Moral Philosophy Seminar (Monday - Week 1, MT26)

Abstract: For much of the history of Western philosophy it was assumed that philosophical inquiry into what we would now call ‘metaethics’—the study of the nature and sources of morality—was inextricable from the study of morality’s content. Twentieth-century analytic metaethics severed this connection. Metaethicists argued for claims about moral semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology without drawing any substantive conclusions about normative ethics or politics. Some philosophers, such as Rawls, explicitly argued for the independence of ethics from metaethics. But most simply pursued one or the other of these projects exclusively, leading to a sociological rift between the two fields. Only recently has the divide between metaethics and ethics begun to be called into question again, by metaethicists such as Mark Schroeder, Tristram McPherson, and Jussi Suikkanen. In this paper we explore an unexpected resource for thinking about the relationship between ethics and metaethics: the moral theory of Simone de Beauvoir. We show that Beauvoir’s ethics begins from a rejection of moral realism, which she takes to entail substantive and controversial first-order claims about ethics and politics. 

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.

_{Workshop in Moral Philosophy Convenor: David Owens}