58吃瓜

4.05-4.45pm: Miguel de la Cal Moreno – Manufactured Disorientation and Climate Change

Abstract: Many people experience Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC) as overwhelming and intimidating, recognising its seriousness and the need to act while feeling unable to determine what to do or how to decide what to do. This paper characterises this experience as moral disorientation. Drawing on Stephen Gardiner鈥檚 account of ACC as a 鈥淧erfect Moral Storm,鈥� I argue that its global, intergenerational, ecological, and theoretical dimensions undermine moral clarity on both epistemic and psychological grounds. While Gardiner鈥檚 framework helpfully identifies structural difficulties and risks of moral corruption, it treats these difficulties largely ahistorically.
To address this limitation, I turn to historical work by Naomi Oreskes, Erik Conway, and Geoffrey Supran on the deliberate manipulation of climate science and public discourse by the Carbon Industrial Complex. I argue that practices such as doubt-mongering and manipulative framing鈥攑articularly those emphasising individual responsibility鈥攈ave actively contributed to moral disorientation about ACC. Recognising the historically manufactured dimensions of this disorientation helps render it intelligible and identifies normative constraints on how we ought to reason and act.

4.50-5.30pm: Mario Bison – How to think about empathy, and why

Abstract: Empathy is usually cited in connection with altruistic, or otherwise other-oriented behaviours and attitudes. An empathic approach is usually cited in everyday moral talk as fostering virtues such as forgiveness, understanding, and openness. Nevertheless, there has also been, at a theoretical level, an increasing scepticism toward empathy in general. Philosophers have claimed that empathy is neither necessary for making moral judgments nor indeed the best way to go about our moral lives. The matter is complicated by the fact that empathy is variously defined by psychologists, and no universally agreed-upon definition exists. In this talk I want to look for a solution to these problems by setting aside the immediate debates, and instead look at the role that this concept has played in the thought of perhaps its most illustrious and influential historical proponent (David Hume), who believes that our moral judgments are fundamentally influenced by 鈥榮ympathy鈥�. By critically analysing this concept in context, and by setting it against modern critics, I will try to understand what specific need Hume (and his followers) may have felt for invoking empathy, or related concepts, in trying to understand morality.

Location: Edgecliffe G03 and online on teams