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Morality After God: The Return to Babel
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| Date: |
Thursday, February 7, 2013 |
| Time: |
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM |
| Location: |
B316, Tribble Hall |
| Description: |
Mark Cherry, The Dr. Patricia A. Hayes Professor in Applied Ethics, Saint Edward’s University, Austin, Texas will speak.
This presentation explores why even in principle to talk about the possibility of a canonical, morally normative account of the right, the good, and the virtuous requires at least the philosophical equivalent of a God’s eye perspective, not out of religious, but out of moral and epistemic considerations. As Immanuel Kant recognized, one must invoke God, or at least a God’s eye perspective, in order to preserve the unity and force of reality and morality. Without God, and His unique understanding of reality, accounts of human flourishing and even our deepest moral intuitions are no more than particular human emotions or political creations floating on current social and cultural fashion. Without God to secure a fully objective account of being and knowledge of reality in itself, morality exists as no more than the various narratives we tell each other. Absent God there exists no standpoint outside of particular cultural, social, and historically conditioned perspectives from which to communicate any deeper understanding of reality or of the morality that such a viewpoint would secure. Ethics would be trapped in immanence, irreconcilably plural, and unable to provide any definitive motivation to follow its norms, much less decisive sanctions for immorality. Morality after God is a Babel.
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| Sponsor: |
Philosophy |
| Name: |
Donna Simmons |
| E-mail: |
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| Phone: |
(336) 758-5359 |
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