Professor Christopher Shields

Professor Beth Tropman
Colorado State University

will present:

"Renewing Moral Intuitionism"

Saturday, September 29, 2007
10:30 a.m.
Classroom Bldg, Room 215

Abstract: According to moral intuitionism, moral properties are objective, but our cognitions of them are not always based on premises. In this paper, I develop a novel version of moral intuitionism and argue that this new intuitionism is worthy of closer attention. The intuitionistic theory I propose, while inspired by the early twentieth-century intuitionism of W. D. Ross, avoids the alleged errors of his view. Furthermore, unlike Robert Audi’s contemporary formulation of intuitionism, my theory has the resources to account for the non-inferential character of particular, as opposed to merely general, moral beliefs. I achieve this result by avoiding the appeal to self-evidence to explain the possibility of non-inferential moral knowledge.

Professor Mark van Roojen
University of Nebraska - Lincoln

will present:

"Moral Rationalism and Rational Amoralism"

Saturday, September 29, 2007
2:00 p.m.
Classroom Bldg, Room 215

Abstract: a Rationalist theory (one that equates the moral rightness of an action with the rationality of doing it) can account for a moderate internalist thesis of a sort that is independently plausible. And it can do that without entailing that acting in ways that are in fact immoral will always be irrational in the most salient relevant sense. Nor, the paper argues, will it always be irrational to do what one believes wrong, even if rationalism is correct. The main ideas used to generate these results are (1) that we can make a distinction much like Ewing's between objective notions of rationality. (2) That there are different subjective notions of rationality relativized to various features of agents and (3) that it is these subjective notions of rationality that are most often relevant when we assess actions for rationality. Furthermore (4) when we factor in some method of handling Frege's Puzzle we have all of the materials we need to generate the full account to do the work explaining internalism and rational amoralism that I claim can be done within the confines of rationalism.