September 25, 2015
3:30 pm
-
5:00 pm
Mershon Center for International Security Studies
The Mershon Center for International Security Studies presents
David Schmidtz
"After Solipsism"
Click here to register for this event.
Abstract: Philippa Foot once said, "When anthropologists or sociologists look at contemporary moral philosophy they must be struck by a fact about it which is indeed remarkable: that morality is not treated as an essentially social phenomenon." What would it be like to treat morality as an essentilly social phenomenon? Consider how plausible it would be, if utility were all that mattered, to think consequentialist morality is about maximizing utility. Schmidtz will focus on how much less plausible that reduction becomes if, as a matter of empirical fact, affecting people's payoffs is only one of several ways affecting people. What if you also affect how other people act? What if you affect their reasons for action?
Bio: David Schmidtz is Kendric Professor and founding Director of the Center for Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona. His fourteen former doctoral students all hold faculty positions and have published articles in Journal of Philosophy and Ethics. Oxford, Cambridge, and Princeton University Presses have published their books. In political philosophy, Arizona is ranked as the world's #1 graduate program by the Philosophical Gourmet. David is editor-in-chief of Social Philosophy and Policy (which has the largest circulation among analytic philosophy journals in the western world). He is author of Rational Choice and Moral Agency (Princeton), Elements of Justice (Cambridge), Person, Polis, Planet (Oxford), and co-author of Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility (Cambridge, with Bob Goodin) plus Brief History of Liberty (Blackwell, with Jason Brennan). He currently is working in Markets in Education with Harry Brighouse for Oxford University Press. Essays of his have been reprinted 80 times in twelve languages as of 2015.
