Seminar with Olof Leffler (University of Siena)

'Now What' in Social Ontology and Metaethics

The seminar will be a hybrid meeting. It will be held in Room 28 on Grodzka 52, Kraków and Teams on April 9, 2024 (Tuesday, 17:30 GMT+1). 

Abstract:

Error theorists in metaethics face the so-called 'Now what?'-question: the question of what to do with moral discourse in case the error theory turns out to be true, so there are no moral truths. This question is usually discussed with either a local error theory about (all of) morality or a global error about (all of) normativity in mind. But it is quite possible to be an error theorist about some more limited domain of moral judgements than all of it: call that a hyper-local error theory. In this talk, I explore the lessons to be learned from considering a hyper-local error theory about corporate moral responsibility judgements. First, I argue that it is quite possible that an error theory about corporate moral responsibility judgements is true, so we have good reason to explore the 'Now what?'-question about our corporate moral responsibility judgements. Then I discuss the question with respect to these judgements specifically and argue that we should become revisionary expressivists about our judgements of corporate moral responsibility. That allows us to preserve the important functions of these judgements better than alternatives such as abolitionism, fictionalism, and cognitivism. Finally, I generalize my response to the hyper-local error theory about corporate moral responsibility judgements to more familiar local and global error theories. If we add some plausible assumptions, it turns out that the lessons we have learned from the hyper-local one make revisionary expressivism rather compelling as an answer to the 'Now what?'-questions faced by more familiar local and global ones too.

This research was funded by the Priority Research Area Heritage under the program Excellence Initiative – Research University at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow