Steve Clarke, James Martin Research Fellow, Institute for Science and Ethics, Oxford Martin School, Oxford gives a talk for the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion. Joshua Greene argues that ordinary moral judgment results from the interaction of two distinct neural subsystems which generate competing moral intuitions. One subsystem generates consequentialist intuitions and the other generates deontological intuitions. Greene suggests that our faculty for generating deontological intuitions developed in response to an evolutionary need to suppress 'up close and personal' harmful acts within communities and when such acts are under consideration deontological intuitions tend to predominate in moral judgment. When 'up close and personal harms' are not under consideration consequentialist intuitions tend to predominate. A key problem with this account is that many deontological strictures (e.g. 'though shalt not lie') are meant to apply beyond the range of the 'up close and personal'. Here, the speaker seeks to defend Greene's account of the evolutionary origins of deontological moral intuition in the face of this problem, showing how it can be supplemented with an account of the ways in which social organisations can expand the scope of deontological moral judgment. The social organisations that are most effective in expanding the scope of deontological moral judgment are religious institutions. The speaker tries to show why this is so, drawing on Durkheim's account of the sacred. The speaker also considers the consequentialist normative arguments that Greene and Peter Singer build on Greene's descriptive account of moral judgment. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
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Steve Clarke, James Martin Research Fellow, Institute for Science and Ethics, Oxford Martin School, Oxford gives a talk for the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion. Joshua Greene argues that ordinary moral judgment results from the interaction of two distinct neural subsystems which generate competing moral intuitions. One subsystem generates consequentialist intuitions and the other generates deontological intuitions. Greene suggests that our faculty for generating deontological intuitions developed in response to an evolutionary need to suppress 'up close and personal' harmful acts within communities and when such acts are under consideration deontological intuitions tend to predominate in moral judgment. When 'up close and personal harms' are not under consideration consequentialist intuitions tend to predominate. A key problem with this account is that many deontological strictures (e.g. 'though shalt not lie') are meant to apply beyond the range of the 'up close and personal'. Here, the speaker seeks to defend Greene's account of the evolutionary origins of deontological moral intuition in the face of this problem, showing how it can be supplemented with an account of the ways in which social organisations can expand the scope of deontological moral judgment. The social organisations that are most effective in expanding the scope of deontological moral judgment are religious institutions. The speaker tries to show why this is so, drawing on Durkheim's account of the sacred. The speaker also considers the consequentialist normative arguments that Greene and Peter Singer build on Greene's descriptive account of moral judgment. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
On the very idea of criteria for personhood (4 Nov 2010)
Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion
51 minutes
14 years ago
On the very idea of criteria for personhood (4 Nov 2010)
Timothy Chappell, Professor of Philosophy, Open University, gives a talk for the Ian Ramsay Seminar series on 4th November, 2010. Professor Chappell examines the familiar criterial view of personhood, according to which the possession of personal properties such as self-consciousness, emotionality, sentience, and so forth is necessary and sufficient for the status of a person. He argues that this view confuses criteria for personhood with parts of an ideal of personhood. In normal cases, we have already identified a creature as a person before we start looking for it to manifest the personal properties, indeed this pre-identification is part of what makes it possible for us to see and interpret the creature as a person in the first place. And that pre-identification typically runs on biological lines. Except in some interesting special or science-fiction cases it is human animals that we identify as persons Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion
Steve Clarke, James Martin Research Fellow, Institute for Science and Ethics, Oxford Martin School, Oxford gives a talk for the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion. Joshua Greene argues that ordinary moral judgment results from the interaction of two distinct neural subsystems which generate competing moral intuitions. One subsystem generates consequentialist intuitions and the other generates deontological intuitions. Greene suggests that our faculty for generating deontological intuitions developed in response to an evolutionary need to suppress 'up close and personal' harmful acts within communities and when such acts are under consideration deontological intuitions tend to predominate in moral judgment. When 'up close and personal harms' are not under consideration consequentialist intuitions tend to predominate. A key problem with this account is that many deontological strictures (e.g. 'though shalt not lie') are meant to apply beyond the range of the 'up close and personal'. Here, the speaker seeks to defend Greene's account of the evolutionary origins of deontological moral intuition in the face of this problem, showing how it can be supplemented with an account of the ways in which social organisations can expand the scope of deontological moral judgment. The social organisations that are most effective in expanding the scope of deontological moral judgment are religious institutions. The speaker tries to show why this is so, drawing on Durkheim's account of the sacred. The speaker also considers the consequentialist normative arguments that Greene and Peter Singer build on Greene's descriptive account of moral judgment. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
