Neil Sinhababu from the National University of Singapore will visit Illinois State University for a colloquium titled “A Reliable Route From Is to Ought.”
The colloquium is hosted by Illinois State’s Department of Philosophy.
When: 5 p.m. Thursday, October 27
Where: 311 Stevenson Hall
Here is what Sinhababu will discuss:
I present a strategy by which moral knowledge can be derived from nonmoral knowledge, using insights from reliabilist epistemology. The strategy begins by discovering which cognitive processes generate which moral and nonmoral beliefs. We can then assess the reliability of these cognitive processes for moral belief formation by considering to what extent they produce true belief on nonmoral issues, and by checking whether they produce contradictory moral beliefs in different people. By retaining reliably caused beliefs and abandoning unreliably caused ones, we can move closer to moral truth. No normative ethical assumptions are required.
