Prompted by the thesis that an organism’s umwelt possesses not just a descriptive dimension, but a normative one as well, some have sought to annex semiotics with ethics. Yet the pronouncements made in this vein have consisted mainly in... more
Prompted by the thesis that an organism’s umwelt possesses not just a descriptive dimension, but a normative one as well, some have sought to annex semiotics with ethics. Yet the pronouncements made in this vein have consisted mainly in rehearsing accepted moral intuitions, and have failed to concretely further our knowledge of why or how a creature comes to order objects in its environment in accordance with axiological charges of value or disvalue. For want of a more explicit account, theorists writing on the topic have relied almost exclusively on semiotic insights about perception originally designed as part of a sophisticated refutation of idealism. The end result, which has been a form of direct givenness, has thus been far from convincing. In an effort to bring substance to the right-headed suggestion that values are rooted in the biological and conform to species-specific requirements, we present a novel conception that strives to make explicit the elemental structure underlying umwelt normativity. Building and expanding on the seminal work of Ayn Rand in metaethics, we describe values as an intertwined lattice which takes a creature’s own embodied life as its ultimate standard; and endeavour to show how, from this, all subsequent valuations can in principle be determined.
Invited talk given to Mancept (2015) Workshop on Political Theory and the Public. (contact me for further details) My talk described my empirical research project which used in-depth interviews with members of the British public to... more
Invited talk given to Mancept (2015) Workshop on Political Theory and the Public. (contact me for further details)
My talk described my empirical research project which used in-depth interviews with members of the British public to investigate how they think about politics and their own political decision-making. A core interest was how they conceptualised politics in moral or non-moral terms.
I described 5 broad ways in which such research into how the public actually think about politics may be relevant: at the level of implementation (e.g. motivation, feasibility, non-ideal theory);
as a general resource, inspiration or orientation for political theorising even if the principles of one's normative theory are not grounded in or sensitive to facts about how citizens actually think; as a form of experimental political philosophy, concerned with verifying or debunking whether 'we' hold the normative intuitions intuitions that theorists sometimes posit are intuitive or hold wide assent; it may have "direct" relevance for a variety of normative positions, including Williamian political realism or deliberative democracy; it may also have relevance in a variety of Geussian realist ways (though in this talk I focus on ideology critique).
The talk covered 3 key findings concerning: the moralised aspect of ordinary citizens' talk; the non-liberal moral content of their talk (alongside a discussion of some methodological issues raised by this research and prior studies); and a discussion of akrasia and folk moral relativism.
I conclude by discussing some of the most interesting (in my view) ways forward for this kind of research. The development of the application of Geussian ideology critique as a distinct method for empirical research and of highly deliberative Socratic questioning as a means of verifying what non-theorist citizens think about normative theories and political questions after reflective deliberation in concert with normative theorists. This latter method breaks down the distinction between empirical and normative research as well as between theory formation and theory dissemination and reflection.
