Our seminar speaker next week, February 7th, will be our very own Sophie-Grace Chappell. Details below.

‘Virtue Ethics and Climate Change’

This paper is more about virtue ethics than climate change. It discusses two possible virtue-ethical approaches to climate change and similar issues in “emergency ethics”, one that takes virtue ethics to be a systematic moral theory of the usual sort, the other that takes virtue ethics to be a broader and looser approach to ethics–an ethical outlook. It considers two objections, the timescale objection and the authority objection. To the former of these, either version of virtue ethics seems more vulnerable than other approaches in ethics, but I suggest remedies from McDowell and Aquinas. To the latter objection, I suggest that the general moral scepticism that underlies it is better outflanked than attacked directly. I aim to outflank it by proposing what I call enchanted realism, which is a metaethics which I think goes particularly well with virtue ethics, and which is also highly pertinent to the issue of climate change.

It will run from 2-4pm in CMR15. All welcome!