Most of my recent posts on this blog have been about transitioning to online teaching, the job-market and other issues in the profession. It has been quite a while since I have talked actual philosophy. This little series will try to do some of the latter, and I hope readers will find it an interesting change of pace (I don't know about you, but being stuck at home all day due to COVID-19 is getting pretty tiresome already!). In brief, my plan in the series to discuss some of the motivating ideas behind my two books, Rightness as Fairness: A Moral and Political Theory and Neurofunctional Prudence and Morality: A Philosophical Theory. My hope here is two-fold. First, I'll be very curious to hear what readers think of the motivating ideas, particularly once I make the history of the project and its intended future trajectory clearer. Second, my hope is that the discussion will help readers of both books better understand what I am really up to and why.
Both of my books argue that normative moral philosophy should be based (at least in the first instance) on (1) instrumental ('means-end') normative rationality and (2) empirical moral psychology. Both of these claims have been met with resistance, for fairly obvious reasons. First, there are many in moral philosophy today who think (following Kant) that moral reasons are fundamentally different in kind than prudential ones (moral reasons being categorically binding, prudential reasons not - though see this). Second, there are those (including TM Scanlon) who argue that empirical psychology can have nothing useful to say about normative matters, since (supposedly) the empirical and normative are fundamentally different kinds of phenomena. Readers may be a bit surprised to learn than when I began my first book, I was actually sympathetic with both of these positions. As you can see on my university's faculty webpage (which I really need to update!), Rightness as Fairness initially had a very different title, "Reconstructing the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals." Early iterations of the book (right up to three months before the final manuscript was due) had nothing to do with instrumental rationality or empirical moral psychology, but instead defended my normative moral theory--Rightness as Fairness--on classically Kantian constituvist grounds (viz. categorical moral reasons).
Why did the aim of the project change so fundamentally? It will take a few posts to lay out the full details, including why I hope to return to the Kantian side of the project in future work. But let me conclude this first post by giving some hints. One of my main intellectual concerns dating all the way back to my undergraduate days has been to avoid what I take to have been a very (epistemically and morally) problematic trend in intellectual history: the trend of engaging in purely armchair speculation about matters of practical importance. Let me explain.
Continue reading "On the evolution of a research project - part 1 (epistemic and moral concerns)" »
Recent Comments