When:
Monday, November 16, 2015
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM CT
Where: Crowe Hall, 4-134, 1860 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208 map it
Audience: Faculty/Staff - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
Contact:
Hao Liang
Group: Practical Philosophy Workshop
Category: Academic
Abstract: In a genuine moral dilemma, an agent faces conflicting moral obligations, and therefore the agent cannot avoid violating at least one of her moral obligations. Nearly all of the proponents of moral dilemmas—from Williams (1967) to Tessman (2015)—appeal to the moral look and feel of certain heartrending cases, such as Sophie’s Choice, in order to argue for the possibility and the actuality of moral dilemmas. Such arguments turn out not to be fully persuasive. The case for moral dilemmas would be stronger if we had a moral theory, a system of general moral principles, that could explain why there are moral dilemmas. Yet defenders of moral dilemmas have shown little interest in developing a dilemmas-entailing theory of their own. The purpose of this paper is precisely to develop and defend such a theory—Strict Pluralism. After characterizing Strict Pluralism, the paper argues that this theory has three principal theoretic virtues: it is more intuitively sensitive, simple, and informative than rival theories that exclude moral dilemmas. Then the paper discusses a range of different problems for Strict Pluralism. The central aim of the paper is to provide an honest accounting of Strict Pluralism’s main advantages and disadvantages.