The Research Seminar Series in Philosophy invites you to a talk from the Metaethics workshop. Graham Oddie, University of Colorado Boulder, will give an open lecture titled "Convergence in a moral inquiry and the possibility of moral progress". All interested are welcome to attend this talk.
Abstract: There is a cluster of arguments for moral skepticism that draw on the apparently persistent and deep disagreements amongst moral theorists from the different ethical traditions (e.g. Consequentialism, Kantianism and Contractualism). Scientific inquiry clearly does make progress—lots of it—but ethical inquiry appears to lack the outward signs of scientific progress. For example, scientific inquiries tend to produce a convergence in opinion, even in the absence of unanimity, and the extent of the disagreement between different research traditions seems to diminish over time. Before ascertaining whether or not there has been any actual progress in ethical inquiry, we need to establish the possibility of progress. In particular we need to demonstrate that there is a clear notion of convergence in ethical theorizing. This paper (based on collaborative work with Olle Risberg and Folke Tersman) lays out a concept of theory distance (or of theory similarity) in ethics, and goes on to develop three related notions of ethical convergence.
