Event Timeslots (1)
Thursday
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Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where does it come from? Is there an innate basis to human morality or is it a cultural phenomenon? Can we give a plausible evolutionary account of our sense of morality? What purpose does this sense of morality serve? What does that mean for the normative status of our moral judgments? Can an evolutionary perspective help to answer to moral skepticism? Or does an adaptive explanation of morality in terms of genetic success (“if it is just something that helped our ancestors make more babies”, as Joyce writes) rather undermine morality´s central role in our life? In this seminar we´ll discuss these question on the basis of Richard Joyce´s 2005 book The evolution of morality. The language of the seminar is English.