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The Department of Philosophy Colloquium Series will present:
Evolutionary Moral Realism
Guest Speaker: Prof. Michael Stingl
Day/Date: Friday, March 6, 2020
Time: 3:00 p.m.
Location: C-640
Abstract: Modern science seems to leave no room in the natural world for objectively real moral values. In our recent book, John Collier and I argue that this view may be mistaken. Starting from the point of view of evolutionary biology, we argue that moral values may have originated in regularly recurring structural features in the cooperative environments of species of organisms that are both social and intelligent. The book identifies these underlying environmental regularities as biological natural kinds and as natural moral values. As natural kinds, moral values may help to provide more complete explanations for the selection of traits that arise in response to them. For example, helping another individual in need in an aquatic environment is quite different than in an arboreal environment, and so we can expect the selection of traits for helping others to reflect these underlying environmental differences. With the human ability to name, talk, and reason about important features of our environment, naturally occurring moral values would have become focal points of moral discourse and argument, and thus a foundational aspect of social and historical processes leading to coherent systems of moral thought ultimately structured by these very same values.
Everyone is welcome.
Contact:
Bev Garnett | bev.garnett@uleth.ca | (403) 380-1894
