Philip Kitcher – Ethics as a Human Project [videolecture]

The goal of this lecture is to extend and refine the approach to ethics I proposed in The Ethical Project.  My presentation will have three parts.  First, I shall sketch an account of the genealogy of ethical life, using ideas of Patricia Churchland, Sarah Hrdy, Michael Tomasello and Kim Sterelny to amend the story I previously sketched.  The principal errors I diagnose here are my overemphasis on linguistic exchange and on the notion of altruism.  Second, I shall offer a meta-ethical analysis explicitly couched in terms of Deweyan pragmatism.  The core meta-ethical questions, I suggest, are “What is ethical progress?” and “Can we find methods for making ethical progress more systematically and more reliably?” (more “intelligently”, as Dewey would put it).  Finally, I shall try to respond to the most common criticism of versions of ethical naturalism (including my own): the charge that naturalists inevitably commit a fallacy.  I argue that we can learn from history, and that the exploration of genealogies can sometimes teach us how we might profitably go on.