Ethics and Political Philosophy Group Talk (Matthew Scarfone, Toronto)

The Ethics and Political Philosophy Research Interest Group welcomes as a speaker Matthew Scarfone, a postdoctoral fellow in our department. Dr. Scarfone’s research is in metaethics, in particular moral epistemology. Before coming to Toronto, he was a Visiting Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He completed his doctorate at McGill University in 2019.

Talk Title

Disunified Moral Judgments

Talk Abstract

A common assumption is that moral judgments are a unified phenomenon. Metaethicists take this assumption on board when they suppose that what they say about some moral judgments will generalize to all other ones. I’ll show this assumption at work for cognitivists (who think moral judgments aim to represent the world) and noncognitivists (who think moral judgments don’t aim to represent the world). I’ll then argue that moral judgments genuinely have both representational and nonrepresentational features, and that as usually characterized neither cognitivism nor cognitivism can capture this variability. I’ll end by suggesting how we can better account for the disunity of moral judgments.

About the Ethics and Political Philosophy Group

The Ethics and Political Philosophy Group meets periodically throughout the year to discuss topics in value theory and related fields, including meta-ethics, normative ethics, applied ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, moral psychology, practical reason, agency, and identity.