January Seminars

We will hold three, annual January seminars in European locations on specific topics. The purpose of these two-week seminars is to acquaint Chinese scholars with the best recent work in values and virtues and to equip them to write a high-quality, publishable paper on the seminar topic. Each participant must agree to complete a paper on the topic and to submit their paper to the follow-up conference in October on the seminar theme; in addition, we expect revision of the paper, in light of comments, for possible publication. Participation includes 8-12 Chinese professors and 4-6 Chinese students: participation is by invitation only. We cover transportation (up to $1000USD), room and board, and collection of books for each participant. The seminar themes and locations are as follows:

The Foundations of Morality
Athens, Greece
January 15-29, 2011
Seminar Directors:
Mark Murphy, Christian Miller & Kelly James Clark

Description
We have the capacity to make judgments of a distinctive sort: moral judgments. One of the questions at the very foundations of ethics is what moral judgments are—what distinguishes them from other sorts of judgments that we make and whether they are susceptible to evaluation in terms of truth and falsity. (According to one famous position, moral judgments are expressions of desires rather than beliefs, and so are not capable of being true or false in the first place.)

If we hold the view that moral judgments are susceptible to evaluation in terms of truth and falsity, we are still left with the question of what explains their truth or falsity. Is it the case that all positive moral judgments are false, as some philosophers (‘error theorists’) have claimed? Is it the case that while some such moral judgments are true, there is no informative explanation that can be given as to what makes true moral judgments true, as some philosophers ('non-natural moral realists') have claimed? Or is it, after all, possible to provide an account of what makes for the correctness of moral judgments, say in terms of human desires, human nature, or God's commands?

We will first consider together some of the recent literature on the character of moral judgment. We will then turn to this question of explanation, asking about the various views — views grounded in human desire, human nature, sui generis moral facts, and divine command—that have been forwarded in the recent philosophical literature as explanations of what makes correct moral judgments correct.

Director Bios
Mark C. Murphy is the Fr. Joseph T. Durkin, SJ Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He works in ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of law, and philosophy of religion. He is the author of Natural Law and Practical Rationality (Cambridge, 2001), An Essay on Divine Authority (Cornell, 2002), Natural Law in Jurisprudence and Politics (Cambridge, 2006), and Philosophy of Law: The Fundamentals (Blackwell, 2006). He is editor of Alasdair MacIntyre (Cambridge, 2003), and is the book review editor for the journal Ethics. During the 2009-2010 academic year he is the Plantinga Fellow at Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion, where he is completing a book manuscript Theistic Explanation of Moral Law.

Christian Miller is the Zachary T. Smith Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. His main areas of research are meta-ethics, moral psychology, action theory, and philosophy of religion, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Noûs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Studies, Philosophical Psychology, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, The Journal of Ethics, Social Theory and Practice, The Journal of Philosophical Research, The European Journal of Philosophy, and Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion. He is the editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press) and the book review editor of the Journal of Moral Philosophy, and is currently editing The Continuum Companion to Ethics (Continuum Press). He has also begun work on a monograph entitled A New Theory of Character, which articulates a new framework for thinking about character that is both conceptually coherent and empirically supported by research in social psychology.

Kelly James Clark is Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College and Program Director of  “Values and Virtues in Contemporary China” which was generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation. An accomplished philosopher with a focused interest on ethics, epistemology and Chinese philosophy, he is the author, editor, or co-author of more than fifteen books and author of over fifty articles; his books include The Story of Ethics, Return to Reason (Peking University Press) and Faith, Knowledge and Naturalism (Peking University Press).

This seminar is generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

2012: Creating Character

2010: Evolution and Morality. (See Blog) The time has come, E. O. Wilson bravely trumpeted, “for ethics to be temporarily removed from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized” (Wilson, 1975, p. 562). Wilson seeks to divorce ethics from God (or any transcendental source or warrant), hoping “that if we explore the biological roots of moral behavior, and explain their material origins and biases, we should be able to fashion a wise and enduring ethical consensus” (Wilson, 1998). Ethics biologicized is ethics based on the evolution of various traits. “True character,” he claims, “arises from a deeper well than religion” (Wilson, 1998). Can ethics survive biologicization—can it be grounded in evolution alone? Can ethics be divorced from a transcendental or religious foundation? Are evolutionary and religious accounts of morality in conflict?

There are two caricatures—two extremes—associated with evolutionary ethics, neither of which is justified. The first, usually offered by early critics of evolutionary ethics, holds that evolutionary ethics favors either selfishness of a particularly sexual variety or Social Darwinism (sometimes called “eugenics”)—the cleansing of the human race of unfit members. The second caricature, offered by overly optimistic defenders of evolutionary ethics, holds a naïve and romantic extension of animal traits and behaviors to human behaviors.

The best of evolutionary ethics finds itself somewhere between these extremes of sexual selfishness and Social Darwinism, on the one hand, and the romantic view of our connection to nature on the other. Can we, drawing upon our evolutionary history, find within our pre-human ancestors the basic ingredients of human morality? This seminar will examine the prospects and promise of evolutionary theory and some of its implications for religious belief. The participants will first consider the nature of morality and then various ways that evolutionary ethicists have sought to explain human morality.

Seminar Directors: Larry Arnhart, Northern Illinois University; Ryan Nichols, University of California at Fullerton; Kelly James Clark, Calvin College

Location: Oxford University
See Syllabus See Blog