III. Moral Theory and Ethics

As a graduate student, I was attracted to Kantian Moral Philosophy and its contemporary developments and transformations in people like Rawls, Putnam, Hill, and others. However, as I began to learn more about the nature of human mind, thought, and language, I lost all confidence in Kantian claims about apriori knowledge and universal forms of judgment. Rawls had already de-transcendentalized Kantian Moral Theory, and this opened the way to a very different perspective on the sources and nature of moral values. Shortly after I moved to the University of Oregon, I was introduced by my colleague Scott Pratt to Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct (1922), which transformed my orientation to a pragmatist account that stressed the role of habits and provided a non-absolutist view of moral deliberation as imaginative dramatic rehearsal. I began to explore recent varieties of ethical naturalism to see how well they meshed with what I call second-generation (or embodied) cognitive science. In my book Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (1993) I tried to summarize my reasons for giving up traditional Moral Law theories and replacing them with a pragmatist account that was more consistent with our scientific understanding of human valuing, deliberation, and judgment. Since that time, I have focused mainly on the intersection of ethical naturalism with current cognitive neuroscience, especially Antonio Damasio’s several books on emotion and homeostasis in the genesis of human values.

Courses:

PHIL 433/533: Topic: Kant Moral Theory

PHIL 614: Issues in Ethics (Recent Moral Theory)

A study of recent work in ethical naturalism, beginning with Dewey and quickly moving into contemporary empirical work on moral understanding and judgment. The course includes work by Antonio Damasio on the importance of emotions, Owen Flanagan on the nature of a naturalized view, Robert Hinde on the evidence for universal propensities that might underlie moral principles, Paul Churchland on learning to navigate a social space, and other recent empirically-minded philosophers and scientists working on moral judgment.

Books:

Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (co-author George Lakoff), Basic Books, 1999.

Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics, University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Articles:

"Law Incarnate,” Brooklyn Law Review, 67: No.4 (Summer 2002), 949-962.

“Imagination in Moral Judgment,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 46, No. 2 (1985), 265-280.

Book Chapters:

“What Cognitive Science Brings to Ethics.” Morality, Ethics, and Gifted Minds, D. Ambrose & T. Cross (eds.). Dordrecht: Springer, 2009, 147-150.

“Ethics,” A Companion to Cognitive Science, W. Bechtel and G. Graham, eds. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998, 691-701.

"How Moral Psychology Changes Moral Philosophy,” Mind and Morals, L. May, A. Clarke, M. Friedman (eds), (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996), 45-68.