases and views of imagination in the philosophical literature, focusing on the works of Mark Johnson, Sophie Grace Chappell, Mavis Biss, Adrian Piper and Susan Babbitt. From this literature and my own contributions, I identify six distinct modes of engaging the moral imagination. These six modes help illustrate imagination’s functional role, and from here I provide a working conception of the moral imagination. Second, I explore some of the ways in which each mode will be necessary for the movement for prison abolition. Third, I focus on the sixth mode of engaging the moral imagination: imagining social possibilities. Here I explain the relevant sense of possibility I call social possibility and its central role in moral revolutions. Because moral revolutions are radical, they are also impractical—they take much effort, coordination, and revision of our beliefs, practices, and values. For this reason, determining what is socially possible requires us to engage our moral imaginations to not only fight against our reflexive conservativism, but to actively construct a vision of a better and more just world. Finally, I draw the conclusion that imagining can actually create social possibilities.
Michiel Meijer
Michiel Meijer is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Antwerp. His main teaching and research interests are situated at the intersections of ethics, philosophical anthropology, hermeneutics, and metaphysics, and he has published widely on the philosophy of Charles Taylor.
Taking Ourselves Seriously: On the Significance of Interpretive Metaethics
Societal debates on developments such as the various terrorist attacks after 9/11, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter indicate an important movement in the direction of our moral thinking: a return to the belief in objective right and wrong. ISIS, Jeffrey Epstein, and Derek Chauvin were not just violating our (Western) moral code. What they did was wrong. This attitude toward moral truth – that at least some moral opinions are objectively true in this way – is very common. One of the central questions in metaethics is the question about the status of such ordinary moral judgments. Are moral convictions merely based on subjective preferences or are there objective values and norms which everyone should acknowledge? The traditional answer to this question has been that there are indeed right and wrong answers about how people should act. The past century, however, skepticism about ethics has become much more extensive. Paradoxically, contemporary moral debates seem characterized not only by the belief in right and wrong but also by a strong sense of suspicion regarding that very belief.
This paper starts from the observation that this predicament cannot be captured by the familiar metaethical question about the status of moral judgment. It invokes a deeper issue: the question of how we understand ourselves as moral subjects, our moral self-understanding or moral identity. My aim is twofold. First, I show how the common conception of the nature of metaethics leaves little room to address this issue properly. Second, I argue that, if we are to gain full access to the topic of moral self-understanding to clarify metaethics’ wider significance, then what we need to develop is what I call “interpretive metaethics.” This involves fleshing out the idea of interpretive metaethics by building on insights from Charles Taylor, as he connects moral questions with issues of human nature and moral realism in a way that has no obvious counterpart across the wide range of metaethical views. At stake is the possibility of a more comprehensive ethics – taking the cause of metaethics in a new direction.
The main points are (1) that metaethical theories are constrained by a requirement to consort with our moral identities; (2) that the issue of moral self-understanding can only be adequately conceptualized at the intersection of normative ethics and metaethics; which in turn requires (3) taking a distance from mainstream metaethical debates by understanding moral judgments as interpretations of meaning rather than (non)descriptive statements; and thus (4) providing the resources for a novel conception of metaethics that clarifies its societal relevance by overcoming the existing boundaries between normative ethics and metaethics.
Yuhan Fu
Yuhan Fu is a 4th-year PhD student at the University of Sheffield. Her thesis is on cognitive architecture of moral judgements. Most people call her Felicity.
AI, Human, Norms and Society: To What Extent Does AI Learn Moral Norms about Human Society
In this talk, I will address the question of whether we can build a machine that can learn moral norms and judge according to those norms? I will argue that based on current technological developments in artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP), machines are already able to output human-like moral judgements. However, I contend that we are far from building an intelligent and human-like moral machine because at this stage: current AI performance in solving moral problems cannot prove that AI understand moral norms, let alone make genuine moral judgements and become morally responsible agents.
To illustrate and justify my claim, I will introduce an AI called Delphi released by Jiang and colleagues (2021). Delphi is an AI designed to make moral judgements. Its programme is based on what AI researchers called a deep neural network (Goodfellow, Bengio, and Courville 2016), which is a mathematical system which attempts to mimic the web of neurons in the brain. This neural network attempts to learn moral norms from 1.7 million of everyday human ethical judgements made by people in the US. Through learning and training, Delphi can answer three different moral tasks: free forms (kill a bear to save your child), yes and no questions (should we welcome refugees?) and makes moral judgements in moral dilemmas. Delphi has demonstrated 92.1% accuracy compared to human moral judgements. This has been taken to show that Delphi understands moral concepts and makes moral judgements in complicated moral contexts.
I argue that despite this output behaviour, Delphi does not possess moral understanding and engage in moral judgements. To make moral judgements as humans do, one needs to acquire and reason from moral norms. The capacity to learn, adopt, store and reason from moral norms are key factors in morality. Whereas what Delphi and other similar AI do is simply output what the majority of people in a community would morally judge in a given situation. Thus far, Delphi demonstrates that vast training and learning about everyday moral situations cannot make a machine detect moral scenarios from non-moral ones. Secondly, the moral learning strategy is different from human, and it can only generate general opinion of crowed-sourced workers that researchers recruited online, which only reflects how general American people judge morally about given scenarios statistically. Finally, the logic underlying deep learning is vastly different from the psychological strategy underlying human moral judgements. The deep learning system aims produce optimal outputs given inputs. But it does not care how that gets done. However, in moral judgements, humans perform in the way we do based on the rules we learn.
As a result, I suggest that the current performance of machine ethics cannot prove that well-trained AI have learned moral concepts and are capable of making moral judgement based on learned moral norms. It can only reveal the worldview of the designers or people who are involved in contributing the training data.
Nick Küspert
Nick Küspert is a second-year PhD student at the University of St Andrews and the University of Stirling. In their thesis, they develop a cooperative approach to moral inquiry, arguing that moral testimony and resulting phenomena (should) play a significant role in moral inquiry.
Optimistic Pessimism about Moral Testimony
Optimists about moral testimony claim that reliance on moral testimony is, despite its illegitimate appearance, perfectly fine. In contrast, pessimists about moral testimony hold that relying on mere testimony when it comes to moral matters is illegitimate. I argue that the motivations for pessimism about moral testimony provided so far support only a very optimistic version of such pessimism: even if there is something regrettable about reliance on moral testimony, there is rarely a decisive reason to dismiss it as a resource in moral inquiry.
Pessimism about moral testimony on moral grounds holds that a central aim of moral agents is to perform actions of moral worth. Performing an action of moral worth requires implicit or explicit understanding of why the act in question ought to be performed. However, mere moral testimony fails to transmit such understanding (cf. Hills (2009)).
I show that this argument supports proper pessimism about moral testimony only if moral worth has substantial positive value. In particular, its value needs to be such that it can justify opting for contemplating on your own even if this decreases the likelihood of you getting it right (compared to reliance on moral testimony). However, assigning moral worth this value has implausible consequences. Most strikingly, it entails that it is permissible for an agent to take a moral risk for the sole reason of increasing the moral worth of their action. This allows the agent to neglect the primary moral aim – acting rightly – in favour of their own personal gain.
Pessimism about moral testimony on psychological grounds attests that testimony-based moral beliefs lack a motivational component. Therefore, reliance on moral testimony only enables us to gain sub-optimal moral beliefs. What is more, having formed a belief on the basis of moral testimony disincentivises further moral inquiry into the matter since forming a belief tends to close inquiry (Fletcher (2016), Callahan (2018)).
I argue that while the agent relying on moral testimony lacks the motivation inherent to the resulting moral belief, they nonetheless have an extrinsic motivation to act in accordance with the newly acquired belief. In virtue of seeking out testimony, they are motivated to act in accordance with the testimony they receive. Though this extrinsic motivation may be sub-optimal, it is the best option available to our agent.
Pressing this objection further, one might argue that we care not only about being motivated per se but about being rightly motivated – where this is, roughly, understood as being motivated to do the right thing de re and not just de dicto. If this is the objection, then my remarks about moral worth apply once more. Again, we would end up in situations in which agents take a moral risk solely for the possibility of gaining the right motivation instead of a testimony-based motivation.
Since neither moral nor psychological explanations are successful in establishing a strong version of pessimism about moral testimony, I propose an optimistic outlook on pessimism about moral testimony. Reliance on moral testimony is legitimate even if we are pessimists about moral testimony.
Emma Prendergast
Emma Prendergast is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has research interests in political philosophy, metaethics, feminist philosophy, philosophy of social science, and philosophy of education.
The Service Conception of Legitimate Political Authority and Reasons Internalism
We call our elected and appointed government officials “public servants” out of a recognition that the decisions such authorities make ought to be those that will serve the governed. Joseph Raz defends this “service conception” of legitimate political authority with what he calls the dependence thesis and the normal justification thesis. The dependence thesis claims that the directives of authorities ought to be based on reasons which already apply to the governed. The normal justification thesis (NJT) claims that “…the normal way to establish that a person has authority over another person involves showing that the alleged subject is likely better to comply with reasons which apply to him (other than the alleged authoritative directives) if he accepts the directives of the alleged authority…” (Raz 1986, p. 53, emphasis added.) Legitimate authority is only justified when it helps the governed act on the reasons which already normatively bind them.
In this paper, I give a new interpretation of Joseph Raz’s normal justification thesis, arguing that political authorities are legitimate only if they are responsive to the internal reasons of the governed. I argue that this interpretation of the normal justification thesis can help relieve a tension in Raz’s view—a tension which arises because it is a conception of legitimacy that is meant to both respect the self-governance of agents yet also explain why the state is justified in perfectionistic intervention (Kirby 2017).
The paper disambiguates two senses of “reasons”—internal reasons vs. external reasons—which have been the subject of extensive discussion in the meta-ethics literature, but the implications of which have so far been under-explored in the political philosophy literature. The internal reasons thesis is committed to the view that all reasons for action are relative to an agent’s subjective motivational set, which includes her desires, broadly construed to include goals, projects, dispositions, and commitments (Williams 1979). In contrast, many philosophers (often implicitly) accept externalism about reasons, which is the view that agents (at least sometimes) have reasons for action which are not part of the agent’s subjective motivational set.
In our global society and in the United States today, transparency about the source of the legitimate authority is a pressing matter. For example, alarming numbers of citizens are skeptical about public health policies aimed at mitigating the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Citizens have been calling for each other to “believe in the science,” but a lingering problem is that some citizens have lost trust in our scientific experts—in many cases, owing to harmful disinformation campaigns online. Public authorities are right to impose public health measures aimed at curtailing the pandemic, but in the face of vocal disagreement from segments of the citizenry, we need an explanation of what justifies those uses of coercive power.
Dr Neil Sinclair – Keynote Speaker
Neil Sinclair is Head of Department and Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, and Area Editor for Ergo. He writes on the metaphysics, psychology, semantics (meta-semantics) and epistemology of moral discourse, and has recently published a book on Practical Expressivism.
Folk Metaethics and the Impacts of Metaethical Reflection
In this talk I want to do two things. First, to argue that ordinary folks (those who would ride the Clapham Omnibus, if such a thing still existed) don’t naturally have many meta-ethical views. Second, to consider what might be the effects if they did – in particular if they came to acknowledge the One True Metaethical View. Some of these effects might be good, others less so. Either way, they demonstrate the potential importance of metaethical reflection on wider society.
Wednesday 16th March
Astrid Fly Oredsson
Astrid Fly Oredsson is a first-year PhD-student at Aarhus University, Denmark, working on the stigmatization of borderline personality disorder and its impact on medical practice and research.
Psychiatric Taxonomy and Epistemic Injustice: The case of borderline personality disorder, inappropriate anger and moral agency
While displaying “inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger” is one of nine possible diagnostic criteria for BPD in the DSM-5, it is vaguely defined and relies on unclear terminology such as “temper”, “enduring bitterness” and “verbal outbursts” as illustrative examples (APA 2013, 663-664). This ambiguous account of anger falls short of providing any context-sensitive guidelines as to how one should evaluate the appropriateness of anger. Nevertheless, attention to context has continuously been highlighted in the philosophical literature on anger as crucial to proper evaluation of the appropriateness, aptness or fittingness of anger (cf. Srinivasan 2018; Shoemaker 2018; Cherry 2018). Additionally, BPD is known to be uniquely stigmatised within mental health services with people diagnosed with BPD frequently being stereotyped as hostile, intentionally difficult and manipulative (cf. New & Triebwasser 2018; Bodner et al. 2015; Pickard 2011; Brodsky 2018; Potter 2009). The combination of these prejudices and the decontextualised account of anger offered in the DSM-5 is worrisome, and further, it sufficiently grounds concern about the extent to which psychiatric workers’ evaluations of anger expressed by those diagnosed with BPD are based on non-prejudiced expert knowledge.
In other words, there seems to be a real risk that psychiatric workers may end up dismissing all or nearly all anger expressed by people with BPD as inappropriate regardless of whether this is the case. This, I argue, qualifies as what Fricker (2007) has termed epistemic injustice – a distinct kind of injustice wherein a person is wronged in their capacity as a knower. First, it is a case of testimonial injustice because it undermines the credibility of patients’ anger testimonies when these pertain to appropriate anger. Second, it leads to hermeneutical injustice as it limits the meanings and modes of expression available to patients with BPD relating to anger as a domain. Their ability to express anger within the clinical setting without substantial risk that this will be misconstrued and interpreted as symptomatic of BPD is considerably diminished. Furthermore, if we conceive of (at least a subset of) anger as a moral emotion – as a reaction to perceived moral violation (cf. Callard 2018; Srinivasan 2018; Shoemaker 2018; Cherry 2018), then this form of anger-related epistemic injustice becomes particularly egregious. Namely, it is likely that persistent exposure to it will lead to an erosion of “moral” self-trust similar to the erosion of intellectual self-trust that Jones (2012) has linked to continuous exposure to other kinds of epistemic injustice. Such erosion in moral self-trust could very well diminish ability to accurately identify and respond to violations of moral norms. Therefore, this kind of anger-related epistemic injustice not only involves a failure in recognition of the epistemic status of BPD patients it may also diminish their moral agency.
Jose C. Cañizares-Gaztelu
Jose C. Cañizares-Gaztelu is an MSc in Philosophy of Science, Technology & Society from U. of Twente, where he graduated with a thesis on some key technological, socio-economic and cultural trends which emerged during the Third Industrial Revolution. His current research focuses on urban resilience, and justice-sensitive concerns in initiatives for building resilience to climate change through policy.
Normativity Assessment: Applying Metaethics to Practical Challenges
We live at a time when humans face unprecedented challenges, such as how to deal with climate change and other social and ecological crises, or how to end poverty. Much reflection is needed around these challenges and their moral aspects, and one way in which philosophy could contribute to them is by examining the normative character of the discourses with which scientists, public figures and citizens address those problems. Indeed, assessing normativity has become a matter of growing interest in fields from psychiatry (Bermúdez 2001) to medicine (Bosman 2017), economics (Hands 2012; van Staveren 2017), political science (Abulof 2015), technology studies (Scheele 2006) and resilience and risk research (Cañizares et al. 2021). Given that metaethics is the branch of philosophy most directly concerned with normativity, one might think it can offer unique insights and tools for assessing normativity in scientific and political discourse.
Yet, when we one examines the few extant cases of normativity assessment practice (NA), coming from applied philosophy and philosophy of science, these reveal misalignments with orthodox metaethical ideas (Cañizares et al. forthcoming). For example, metaethical debates over thick terms (i.e. those that combine descriptive and evaluative contents) focus on terms that “evaluate actions and persons” as good/bad-in-a-way, like virtues and vices (Väyrynen 2016). Applied philosophers, in contrast, consider a more ample and diverse class of thick terms: e.g. health (Boenink 2020) or well-being (Alexandrova 2018) are conditions of persons or social groups, and resilience (Thorén & Olsson 2017; Copeland et al. 2020) or risk and safety (Möller 2012) are properties of systems or system states. Further, applied philosophers view normativity more broadly and pragmatically than metaethicists: less concerned with evaluation narrowly defined (or whatever thick concepts “ultimately” are), than with identifying the value-laden assumptions and decisions thick concepts imply in practice and handling them legitimately (van Staveren 2017; Alexandrova 2018). These insights suggest that certain theoretical assumptions in metaethics currently limit its potential to contribute to NA as well as to practical affairs more generally.
This paper addresses this problem by developing groundwork for NA in critical dialogue between metaethics and other disciplines. We start by reviewing important metaethical doctrines and describing the basic view of normativity that dominates in the field: that normativity is a property of certain expressions that justify or place obligations on human action. Then, after discussing recent work on the desired purpose and content of NA (Cañizares et al. forthcoming), we explain why orthodox metaethical views offer only a limited help in consolidating this practice. Next, building on a generalized version of Thomson ’s (2008) account of normativity -specifically, of her statements of attributive goodness- we offer an expanded and multidimensional view of normativity that addresses some of these limitations. Finally, to illustrate the practical value of this view, we present a method of normativity assessment based on our groundwork and apply it to the example of “resilience to climate change”, showing how the emerging insights are continuous with, and valuable for, ethical assessment in resilience research.
Paul Forrester
Paul Forrester is a second-year student in the philosophy PhD program at Yale. He mainly works on issues at the intersection of epistemology and ethics, and also has interests in metaethics, philosophy of mind and metaphysics.
The Fittingness of Individual and Collective Attitudes and Emotions
We experience emotions both individually and collectively. As individuals, we grieve the loss of a loved one, and we also go to funerals in order to grieve together. As individuals, we are excited by watching our favorite sports team play, and we go to the stadium or the sports bar to be a part of a group which is excited by the game. Likewise for other emotions and even cognitive attitudes: amusement, admiration, respect, fear, anger, belief, empathy and many more attitudes can be had by both individuals and groups.
Norms of fit govern an individual’s attitudes. A person’s attitude is a fitting response to its content when it is the appropriate response to the content—when it is the response which is called for by the contents. Presumably, collective attitudes, too, may be fitting or unfitting responses to their contents. In the paper, I identify three puzzles which arise when we consider the relationship between the normative structures of collective and individual attitudes.
First, I explore how the fittingness conditions of individual attitudes relate to the fittingness conditions of collective attitudes. Clear examples show that a group may have attitude A despite the fact that some of its members do not have A. Likewise, I identify examples which show that some members may be such that it is unfitting for them to have A, yet it may be fitting for the group to have A. The diachronic fittingness conditions for individual and group attitudes also differ. The first puzzle arises from the fact that the fittingness of individual and group attitudes come apart.
The second puzzle situates the wrong kind of reason (WKR) problem in a collective context. Individuals can have reasons of the wrong kind to have an attitude—reasons to have the attitude which are not related to the fittingness of the attitude. I identify analogous WKR examples for collectives. Individual WKR’s and collective WKR’s have some important differences that I will discuss.
Finally, I consider how these features of collective attitudes bear on the fitting attitudes (FA) analysis of value. According to the FA analysis, X is valuable just in case it is fitting to value X. “Thick” evaluative notions like being admirable, being pitiable, being trustworthy, etc. can also be given FA analyses. But a question arises about the analysans: for whom is it fitting to value X? As noted above, the conditions which make it fitting to have an attitude may differ between individuals and groups. Given the FA analysis, this leads to the thought that there might be divergent evaluative properties for individuals and collectives—a possibility which I explore and critique in the final section.
Working through these three puzzles provides us with a foundation for understanding how the normativity governing our attitudes relates to the normativity governing the attitudes of collectives of which we are members. This is one interesting and underexplored aspect of the normative relationship between the individual and society.
Caitlin Fitchett
Caitlin Fitchett is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at Harvard University. Her dissertation, tentatively titled "Theirs to Reason Why", concerns the nature of practical deliberation and the moral responsibility of individuals in collective action cases.
Geoengineering, Indigenous Conceptions of the Value of Nature, and Public Discourse
Indigenous systems of value are often represented as being more “natural” than other worldviews. This representation is regularly appealed to by activists and academics, who suggest that indigenous perspectives ought to be considered uniquely authoritative on environmental issues because of the naturalism of such views. Recently, this has led to calls for geoengineering research to be abandoned on the basis that making use of this technology would involve illicitly privileging a Western conception of the value of nature on which the natural world is merely instrumentally and extrinsically valuable. The coherency of this position depends on it being the case that the conception of a naturalistic, indigenous environmental philosophy, which is a second-order metaethical theory concerning the character of environmental value, engenders specific first-order ethical standards for action. My aim in this paper is to challenge this assumption.
I argue that Māori environmental philosophy is ambiguous as to the permissibility of geoengineering. (Māori are the first peoples of Aotearoa, New Zealand). With reference to Māori myths, which are a key repository of Māori moral teachings, I argue that a coherent defense for the permissibility of engaging in solar geoengineering can be given. I also argue that Māori environmental philosophy has the resources to prohibit geoengineering. I make these arguments in order to show that even if one accepts that indigenous environmental values ought to be privileged over, say, a Western conception of the value of the environment, this does not mean that it is possible to straightforwardly derive a decisive verdict as to what actions ought to be taken or what policies should be enacted. First-order environmental issues cannot be decisively settled merely by determining whether a course of action or policy proposal is compatible with a favored second-order theory about the value of the environment.
The argument of my paper unfolds as follows. First, I present evidence for my opening claim that indigenous philosophies are represented as naturalistic and for my claims concerning how this representation is utilized by activists and academics. Second, I outline the core aspects of Māori environmental philosophy, showing how te ao Māori (the Māori worldview) is an instance of an naturalistic, indigenous environmental ethic. Third, I explain how the values embedded in two prominent Māori myths—Maui slowing the sun, and Tāne separating Ranginui and Papatūanuku—can be coherently appealed to in order to justify geoengineering and in order to prohibit it. I thus conclude that geoengineering cannot be straightforwardly rejected on the basis that making use of it is incompatible with naturalistic, indigenous philosophies and more generally, that even if a second-order moral theory ought to take precedence it does not follow that there is an uncontestably correct thing to do. In the final section of my paper, I take a step back and consider what lessons can be drawn from the arguments of the previous sections concerning what norms ought to govern public deliberation on environmental ethics and policy.
Katharina Sodoma
Katharina Anna Sodoma is a Postdoc at the University of Duisburg-Essen, working on empathy as part of the project “How Does it Feel? Interpersonal Understanding and Affective Empathy”. Before coming to Essen, she completed her PhD at the University of Vienna in April 2020 with a thesis on moral relativism and moral progress.
Towards a Feminist Conception of Moral Progress
Although commentators agree that the political project of ending the oppression of women* bears on metaethical questions (see e.g. Holroyd 2013; Superson 2017; Srinivasan 2018), there has been relatively little explicitly feminist work in metaethics. This is particularly striking when compared to other areas of analytic philosophy, such as philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics, to which feminists have made important contributions by raising new sets of questions and exhibiting blind spots of the respective fields. Anita Superson suggests that “how best to bring about moral progress” is an example of a question that is not routinely discussed in metaethics but becomes salient from a feminist perspective (Superson 2017, 529). Prima facie, Superson’s question may appear to fall in the realm of first-order normative ethics rather than metaethics. However, answers to the question of how best to bring about moral progress will implicitly depend on a conception of what constitutes moral progress.
Such a conception of moral progress will in turn depend on assumptions about the metaphysical status of moral truth and the possibility of moral knowledge and thus on questions that fall squarely within the realm of metaethical theorizing. Following Superson’s suggestion, I aim to develop a feminist conception of moral progress, addressing both the question of how to conceptualize moral progress and, relatedly, of how to bring it about. My starting point is a particular conception of moral progress that follows from J. David Velleman’s version of metaethical constitutivism (Velleman 2009). On this type of view, it is the constitutive aim of agents to understand themselves and each other. Because moral forms of life increase mutual intelligibility, the development of morality is itself progressive. Moreover, we can make further moral progress by developing our social practices and interpretative resources in ways that help us to better understand ourselves and each other. I raise a challenge for this view based on the fact that our shared interpretative resources are developed under conditions of unequal participation and unequal influence.
Then, I show how this challenge can be met by incorporating conceptual resources from feminist epistemology. In particular, I draw on Miranda Fricker’s notion of “hermeneutical injustice” and Kristie Dotson’s notion of “contributory injustice” in order to further develop the conception of moral progress that follows from Velleman’s version of constitutivism (Fricker 2007; Dotson 2012). Finally, I assess the resulting conception of moral progress against the background of two important lines of critique of the discourse of progress. The first line of critique draws on the Eurocentric history of notions of progress and challenges the assumption that progress must lead to convergence on one historically specific form of life. The second line of critique draws on the charge that narratives of progress are overly optimistic, obstructing our view of persisting oppression and regressive tendencies and inspiring the expectation that progressive developments linearly follow from a quasi-automatic dynamic. I conclude by exploring some consequences my argument has for the prospects of a feminist metaethics.
Dr Zoë A Johnson King – Keynote Speaker
Zoë Johnson King is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. Before that, she was a Bersoff fellow at NYU, a grad student at Michigan, a Teach First teacher in Croydon, and an undergrad at Cambridge. She grew up in Nottingham and will not stop going on about it.
Moral Motivation in the Wild
I do what I call non-ideal moral psychology – thoughts about motivation and creditworthiness for regular humans who have to deal with a lot of moral uncertainty and who face surrounding circumstances that are frequently deeply unjust or otherwise profoundly morally challenging. I've also done a lot of philosophy with people who aren't professional philosophers, in UK and US high schools and in my workout communities. These things are related; my experiences doing moral psychology "in the wild" have shaped my theorizing. That's what this talk is about. I will describe four of those experiences and explain four ways in which the lessons I learned have been reflected in my research; specifically, I will discuss the nature of moral motivation, praise and positive behavior management, the ethics of praise, and the importance of working on yourself.
Maggie Fife
Maggie Fife is a fifth-year PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation focuses on the roles of hope and imagination in moral revolutions.
Moral Imagination, Social Possibility, and Prison Abolition
The movement for prison abolition requires that we envision a world structured very differently from our current social reality. Abolitionist literature is filled with calls to invoke our powers of imagination: Angela Davis (2003) encourages us to “imagine a world without prisons,” while noted abolitionists Mariame Kaba and Kelley Hayes (2018) call for a “jailbreak of the imagination.” Legal scholar Allegra McLeod (2015) argues that reluctance to take seriously abolition “represents a failure of moral, legal, and political imagination”(p. 1156). Abolitionists are often met by the skeptical view that it is simply too hard to imagine a world without prisons, or that it seems impossible. Given that the theme of imagination comes up so often, what exactly is its role in the movement for prison abolition?
The movement for prison abolition is importantly constructive. Abolitionists share a political vision “with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance, and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment” (Critical Resistance). Appeals to common sense, moral reason, and empathy alone cannot complete this or other similarly constructive political projects. In analytic philosophy, there is some talk of “moral imagination,” though it is not immediately clear what the moral imagination refers to. Here I will use the activist imperative to imagine as an indicator that there is important metaethical work to be done, and accordingly explore the meaning and importance of the moral imagination in radical political projects. By turning to a tangible political movement to guide my metaethical inquiry, I express a methodological commitment that theory should begin from the ground up.
In this paper I will highlight the importance of moral imagination in radical political movements and moral revolutions, and argue that imagination can partially determine what is socially possible. First, I will illustrate the concept of moral imagination by drawing out unique cases and views of imagination in the philosophical literature, focusing on the works of Mark Johnson, Sophie Grace Chappell, Mavis Biss, Adrian Piper and Susan Babbitt. From this literature and my own contributions, I identify six distinct modes of engaging the moral imagination. These six modes help illustrate imagination’s functional role, and from here I provide a working conception of the moral imagination. Second, I explore some of the ways in which each mode will be necessary for the movement for prison abolition. Third, I focus on the sixth mode of engaging the moral imagination: imagining social possibilities. Here I explain the relevant sense of possibility I call social possibility and its central role in moral revolutions. Because moral revolutions are radical, they are also impractical—they take much effort, coordination, and revision of our beliefs, practices, and values. For this reason, determining what is socially possible requires us to engage our moral imaginations to not only fight against our reflexive conservativism, but to actively construct a vision of a better and more just world. Finally, I draw the conclusion that imagining can actually create social possibilities.
Michiel Meijer
Michiel Meijer is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Antwerp. His main teaching and research interests are situated at the intersections of ethics, philosophical anthropology, hermeneutics, and metaphysics, and he has published widely on the philosophy of Charles Taylor.
Taking Ourselves Seriously: On the Significance of Interpretive Metaethics
Societal debates on developments such as the various terrorist attacks after 9/11, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter indicate an important movement in the direction of our moral thinking: a return to the belief in objective right and wrong. ISIS, Jeffrey Epstein, and Derek Chauvin were not just violating our (Western) moral code. What they did was wrong. This attitude toward moral truth – that at least some moral opinions are objectively true in this way – is very common. One of the central questions in metaethics is the question about the status of such ordinary moral judgments. Are moral convictions merely based on subjective preferences or are there objective values and norms which everyone should acknowledge? The traditional answer to this question has been that there are indeed right and wrong answers about how people should act. The past century, however, skepticism about ethics has become much more extensive. Paradoxically, contemporary moral debates seem characterized not only by the belief in right and wrong but also by a strong sense of suspicion regarding that very belief.
This paper starts from the observation that this predicament cannot be captured by the familiar metaethical question about the status of moral judgment. It invokes a deeper issue: the question of how we understand ourselves as moral subjects, our moral self-understanding or moral identity. My aim is twofold. First, I show how the common conception of the nature of metaethics leaves little room to address this issue properly. Second, I argue that, if we are to gain full access to the topic of moral self-understanding to clarify metaethics’ wider significance, then what we need to develop is what I call “interpretive metaethics.” This involves fleshing out the idea of interpretive metaethics by building on insights from Charles Taylor, as he connects moral questions with issues of human nature and moral realism in a way that has no obvious counterpart across the wide range of metaethical views. At stake is the possibility of a more comprehensive ethics – taking the cause of metaethics in a new direction.
The main points are (1) that metaethical theories are constrained by a requirement to consort with our moral identities; (2) that the issue of moral self-understanding can only be adequately conceptualized at the intersection of normative ethics and metaethics; which in turn requires (3) taking a distance from mainstream metaethical debates by understanding moral judgments as interpretations of meaning rather than (non)descriptive statements; and thus (4) providing the resources for a novel conception of metaethics that clarifies its societal relevance by overcoming the existing boundaries between normative ethics and metaethics.
Yuhan Fu
Yuhan Fu is a 4th-year PhD student at the University of Sheffield. Her thesis is on cognitive architecture of moral judgements. Most people call her Felicity.
AI, Human, Norms and Society: To What Extent Does AI Learn Moral Norms about Human Society
In this talk, I will address the question of whether we can build a machine that can learn moral norms and judge according to those norms? I will argue that based on current technological developments in artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP), machines are already able to output human-like moral judgements. However, I contend that we are far from building an intelligent and human-like moral machine because at this stage: current AI performance in solving moral problems cannot prove that AI understand moral norms, let alone make genuine moral judgements and become morally responsible agents.
To illustrate and justify my claim, I will introduce an AI called Delphi released by Jiang and colleagues (2021). Delphi is an AI designed to make moral judgements. Its programme is based on what AI researchers called a deep neural network (Goodfellow, Bengio, and Courville 2016), which is a mathematical system which attempts to mimic the web of neurons in the brain. This neural network attempts to learn moral norms from 1.7 million of everyday human ethical judgements made by people in the US. Through learning and training, Delphi can answer three different moral tasks: free forms (kill a bear to save your child), yes and no questions (should we welcome refugees?) and makes moral judgements in moral dilemmas. Delphi has demonstrated 92.1% accuracy compared to human moral judgements. This has been taken to show that Delphi understands moral concepts and makes moral judgements in complicated moral contexts.
I argue that despite this output behaviour, Delphi does not possess moral understanding and engage in moral judgements. To make moral judgements as humans do, one needs to acquire and reason from moral norms. The capacity to learn, adopt, store and reason from moral norms are key factors in morality. Whereas what Delphi and other similar AI do is simply output what the majority of people in a community would morally judge in a given situation. Thus far, Delphi demonstrates that vast training and learning about everyday moral situations cannot make a machine detect moral scenarios from non-moral ones. Secondly, the moral learning strategy is different from human, and it can only generate general opinion of crowed-sourced workers that researchers recruited online, which only reflects how general American people judge morally about given scenarios statistically. Finally, the logic underlying deep learning is vastly different from the psychological strategy underlying human moral judgements. The deep learning system aims produce optimal outputs given inputs. But it does not care how that gets done. However, in moral judgements, humans perform in the way we do based on the rules we learn.
As a result, I suggest that the current performance of machine ethics cannot prove that well-trained AI have learned moral concepts and are capable of making moral judgement based on learned moral norms. It can only reveal the worldview of the designers or people who are involved in contributing the training data.
Nick Küspert
Nick Küspert is a second-year PhD student at the University of St Andrews and the University of Stirling. In their thesis, they develop a cooperative approach to moral inquiry, arguing that moral testimony and resulting phenomena (should) play a significant role in moral inquiry.
Optimistic Pessimism about Moral Testimony
Optimists about moral testimony claim that reliance on moral testimony is, despite its illegitimate appearance, perfectly fine. In contrast, pessimists about moral testimony hold that relying on mere testimony when it comes to moral matters is illegitimate. I argue that the motivations for pessimism about moral testimony provided so far support only a very optimistic version of such pessimism: even if there is something regrettable about reliance on moral testimony, there is rarely a decisive reason to dismiss it as a resource in moral inquiry.
Pessimism about moral testimony on moral grounds holds that a central aim of moral agents is to perform actions of moral worth. Performing an action of moral worth requires implicit or explicit understanding of why the act in question ought to be performed. However, mere moral testimony fails to transmit such understanding (cf. Hills (2009)).
I show that this argument supports proper pessimism about moral testimony only if moral worth has substantial positive value. In particular, its value needs to be such that it can justify opting for contemplating on your own even if this decreases the likelihood of you getting it right (compared to reliance on moral testimony). However, assigning moral worth this value has implausible consequences. Most strikingly, it entails that it is permissible for an agent to take a moral risk for the sole reason of increasing the moral worth of their action. This allows the agent to neglect the primary moral aim – acting rightly – in favour of their own personal gain.
Pessimism about moral testimony on psychological grounds attests that testimony-based moral beliefs lack a motivational component. Therefore, reliance on moral testimony only enables us to gain sub-optimal moral beliefs. What is more, having formed a belief on the basis of moral testimony disincentivises further moral inquiry into the matter since forming a belief tends to close inquiry (Fletcher (2016), Callahan (2018)).
I argue that while the agent relying on moral testimony lacks the motivation inherent to the resulting moral belief, they nonetheless have an extrinsic motivation to act in accordance with the newly acquired belief. In virtue of seeking out testimony, they are motivated to act in accordance with the testimony they receive. Though this extrinsic motivation may be sub-optimal, it is the best option available to our agent.
Pressing this objection further, one might argue that we care not only about being motivated per se but about being rightly motivated – where this is, roughly, understood as being motivated to do the right thing de re and not just de dicto. If this is the objection, then my remarks about moral worth apply once more. Again, we would end up in situations in which agents take a moral risk solely for the possibility of gaining the right motivation instead of a testimony-based motivation.
Since neither moral nor psychological explanations are successful in establishing a strong version of pessimism about moral testimony, I propose an optimistic outlook on pessimism about moral testimony. Reliance on moral testimony is legitimate even if we are pessimists about moral testimony.
Emma Prendergast
Emma Prendergast is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has research interests in political philosophy, metaethics, feminist philosophy, philosophy of social science, and philosophy of education.
The Service Conception of Legitimate Political Authority and Reasons Internalism
We call our elected and appointed government officials “public servants” out of a recognition that the decisions such authorities make ought to be those that will serve the governed. Joseph Raz defends this “service conception” of legitimate political authority with what he calls the dependence thesis and the normal justification thesis. The dependence thesis claims that the directives of authorities ought to be based on reasons which already apply to the governed. The normal justification thesis (NJT) claims that “…the normal way to establish that a person has authority over another person involves showing that the alleged subject is likely better to comply with reasons which apply to him (other than the alleged authoritative directives) if he accepts the directives of the alleged authority…” (Raz 1986, p. 53, emphasis added.) Legitimate authority is only justified when it helps the governed act on the reasons which already normatively bind them.
In this paper, I give a new interpretation of Joseph Raz’s normal justification thesis, arguing that political authorities are legitimate only if they are responsive to the internal reasons of the governed. I argue that this interpretation of the normal justification thesis can help relieve a tension in Raz’s view—a tension which arises because it is a conception of legitimacy that is meant to both respect the self-governance of agents yet also explain why the state is justified in perfectionistic intervention (Kirby 2017).
The paper disambiguates two senses of “reasons”—internal reasons vs. external reasons—which have been the subject of extensive discussion in the meta-ethics literature, but the implications of which have so far been under-explored in the political philosophy literature. The internal reasons thesis is committed to the view that all reasons for action are relative to an agent’s subjective motivational set, which includes her desires, broadly construed to include goals, projects, dispositions, and commitments (Williams 1979). In contrast, many philosophers (often implicitly) accept externalism about reasons, which is the view that agents (at least sometimes) have reasons for action which are not part of the agent’s subjective motivational set.
In our global society and in the United States today, transparency about the source of the legitimate authority is a pressing matter. For example, alarming numbers of citizens are skeptical about public health policies aimed at mitigating the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Citizens have been calling for each other to “believe in the science,” but a lingering problem is that some citizens have lost trust in our scientific experts—in many cases, owing to harmful disinformation campaigns online. Public authorities are right to impose public health measures aimed at curtailing the pandemic, but in the face of vocal disagreement from segments of the citizenry, we need an explanation of what justifies those uses of coercive power.
Dr Neil Sinclair – Keynote Speaker
Neil Sinclair is Head of Department and Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, and Area Editor for Ergo. He writes on the metaphysics, psychology, semantics (meta-semantics) and epistemology of moral discourse, and has recently published a book on Practical Expressivism.
Folk Metaethics and the Impacts of Metaethical Reflection
In this talk I want to do two things. First, to argue that ordinary folks (those who would ride the Clapham Omnibus, if such a thing still existed) don’t naturally have many meta-ethical views. Second, to consider what might be the effects if they did – in particular if they came to acknowledge the One True Metaethical View. Some of these effects might be good, others less so. Either way, they demonstrate the potential importance of metaethical reflection on wider society.
Wednesday 16th March
Astrid Fly Oredsson
Astrid Fly Oredsson is a first-year PhD-student at Aarhus University, Denmark, working on the stigmatization of borderline personality disorder and its impact on medical practice and research.
Psychiatric Taxonomy and Epistemic Injustice: The case of borderline personality disorder, inappropriate anger and moral agency
While displaying “inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger” is one of nine possible diagnostic criteria for BPD in the DSM-5, it is vaguely defined and relies on unclear terminology such as “temper”, “enduring bitterness” and “verbal outbursts” as illustrative examples (APA 2013, 663-664). This ambiguous account of anger falls short of providing any context-sensitive guidelines as to how one should evaluate the appropriateness of anger. Nevertheless, attention to context has continuously been highlighted in the philosophical literature on anger as crucial to proper evaluation of the appropriateness, aptness or fittingness of anger (cf. Srinivasan 2018; Shoemaker 2018; Cherry 2018). Additionally, BPD is known to be uniquely stigmatised within mental health services with people diagnosed with BPD frequently being stereotyped as hostile, intentionally difficult and manipulative (cf. New & Triebwasser 2018; Bodner et al. 2015; Pickard 2011; Brodsky 2018; Potter 2009). The combination of these prejudices and the decontextualised account of anger offered in the DSM-5 is worrisome, and further, it sufficiently grounds concern about the extent to which psychiatric workers’ evaluations of anger expressed by those diagnosed with BPD are based on non-prejudiced expert knowledge.
In other words, there seems to be a real risk that psychiatric workers may end up dismissing all or nearly all anger expressed by people with BPD as inappropriate regardless of whether this is the case. This, I argue, qualifies as what Fricker (2007) has termed epistemic injustice – a distinct kind of injustice wherein a person is wronged in their capacity as a knower. First, it is a case of testimonial injustice because it undermines the credibility of patients’ anger testimonies when these pertain to appropriate anger. Second, it leads to hermeneutical injustice as it limits the meanings and modes of expression available to patients with BPD relating to anger as a domain. Their ability to express anger within the clinical setting without substantial risk that this will be misconstrued and interpreted as symptomatic of BPD is considerably diminished. Furthermore, if we conceive of (at least a subset of) anger as a moral emotion – as a reaction to perceived moral violation (cf. Callard 2018; Srinivasan 2018; Shoemaker 2018; Cherry 2018), then this form of anger-related epistemic injustice becomes particularly egregious. Namely, it is likely that persistent exposure to it will lead to an erosion of “moral” self-trust similar to the erosion of intellectual self-trust that Jones (2012) has linked to continuous exposure to other kinds of epistemic injustice. Such erosion in moral self-trust could very well diminish ability to accurately identify and respond to violations of moral norms. Therefore, this kind of anger-related epistemic injustice not only involves a failure in recognition of the epistemic status of BPD patients it may also diminish their moral agency.
Jose C. Cañizares-Gaztelu
Jose C. Cañizares-Gaztelu is an MSc in Philosophy of Science, Technology & Society from U. of Twente, where he graduated with a thesis on some key technological, socio-economic and cultural trends which emerged during the Third Industrial Revolution. His current research focuses on urban resilience, and justice-sensitive concerns in initiatives for building resilience to climate change through policy.
Normativity Assessment: Applying Metaethics to Practical Challenges
We live at a time when humans face unprecedented challenges, such as how to deal with climate change and other social and ecological crises, or how to end poverty. Much reflection is needed around these challenges and their moral aspects, and one way in which philosophy could contribute to them is by examining the normative character of the discourses with which scientists, public figures and citizens address those problems. Indeed, assessing normativity has become a matter of growing interest in fields from psychiatry (Bermúdez 2001) to medicine (Bosman 2017), economics (Hands 2012; van Staveren 2017), political science (Abulof 2015), technology studies (Scheele 2006) and resilience and risk research (Cañizares et al. 2021). Given that metaethics is the branch of philosophy most directly concerned with normativity, one might think it can offer unique insights and tools for assessing normativity in scientific and political discourse.
Yet, when we one examines the few extant cases of normativity assessment practice (NA), coming from applied philosophy and philosophy of science, these reveal misalignments with orthodox metaethical ideas (Cañizares et al. forthcoming). For example, metaethical debates over thick terms (i.e. those that combine descriptive and evaluative contents) focus on terms that “evaluate actions and persons” as good/bad-in-a-way, like virtues and vices (Väyrynen 2016). Applied philosophers, in contrast, consider a more ample and diverse class of thick terms: e.g. health (Boenink 2020) or well-being (Alexandrova 2018) are conditions of persons or social groups, and resilience (Thorén & Olsson 2017; Copeland et al. 2020) or risk and safety (Möller 2012) are properties of systems or system states. Further, applied philosophers view normativity more broadly and pragmatically than metaethicists: less concerned with evaluation narrowly defined (or whatever thick concepts “ultimately” are), than with identifying the value-laden assumptions and decisions thick concepts imply in practice and handling them legitimately (van Staveren 2017; Alexandrova 2018). These insights suggest that certain theoretical assumptions in metaethics currently limit its potential to contribute to NA as well as to practical affairs more generally.
This paper addresses this problem by developing groundwork for NA in critical dialogue between metaethics and other disciplines. We start by reviewing important metaethical doctrines and describing the basic view of normativity that dominates in the field: that normativity is a property of certain expressions that justify or place obligations on human action. Then, after discussing recent work on the desired purpose and content of NA (Cañizares et al. forthcoming), we explain why orthodox metaethical views offer only a limited help in consolidating this practice. Next, building on a generalized version of Thomson ’s (2008) account of normativity -specifically, of her statements of attributive goodness- we offer an expanded and multidimensional view of normativity that addresses some of these limitations. Finally, to illustrate the practical value of this view, we present a method of normativity assessment based on our groundwork and apply it to the example of “resilience to climate change”, showing how the emerging insights are continuous with, and valuable for, ethical assessment in resilience research.
Paul Forrester
Paul Forrester is a second-year student in the philosophy PhD program at Yale. He mainly works on issues at the intersection of epistemology and ethics, and also has interests in metaethics, philosophy of mind and metaphysics.
The Fittingness of Individual and Collective Attitudes and Emotions
We experience emotions both individually and collectively. As individuals, we grieve the loss of a loved one, and we also go to funerals in order to grieve together. As individuals, we are excited by watching our favorite sports team play, and we go to the stadium or the sports bar to be a part of a group which is excited by the game. Likewise for other emotions and even cognitive attitudes: amusement, admiration, respect, fear, anger, belief, empathy and many more attitudes can be had by both individuals and groups.
Norms of fit govern an individual’s attitudes. A person’s attitude is a fitting response to its content when it is the appropriate response to the content—when it is the response which is called for by the contents. Presumably, collective attitudes, too, may be fitting or unfitting responses to their contents. In the paper, I identify three puzzles which arise when we consider the relationship between the normative structures of collective and individual attitudes.
First, I explore how the fittingness conditions of individual attitudes relate to the fittingness conditions of collective attitudes. Clear examples show that a group may have attitude A despite the fact that some of its members do not have A. Likewise, I identify examples which show that some members may be such that it is unfitting for them to have A, yet it may be fitting for the group to have A. The diachronic fittingness conditions for individual and group attitudes also differ. The first puzzle arises from the fact that the fittingness of individual and group attitudes come apart.
The second puzzle situates the wrong kind of reason (WKR) problem in a collective context. Individuals can have reasons of the wrong kind to have an attitude—reasons to have the attitude which are not related to the fittingness of the attitude. I identify analogous WKR examples for collectives. Individual WKR’s and collective WKR’s have some important differences that I will discuss.
Finally, I consider how these features of collective attitudes bear on the fitting attitudes (FA) analysis of value. According to the FA analysis, X is valuable just in case it is fitting to value X. “Thick” evaluative notions like being admirable, being pitiable, being trustworthy, etc. can also be given FA analyses. But a question arises about the analysans: for whom is it fitting to value X? As noted above, the conditions which make it fitting to have an attitude may differ between individuals and groups. Given the FA analysis, this leads to the thought that there might be divergent evaluative properties for individuals and collectives—a possibility which I explore and critique in the final section.
Working through these three puzzles provides us with a foundation for understanding how the normativity governing our attitudes relates to the normativity governing the attitudes of collectives of which we are members. This is one interesting and underexplored aspect of the normative relationship between the individual and society.
Caitlin Fitchett
Caitlin Fitchett is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at Harvard University. Her dissertation, tentatively titled "Theirs to Reason Why", concerns the nature of practical deliberation and the moral responsibility of individuals in collective action cases.
Geoengineering, Indigenous Conceptions of the Value of Nature, and Public Discourse
Indigenous systems of value are often represented as being more “natural” than other worldviews. This representation is regularly appealed to by activists and academics, who suggest that indigenous perspectives ought to be considered uniquely authoritative on environmental issues because of the naturalism of such views. Recently, this has led to calls for geoengineering research to be abandoned on the basis that making use of this technology would involve illicitly privileging a Western conception of the value of nature on which the natural world is merely instrumentally and extrinsically valuable. The coherency of this position depends on it being the case that the conception of a naturalistic, indigenous environmental philosophy, which is a second-order metaethical theory concerning the character of environmental value, engenders specific first-order ethical standards for action. My aim in this paper is to challenge this assumption.
I argue that Māori environmental philosophy is ambiguous as to the permissibility of geoengineering. (Māori are the first peoples of Aotearoa, New Zealand). With reference to Māori myths, which are a key repository of Māori moral teachings, I argue that a coherent defense for the permissibility of engaging in solar geoengineering can be given. I also argue that Māori environmental philosophy has the resources to prohibit geoengineering. I make these arguments in order to show that even if one accepts that indigenous environmental values ought to be privileged over, say, a Western conception of the value of the environment, this does not mean that it is possible to straightforwardly derive a decisive verdict as to what actions ought to be taken or what policies should be enacted. First-order environmental issues cannot be decisively settled merely by determining whether a course of action or policy proposal is compatible with a favored second-order theory about the value of the environment.
The argument of my paper unfolds as follows. First, I present evidence for my opening claim that indigenous philosophies are represented as naturalistic and for my claims concerning how this representation is utilized by activists and academics. Second, I outline the core aspects of Māori environmental philosophy, showing how te ao Māori (the Māori worldview) is an instance of an naturalistic, indigenous environmental ethic. Third, I explain how the values embedded in two prominent Māori myths—Maui slowing the sun, and Tāne separating Ranginui and Papatūanuku—can be coherently appealed to in order to justify geoengineering and in order to prohibit it. I thus conclude that geoengineering cannot be straightforwardly rejected on the basis that making use of it is incompatible with naturalistic, indigenous philosophies and more generally, that even if a second-order moral theory ought to take precedence it does not follow that there is an uncontestably correct thing to do. In the final section of my paper, I take a step back and consider what lessons can be drawn from the arguments of the previous sections concerning what norms ought to govern public deliberation on environmental ethics and policy.
Katharina Sodoma
Katharina Anna Sodoma is a Postdoc at the University of Duisburg-Essen, working on empathy as part of the project “How Does it Feel? Interpersonal Understanding and Affective Empathy”. Before coming to Essen, she completed her PhD at the University of Vienna in April 2020 with a thesis on moral relativism and moral progress.
Towards a Feminist Conception of Moral Progress
Although commentators agree that the political project of ending the oppression of women* bears on metaethical questions (see e.g. Holroyd 2013; Superson 2017; Srinivasan 2018), there has been relatively little explicitly feminist work in metaethics. This is particularly striking when compared to other areas of analytic philosophy, such as philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics, to which feminists have made important contributions by raising new sets of questions and exhibiting blind spots of the respective fields. Anita Superson suggests that “how best to bring about moral progress” is an example of a question that is not routinely discussed in metaethics but becomes salient from a feminist perspective (Superson 2017, 529). Prima facie, Superson’s question may appear to fall in the realm of first-order normative ethics rather than metaethics. However, answers to the question of how best to bring about moral progress will implicitly depend on a conception of what constitutes moral progress.
Such a conception of moral progress will in turn depend on assumptions about the metaphysical status of moral truth and the possibility of moral knowledge and thus on questions that fall squarely within the realm of metaethical theorizing. Following Superson’s suggestion, I aim to develop a feminist conception of moral progress, addressing both the question of how to conceptualize moral progress and, relatedly, of how to bring it about. My starting point is a particular conception of moral progress that follows from J. David Velleman’s version of metaethical constitutivism (Velleman 2009). On this type of view, it is the constitutive aim of agents to understand themselves and each other. Because moral forms of life increase mutual intelligibility, the development of morality is itself progressive. Moreover, we can make further moral progress by developing our social practices and interpretative resources in ways that help us to better understand ourselves and each other. I raise a challenge for this view based on the fact that our shared interpretative resources are developed under conditions of unequal participation and unequal influence.
Then, I show how this challenge can be met by incorporating conceptual resources from feminist epistemology. In particular, I draw on Miranda Fricker’s notion of “hermeneutical injustice” and Kristie Dotson’s notion of “contributory injustice” in order to further develop the conception of moral progress that follows from Velleman’s version of constitutivism (Fricker 2007; Dotson 2012). Finally, I assess the resulting conception of moral progress against the background of two important lines of critique of the discourse of progress. The first line of critique draws on the Eurocentric history of notions of progress and challenges the assumption that progress must lead to convergence on one historically specific form of life. The second line of critique draws on the charge that narratives of progress are overly optimistic, obstructing our view of persisting oppression and regressive tendencies and inspiring the expectation that progressive developments linearly follow from a quasi-automatic dynamic. I conclude by exploring some consequences my argument has for the prospects of a feminist metaethics.
Dr Zoë A Johnson King – Keynote Speaker
Zoë Johnson King is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. Before that, she was a Bersoff fellow at NYU, a grad student at Michigan, a Teach First teacher in Croydon, and an undergrad at Cambridge. She grew up in Nottingham and will not stop going on about it.
Moral Motivation in the Wild
I do what I call non-ideal moral psychology – thoughts about motivation and creditworthiness for regular humans who have to deal with a lot of moral uncertainty and who face surrounding circumstances that are frequently deeply unjust or otherwise profoundly morally challenging. I've also done a lot of philosophy with people who aren't professional philosophers, in UK and US high schools and in my workout communities. These things are related; my experiences doing moral psychology "in the wild" have shaped my theorizing. That's what this talk is about. I will describe four of those experiences and explain four ways in which the lessons I learned have been reflected in my research; specifically, I will discuss the nature of moral motivation, praise and positive behavior management, the ethics of praise, and the importance of working on yourself.