Fri Jan 6th – The Search for a Middle Way in Ethics – John Little

The moral nihilist thinks there is no moral truth…..sometimes this takes the form of relativism, either a subjective individual relativism (morality is like taste) or a cultural version (when in Rome do what the Romans do).
The moral realist thinks moral truths are like scientific, mathematical or logical truths…out there, waiting to be discovered (or the dictates of a supernatural being).

In between are positions like moral constructivism and contractualism. The constructivist / contractualist thinks we make our own moral truths (individually and collectively). But we do so under certain constraints so we should not think that in morality ‘anything goes’. Something like objective truth is possible.

In my talk I want to survey positions taken by a range of thinkers  in the middle ground, focussing on constructivism but also looking at recent books such as Philip Kitcher’s ‘The Ethical Project’ and Mark Johnson’s ‘Morality for Humans’. Both see human morality as contingent, experimental, a work in progress.  Johnson’s most provocative statement, that moral fundamentalism is not just incorrect, but immoral. “Moral absolutism is immoral,” he argues, “in that it shuts down precisely the kind of empirically informed ethical inquiry we most need for our lives.”

Fri 16th Dec – Desert Island Books – Quinn Leigh

 The format is to choose eight books (and one record) for your desert island.

Stop reading now if you want the element of surprise!

There will be themes conducive to finding ways of dealing with existential angst and others which help to keep the mind open.

Books Quinn has chosen –

1 The Prophet by Khalil Gibran

2 Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

3 Freedom and Destiny by Rollo May

4 Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

5 In Search of Authenticity, from Kierkegaard to Camus by Jacob Golomb

6 Power and Terror by Noam Chomsky

7 Beyond Psychology by Otto Rank

8 Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass

Fri Dec 9th – Sustainable Development is Not Enough – Dr Mark Everard

What do we mean by ‘sustainable development’?  The term has a long history and is perhaps most widely understood using the 1987 ‘Brundtland definition’.  But there are many competing definitions, generally serving specific ends, and a lot of assumptions about what all these definitions mean and, importantly, how the concept should be implemented.  Many of the policy and practical implementations relate in one way or another to ‘lightening the footprint’ on an assumed stationary baseline.  However, in the ‘real world’, rising human demands and declining natural resources mean that global resilience and capacity are declining sharply.  So how do we revise our aims in a degrading world with a declining baseline?  We can no longer exploit natural resources for narrow benefits in ways that are blind to their effect on the ecosystem.  Around the world, there are various localised examples of ‘regenerative landscapes’, used and managed with ecosystem restoration and functioning in mind.  We can and must learn from these examples, progressively applying those lessons to influence all policy areas, not merely to niche projects and case studies .