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SUMMARY:How Far Can Good Go Without God? The Limits of a Naturalistic Ethi
 c - Prof. David Lahti
DTSTART:20260519T120000Z
DTEND:20260519T130000Z
UID:TALK246427@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:118591
DESCRIPTION:Humans are a fundamentally ideal-seeking species. We routinely
  interpret our world not only in terms of how it is\, but how it ought to 
 be. We judge our own ideas and actions\, those of others\, and broader sta
 tes of affairs. Such experiences perhaps naturally lead us to conclude tha
 t we are justified in thinking this way – that reality itself is such th
 at certain ideas\, behaviours\, and outcomes are objectively better\, “m
 ore good”\, than others\, regardless of what any of us happens to think.
  Much of Western moral philosophy has sought to ground this conviction in 
 a robust conception of reality capable of supporting the idea\, for exampl
 e\, that human beings were created for a purpose. But what if\, as an emer
 ging biological consensus suggests\, our evolutionary origins and nature s
 hed no light on any ultimate purpose to human existence? What if our stron
 g tendency to idealize and moralize can be explained by an evolutionary pe
 rspective\, while remaining unjustified by that same perspective? If we re
 strict ourselves to such a view\, or even broaden it to include a strong c
 onception of personal freedom\, we still find a range of ethical views ava
 ilable to us. Yet all of them\, I argue\, fail to vindicate our deepest in
 tuitions about purpose and moral reality. Each invite us to endorse an eth
 ic\, an ideal\, that we have constructed for ourselves\, whether individua
 lly or collectively. Without a creator God\, and a divine plan\, no availa
 ble option can validate or fully make sense of the robust judgements we ro
 utinely pass on ourselves\, one another\, and the state of the world.
LOCATION:Shasha Suite\, Woolf Building\, Westminster College
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