Monday 2nd September - 06:00 PM BST
Headline Debate: Morality and Prejudice
Should we abandon morality?
Most have a clear sense of what is right and wrong, and we imagine that our assessment is reasoned and sensible. But critics argue this is an illusion and morality is commonly little more than concealed prejudice that seeks to impose our view on others. Terrible practices, like slavery and racism were in their time justified by philosophers and thinkers in the West who claimed to be applying rational principles, but were merely in positions of power. The Soviet introduction of 'one morality for everyone' saw terrible crimes committed against its people. And from Thasmymachus to Nietzsche, philosophers have argued morality, however rational sounding, is in fact driven by a will to power.
Should we accept that morality is concealed prejudice, and rid our discourse of all moral terms? Or should we see it as useful for ourselves and society, even though it is ultimately prejudice? Or is it a profound mistake to see morality as a means to impose your view on others, and instead hold to the view it is in fact based on eternal lasting principles?
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Tommy J. Curry
Groundbreaking scholar
Tommy J. Curry is a Professor of Philosophy and holds the Personal Chair of Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood, which won the 2018 American Book Award. Dr. Curry’s research has been recognized by Diverse as placing him among the Top 15 Emerging Scholars in the United States in 2018, and his public intellectual work earned him the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy’s Alain Locke Award in 2017.
Melis Erdur
Melis Erdur received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the New York University in 2013. In her dissertation A Moral Critique of Moral Philosophy, she criticizes the common assumption that moral discourse requires a particular sort of philosophical “ground”: a morally neutral account of rightness, wrongness, obligations and values, which would provide final and all-embracing answers to questions such as “What in the end makes any moral statement true or false?” and “Why be moral?” She published two noteworthy academic papers, “A Moral Argument Against Moral Realism” (Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2016) and “Moral Realism and the Incompletability of Morality” (Journal of Value Inquiry, 2018), before leaving academia (but not philosophy).
Contact: meliserdur@gmail.com
Michael Huemer
Leading moral realist
Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is the author of more than eighty academic articles in epistemology, ethics, metaethics, metaphysics, and political philosophy, and he has written several books including Ethical Intuitionism. Huemer is also known for his detailed defence of philosophical anarchism in his book The Problem of Political Authority.