« Séminaire de métaéthique »
2017-2018
15h-17h
Adresse
ENS – 29 rue d’Ulm – 75005 Paris
Salle du Centre Cavaillès (3ème étage, droite)
organisé par Monique Canto-Sperber (CNRS/ENS/République des Savoirs) et
Stéphane Lemaire (Université de Rennes 1)
Programme
• 23 mai 2018
Séminaire de 15h30 à 17h30, en salle Paul Langevin (29, rue d’Ulm, 1er étage gauche)
Sergio Tenenbaum (University of Toronto), “Value Disagreement, Action, and Commitment”
Abstract
The problem of disagreement is a well-known tool in the arsenal of various moral anti-realist and skeptical views. The fact of persistent disagreement about moral issues among different cultures, or different people in the same culture, is supposed to be evidence that our moral judgments do not track a realm of objective values. Moral realists and objectivists of various stripes have tried to answer these challenges. These philosophers often appeal to claims that the extent of disagreement is exaggerated and that similar forms of disagreement show up in other domains, or that some forms of moral realism or objectivism are immune to these challenges. I will not be concerned at all with these issues in this chapter ; I will be concerned with a different challenge raised by the fact of value disagreement, a challenge that has received significantly less attention in the philosophical literature.
Here is a very preliminary way to put the challenge : whether or not disagreement raises doubts about moral realism or objectivity, it should, at least under certain circumstances, lower our confidence in our evaluative judgments. But such lowering of confidence, if taken seriously, seems to leave us with no way to move from our judgments to actions ; neither is our usual commitment to morality in particular justified, nor is any particular course of action based on these evaluative judgments justified. The concern here is similar to the concern that theoretical skepticism might lead us to
paralysis, but it turns out to be significantly more intractable, or so I’ll argue. In other words, our topic is not skepticism about the reality of values, but skepticism about rational action based on our evaluative judgment ; I will call this kind of skepticism “commitment skepticism”. My claim is that the most promising solution to commitment skepticism is to deny that first step and argue that some form of practical certainty resists the argument from disagreement. I argue that Kant’s view about our awareness of the moral law provides a way of accepting that at least an important core of our practical knowledge can warrant full commitment to action.
• 30 mai 2018
Michele Palmira (University of Barcelona & LOGOS Research Group), “How to Respond Rationally to Moral Disagreement”
Abstract
In this talk I tackle the question of how we should respond to moral disagreement with our acknowledged epistemic peers. In the first part of the talk I examine and criticise two answers to this question: the conciliatory answer maintaining that we should suspend judgement, and the steadfast answer claiming that we should retain our beliefs. My main line of criticism is developed around the idea that both answers fail to appreciate the multifaceted nature of moral disagreement. In the second part of the talk I outline a third-way answer, which hinges on two main contentions. First, disagreement is evidence which should lead the peers to re-assess their epistemic position vis-à-vis the issue at stake. Secondly, this re-assessment, which can result in various outcomes depending on the specific disagreement case at stake, can be rationally carried out while entertaining a sui generis doxastic attitude which I call “hypothesis”. In the third part of the talk I test my third-way answer against various cases of moral disagreement in order to show that it fares better than its conciliatory and steadfast rivals.
• 13 juin 2018
Laura et François Schroeter (Melbourne University), « To be donedness »
Organisé conjointement par la République des Savoirs et l’IJN
avec le soutien du labex TransferS