Föstudaginn 9. maí n.k., kl. 12:15-13:30, flytur Karsten Schoellner, doktorsnemi við Háskólann í Potsdam fyrirlestur á vegum Heimspekistofnunar Háskóla Íslands sem nefnist „What should a Wittgensteinian metaethics look like?“ Fyrirlesturinn sem verður í Lögbergi stofu L205 verður fluttur á ensku og er öllum opinn. Fyrirlesturinn ætti að höfða til þeirra sem hafa áhuga á heimspeki Coru Diamond, Wittgeinsteins og dýrasiðfræði (sjá nánari lýsingu hér að neðan).
Karsten Schoellner, a Ph.D. student at the University of Potsdam, will give a lecture at the Philosophical Institute on Friday 9 May, 12:15-13:30. The lecture will be in L205 in Lögberg.
What should a Wittgensteinian metaethics look like?
In this paper I hope to extract a metaethical view from Cora Diamond’s writings and situate it among contemporary metaethical positions, drawing largely on her 1976 paper “Eating Meat, Eating People”. Diamond’s paper has a complex structure. She offers arguments of a kind against eating meat, but she also offers arguments against certain arguments against eating meat, namely the arguments of Singer and Regan. These latter arguments “attack significance in human life”, by getting the “starting point” of our moral life entirely wrong. Her explication of the starting point of ethical life can look like an argument for eating meat and is certainly an argument for a categorical difference in the significance of animals and humans. If we focus solely on this strand in her work, we can locate a view of ethics that I will call Wittgensteinian constructivism. In the first section of this paper I try to explicate this view, and in a second section compare it with other forms of constructivism in contemporary metaethics. In a third section I turn to her argument against eating meat, which builds on the starting point but looks initially like a different view, which I will call Wittgensteinian expressivism. In a fourth section I compare this view to other forms of expressivism in contemporary metaethics. It will now look like I am attributing two distinct metaethics to Diamond, one of which gives us the building blocks of moral significance while the other is responsible for critique and reform. As this distinction is relatively artificial, I will be faced in the fifth section with the task of reconciling these two views.