Colin Marshall (Melbourne): "Empathetic Moral Realism"
This paper argues for a novel form of naturalist moral realism. Showing that cold psychopaths have an incomplete grasp on reality is, I claim, one of the defining tasks of moral realism. The core idea behind Empathetic Moral Realism is that to see something as it is, you must have an experience that reveals its nature to you. A cold psychopath is not pained by some creature's pain, which means, I hold, that his experience does not reveal the nature of pain to him. This entails that he does not see the creature as it is, and so has an incomplete grasp on reality. The final sections of the paper are devoted to answering eight or nine objections to this argument.
Location
Coombs Seminar Room C