CEPPA Talk (in-person) – Omar Ruiz Rivera and Craig Ferrie (St Andrews and Stirling)

Omar Ruiz Rivera – Moral Skill

Abstract: This talk is about moral skill—the capacity for morally excellent behaviour. In particular, I engage with Shepherd’s (2022) view that moral skill is “limited in scope, and precarious” (p. 713). To defend this view, Shepherd relies on a distinction between global and local moral skill. The former involves the action domains that structure human life, whereas the latter is restricted to specific areas of human life. His claim is that global moral skill is “practically impossible for human agents” (p. 725), while local moral skill is possible but precarious. I will argue that Shepherd’s own account of skill supports a more complex picture of moral skill than he allows. Drawing on Shepherd’s (2021) account of skill, I propose a third model of moral skill—“mid-level moral skill”—which is less demanding than global moral skill but broader in scope than local moral skill. If this claim is correct, it would entail that framing moral skill exclusively in terms of global or local moral skill risks overlooking alternative perspectives that might lead to a more nuanced conclusion than Shepherd’s (2022) characterisation of moral skill as limited and precarious.

Craig Ferrie – Normative (Un)knowability and the Hybrid Theory of Normative Truth

Abstract: There is some plausibility to the idea that if a normative claim, p, is true then it should be possible to know p. If correct, this makes normative truth quite different from natural truth, which seems capable of outrunning our knowability. This view, however, runs up against counterexamples. It seems, for instance, that the people of Pompeii had most reason to evacuate in order to escape the eruption of Mt Vesuvius, but no one could have known that they did. I am interested in whether the truth pluralist is in a unique position to overcome such counterexamples, provided they accept a hybrid theory, which treats them as conjunctions, one part normative and one part natural. To do so, it needs to be explained why these cases are exempt from the knowability condition on normative truth (which I will try do to!).

Location: Edgecliffe G03 and online on teams