Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

*This event has been cancelled.*

What is required for an utterance (or judgment, or principle, etc.) to count as moral? Mid-twentieth century philosophy was preoccupied with this question, and in recent times it has become an important issue for psychologists and other social scientists interested in morality. In this talk, Stephen Stich (Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University) will begin by explaining why the issue is important, focusing on the role it plays in debates about moral sentimentalism. He will then explain what the philosophers who were seeking an account of “the distinctive characteristics of moral utterances” were trying to do, and why they failed. In the second half of the talk, Stich’s focus will be on recent attempts, in psychology, to characterize “the moral domain”.  He argues that those attempts have also failed, and that the most plausible explanation for the failure of both the philosophical and psychological projects is that there is no moral domain. The talk will conclude by exploring the implications of this view for debates about moral sentimentalism and for other issues in moral psychology.