Epistemology and Ethics Workshop

This workshop is being held to coincide with the visit of Prof. Robert Audi (Notre Dame) to Edinburgh as the 2010 Scots Philosophical Club Cenntenial Fellow. It preceeds the 2010 Nature of Knowledge lecture that Professor Audi will be delivering in the early evening of July 7th (for more details, click here). This workshop is hosted by the Epistemology Research Group, and funded by The Leverhulme Trust. There is no registration fee and all are welcome. All talks take place in room G.06 of the Dugald Stewart Building (campus maps are available here). Any inquiries about this event should directed to the organiser, Prof. Duncan Pritchard.

Programme

• 9.45-10.00am Tea, coffee & biscuits
• 10.00-11.00am Robert Cowan (Glasgow)

  'Self-Evidence, Understanding and Dispositions to Believe'

ABSTRACT. Robert Audi (1999, 2004, 2008) has recently argued for the existence of self-evident moral principles, e.g. the ‘Rossian obligations,’ where self-evidence is taken to be a property of propositions: a self-evident proposition is one for which an adequate understanding of its content can justify one in believing it, and can be known if believed on the basis of such an understanding. Although Audi rejects the traditional view that understanding a self-evident proposition is belief-entailing, he does claim that an understanding of such a proposition grounds a disposition to believe it. This paper will explore and critically evaluate the idea that an understanding of a self-evident moral proposition, p, grounds a disposition to believe that p, even in agents who apparently have overwhelming objections to p.

• 11.00-12.00pm Evan Butts (Edinburgh)

  'Epistemic Supererogation'

ABSTRACT. Supererogation is a concept familiar to moral and ethical theorists. Roughly, an act is supererogatory if it is good, but not obligatory. Theorists in ethics and moral philosophy generally agree that supererogation is a genuine phenomenon—at least in some attenuated form. My paper explores whether supererogation is a genuine phenomenon in the epistemic domain. Intuitively, that epistemology is a normative domain leaves room for a concept like supererogation to get a foothold. In what follows I delineate what I take to be the conditions on supererogation being possible in a given domain and proceed to make a case for these conditions obtaining in the epistemological domain. Briefly, the conditions are as follows: 1) there are some acts in the relevant domain which are praiseworthy and 2) obligatory acts are not the praiseworthy ones. Conjoining these conditions with the fact that neither neutral nor blameworthy acts can be praiseworthy, a need for another category of acts arises. I claim that this category is supererogatory acts (or at least something so close to the historical concept of supererogation that its differences aren’t worth mentioning).

• 12.00-1.00pm Lunch
• 1.00-2.30pm Prof. Robert Audi (Notre Dame)

  'Moral Perception and Moral Knowledge' (pdf)

ABSTRACT. This paper presents a theory of how perception provides a basis for moral knowledge. To do this, the paper sketches a theory of perception, explores the sense in which moral perception may deserve that name, and explains how certain moral properties may be perceptible. It does not presuppose a causal account of moral properties. If, however, they are not causal, how can we perceive, say, injustice? Can it be observable even if injustice is not a causal property? The paper answers these and other questions by developing an account of how moral properties, even if not causal, can figure in perception in a way that grounds moral knowledge.

• 2.30-3.00pm Tea, coffee & biscuits
• 3.00-4.30pm Prof. Al Casullo (Nebraska)

  'Articulating the A Priori/A Posteriori Distinction'

ABSTRACT. The distinction between a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge has come under attack in the recent literature by philosophers such as Philip Kitcher, Carrie Jenkins, John Hawthorne, and Tim Williamson. I argue that the attacks largely fail because they either miss their target entirely or are directed at inessential features of it. I also attempt to identify the primary reasons why the attacks miss their target.

• 4.30pm Workshop end
• 5.00-7.00pm The 2010 Nature of Knowledge lecture

 

 

Last updated: July 21st 2010 by Duncan Pritchard.