Title: Folk Morality and Philosophical Metaethics
Lecturer: Hagop Sarkissian (Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, The City University of New York)
Chairperson: Paul D’Ambrosio (Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, East China Normal University)
Date: 1 pm, March 20th, 2018 (Tuesday)
Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
The field of metaethics, the branch of moral philosophy that examines the nature and status of morality, is rich in theoretical diversity. Nonetheless, a majority of professional philosophers embrace a subset of theories that affirm the existence of objective moral facts. I suggest that this may be related to the very method that philosophers use to construct metaethical theories. This method involves analyzing how ordinary people think and argue about morality. Analysis of ordinary moral discourse is meant to reveal common platitudes (or truisms) about the nature of morality itself, including the platitude that morality trades in objective moral facts. But do philosophers investigate ordinary moral discourse in any systematic way? How do they arrive at such platitudes? On what grounds are they justified? In this lecture, I critically examine these questions and argue that a) any such platitudes need to be investigated systematically through empirical research and b) philosophers ought to be engaged in this research themselves.
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Hagop Sarkissian, Ph.D. (Duke University, Philosophy), is Associate Professor, Dept. of Philosophy, The City University of New York, Graduate Center & Baruch College. Most of his research is in moral psychology, broadly construed. He is a methodological pluralist, and use resources from other relevant disciplines to inform his work, such as evolutionary biology and experimental psychology. He also draws extensively from the Chinese philosophical tradition. He is a co-chair of the Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy and Core Project Member of the Oneness in Philosophy and Psychology project. He’s co-editor of The Oneness Hypothesis: Beyond the Boundary of Self, Columbia University Press (forthcoming), with PJ Ivanhoe, Owen Flanagan, Victoria Harrison, and Eric Schwitzgebel, and Advances in Experimental Moral Psychology. Bloomsbury Press (2013), with Jennifer Cole Wright. His work has been translated into Chinese and Korean.