The 15th Gavin David Young Lecture in Philosophy

The 15th Gavin David Young Lecture in Philosophy will feature Professor Kim Sterelny from Australian National University exploring the topic, ‘Evolution and Moral Realism: Take 2’.

A decade ago I offered a defence of naturalistic moral realism against evolutionary debunking arguments. It had two elements. One was rejecting a dichotomy between evolutionary vindication and debunking in favour of a continuum. The second (a) proposed a metaethical principle on the basis of a hypothesis about the evolutionary drivers of moral thinking: a moral principle is true if it is part of a set of moral norms which, if acted upon, would optimise the cooperation profits of a community, and (b) by this criterion, folk moral opinion was quite often approximately true.

I still reject the dichotomy, but the rest of the argument was too friendly to realist naturalism in ethics. It mis-characterised the selective history of moral thinking, over-estimating its role as a cooperation amplifier, and under-estimating the epistemic challenges facing individual agents as they develop their moral opinions. The upshot is a shift towards the debunking end of the vindication-debunking continuum.

Arrive at 6pm for a 6:30pm start. Light refreshments will be served prior to the lecture.