We are glad to give notice of the Call for Abstracts for the Workshop Moral Perception, Moral Experience, which will take place with Christoph Halbig (University of Zurich) at the Forschungsinstitut für Philosophie Hannover (fiph), Germany, on July 7th-8th, 2022.

Interested early and mid-career scholars should submit an abstract of max. 800 words to berger@fiph.de, by April 8, 2022.
Invitations will be sent out by mid-April.

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On what do we ground our moral knowledge about singular cases or actions? Suppose you observe a group of children setting fire to a cat: on what do you ground your knowledge that their action is wrong? Against rationalism, or what is sometimes called ‘armchair-access,’ empirical approaches hold that at least some pieces of singular moral knowledge are grounded directly on our moral experiences. One such experience is moral perception. Philosophers in the last few decades have argued that we can have perceptual experiences of moral properties (such as good, wrong, obliged, or prohibited) and that some of these serve as a reliable and immediate foundation for a certain kind of moral knowledge. Other experiences might ground singular moral knowledge as well. Among these are the moral emotions, which have received some attention recently in relation to moral knowledge.

In this workshop with Prof. Dr. Christoph Halbig (University of Zurich) we will explore approaches to moral experience. The focus will be on theories of moral perception, but theories of other kinds of moral experience, such as emotions or other conative states, will be considered as well. The questions guiding our discussion will be, inter alia, which kinds of moral experience one could conceive of, how these different kinds of moral experience can be characterized, how they relate to our moral knowledge, and how theories of moral experience relate to other metaethical positions (e.g., moral realism).

The workshop will employ a pre-read format: participants will share their papers (work in progress) in advance, so that these papers can be discussed intensively during the workshop. The workshop will take place on July 7-8, 2022 at the Hannover Institute for Philosophical Research. Accommodation (one night) will be covered as well as travel expenses for participants based in Germany and, up to a certain amount, also for international participants.