Philosophy Colloquium: Alex Worsnip

The Syracuse University Department of Philosophy is pleased to welcome Dr. Alex Worsnip (UNC Chapel Hill), who will deliver a talk entitled: “A First-Order Argument for Evidentially-Constrained Morality.”

Abstract:

A longstanding debate in ethics concerns whether our moral obligations are “objective” or “fact-relative” (in the sense that they are determined by all the relevant facts, regardless of our epistemic access to them) or “perspectival” or “evidence-relative” (in the sense that they are constrained by what we have epistemic access to). Many of us (this author included) think that intuitions about cases suggest that perspectivalism must be the correct view, but not everyone shares these intuitions, and there are also a number of well-established challenges for perspectivalism to overcome. Presently, the debate is arguably at a standoff. In this paper, I develop a new kind of argument for perspectivalism, and argue that the resulting version of perspectivalism has the resources to break the standoff and overcome the main challenges for the view. The key idea is that, at least when it comes to morally-relevant matters, we are morally required to be epistemically responsible, as such. I try to make this key idea plausible, and argue that if correct, it yields a view on which at least some of our primary, non-derivative moral obligations are evidentially-constrained. Along the way, if there’s time, I’ll note some ancillary upshots for debates about encroachment and about the conditions for blameworthiness.