DPhil Seminar (Wednesday - Week 8, MT26)

Abstract: Discussions of moral luck concern our attributions of morality, whether positive or negative, in cases where the relevant agent does not appear to be fully, or even relevantly, responsible for the outcome of their actions. These discussions typically restrict themselves to three main figures: Immanuel Kant, Bernard Williams, and Thomas Nagel. However, when Kant wrote that nothing “can possibly be conceived that could be called ‘good’ without qualification except a GOOD WILL” he was already responding to a developed position that had grown out of early modern scepticism. Two of the foremost representatives of this tradition, Michel de Montaigne and Pierre Bayle, both consider a moral puzzle caused by the pessimistic accounts of human nature that predominated in their time: if humans are all inherently sinful, how can anything we do be called truly virtuous? In response to this, some authors denied that humans can ever be truly virtuous. Montaigne and Bayle both resist this conclusion by focussing on what it is actually like to pass moral judgement on other people’s actions, rather than on speculative considerations about what people’s motivational statuses might be. By developing this view, I will show how Montaigne and Bayle both prefigured a position in the contemporary debates on moral luck, called ‘evaluational externalism.’ Furthermore, I will argue that the puzzles of moral luck which follow from this position in fact form the core of Bayle’s notoriously inscrutable moral writings.

Registration: If you do not hold a university card, please contact the seminar convenor or admin@philosophy.ox.ac.uk at least two working days before a seminar to register your attendance.

See the DPhil Seminar website for details.

_{DPhil Seminar Convenor: Tom Heywood}