Rethinking moral change

Application summary

Although change is a defining feature of human communal life, attention to it has had a negligible role in the formation of modern anglophone moral philosophy. Centered around universalist and general meta-ethical and normative theories, the interest of this tradition in historicity and moral renegotiations has – pace frontline figures like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and Bernard Williams – been thin, leaving moral philosophy with inadequate means to address areas of moral life where our conceptions of right and wrong, and the criteria by which we would check such conceptions, are in motion. Drawing on resources from an emerging philosophical literature on moral revolutions and moral progress; the philosophical work of Michel Foucault, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Iris Murdoch and the classical pragamtists; along with work on evaluative renegotiations in moral anthropology and sociology of valuation, this project formulates a novel theoretical account of moral change, focused in a ground-up manner on the everyday renegotiations of moral conceptions, concepts, norms, virtues, forms of personhood, ideals and practices that ordinary people conduct in their private as well as professional roles. At the same time, the project seeks to consolidate interdisciplinary discussion on the topic, in order to make a variety of tools and ideas for addressing issues on moral change more readily available to researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds.