ESPF Colloquium: David Enoch (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

The next ESPF colloquium will be on Wednesday 26 April from 16:30 to 17:45 in Omega (so a bit later than usual). This colloquium will also be the keynote lecture of our Metaethics Workshop (find the full programme here).

Our speaker will be David Enoch (Hebrew University of Jerusalem).

The title of his talk will be "Oh, All the Wrongs I Could Have Performed! Or: Why Care about Morality, Robustly Realistically Understood” (joint work with Itamar Weinshtock-Saadon).

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 is just all a big mistake. If they then regret all the shrimp they could have eaten, all the sex!, this makes perfect sense. Not so, however, if someone finds out that moral realism is false, and they now regret all the fun they could have had hurting people's feeling, etc.. Even if this does make sense, there's a strong disanalogy between the moral and the religious case. This asymmetry, on a realist picture of morality, calls for explanation. In this paper, we try to explain it. The discussion engages some topics familiar from objections to Robust realism – the why-be-moral challenge, the status of de-dicto moral motivation, and whether and why we should care about the moral properties, robustly realistically understood.

We hope to see as many of you as possible there — everyone’s very welcome to join us! More information from Bart Streumer.