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Moral Contextualism

New! For a short description of the conference on moral contextualism, see: 'Moral contextualism: a retrospect' (Adobe PDF)

New! Pictures taken at the conference can be seen here: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~csj6/details/AbdnConf

July 4-5, 2006, Department of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen

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One of the most interesting recent developments in philosophy is epistemic contextualism, i.e., the thesis that the truth value of knowledge attributions varies with the context of the attributor. Despite the great attention given to epistemic contextualism, very little work has been done so far on the question of whether analogous arguments can be made in the case of moral notions like, for instance, responsibility, rightness, and demandingness. Moral contextualism is the thesis, broadly speaking, that the truth values of attributions of responsibility, rightness, demandingess, etc., vary with the context of the attributor (in a way similar to the case mentioned above) or with the context of the subject. The basic idea motivating this conference is that moral contextualism is indeed a very attractive and strong position which deserves much more attention and discussion than has so far been given to it. The philosophical debate on moral contextualism has already begun; there is important work being done by Berit Brogaard, John Greco, John Hawthorne, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Alan Thomas, Mark Timmons, Peter Unger, and Ralph Wedgwood. By bringing many of these outstanding specialists of international reputation together, this conference will further progress this topic by intensifying and widening the debate. As far as we know, this will be the first major international conference dedicated exclusively to moral contextualism. There are various connections with other topics in moral philosophy which have recently been the focus of attention: moral particularism, the nature of virtues and character, the concept of demandingness, just to name a few. Finally, this conference will also contribute to a more intensive exchange between theoretical and practical philosophy.

The main speakers at this conference will be

Comments will be given by Peter Baumann, Lars Binderup, Martijn Blaauw, Gerry Hough, Kent Hurtig, Bob Plant, Duncan Pritchard, and Timothy Chappell.

This conference is generously sponsered by the British Academy, The Scots Philosophical Club, The Arts and Humanities Research Council and its Scottish Ethics Network, the University of Aberdeen, The Royal Institute of Philosophy and The Philosophical Quarterly. The proceedings of this conference are scheduled to be published in a special issue of The Philosophical Quarterly.

The conference fee will be £40 for faculty members and £20 for students. This fee includes coffee/tea.

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