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faculty curriculum student awards and projects after macalester colloquium series
Stephen Stich Colloquium
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Location Questions?
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Moral disagreement is widespread. But would that disagreement persist even under hypothetical idealized conditions in which all parties to a moral debate are rational, impartial and fully informed about the relevant non-moral facts? The answer is important for many moral theories. On some versions of theories in the “ideal observer” tradition, a positive answer entails either moral relativism or moral skepticism, and many contemporary moral realists hold that a negative answer would show that moral realism is false. In this talk I will review a number of recent empirical studies of moral judgments in different cultural groups which suggest that moral disagreement would indeed persist under idealized circumstances – though much turns on exactly how the idealized circumstances are characterized. The persistence of moral disagreement is also suggested by an empirically motivated account of the psychological mechanisms underlying the acquisition and implementation of moral norms that I have developed in collaboration with Chandra Sripada, and by theoretical work on how those mechanisms might have evolved. The model for the psychology of norms, which I’ll discuss briefly, leaves abundant room for reasoning in moral deliberation, but does not support the idea that rational deliberation will lead to convergence. Stephen Stich received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University. He currently teaches at Rutgers University, where he serves as Director for the Research Group on Evolution and Higher Cognition.
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