Moral Uncertainty: Decision-Making When Morality Gets Messy

Details: Morality is messy. We often feel that there are no clear answers when it comes to what’s right and what’s wrong. Should you give 10% of your income to charity? How about cutting out factory-farmed meat from your diet? Or deciding to not holiday internationally to reduce your carbon footprint? There seem to be reasonable things to be said both for and against, which can sometimes leave us with the nagging feeling that we’ve acted wrongly, no matter what we do. Recently, some ethicists have started paying close attention to how we should make decisions when, faced with questions like these, we simply don’t know what morality requires of us. And while it might seem obvious that we should just go with whatever is right according to the moral view we find most plausible, several philosophers have argued that this can lead us deeply astray. If you’d like to find out why, and what alternatives we have left, you should come to this talk (just in case you were unsure).

Bio: Matthew Wiseman is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Southern California, although he’s currently locked down with his fellow Melbournians. His main areas of interest lie in moral and political philosophy, especially the nature and extent of our obligations to future people and nonhuman animals. He’s previously studied philosophy at both the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University, and is an Editor-in-Chief of the Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia, which he co-founded in 2019.

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