Notice Board

Speaker:  Prof. Michael Stingl (Philosophy Department)
Location:  D-634 (University Hall)

A view John Collier and I call Evolutionary Moral Realism argues that morally good things naturally arise in certain sorts of cooperative environments.  As humans acquired thought and language, we began to explicitly refer to these simple moral goods, like helping others in need of help, and we began building these moral goods into increasingly rich and complex  social practices and institutions.  While we think that moral truth is anchored in ongoing processes of critical reflection regarding morality, we think these processes are themselves anchored in natural moral goods like helping others in need of help.  We think this is particularly true during times of social revolution, when we begin to have particularly deep doubts about whether our society is on the right moral track.

In this talk I examine the Anglo-American abolition of the slavery and the slave trade from the point of view of both moral argument and natural moral values.  While there were many causal factors behind this social upheaval of the early to mid 1800s, Collier and I think natural moral values played an interesting role in the causal nexus of events and arguments that brought an end to the British slave trade and to slavery itself in the United States.