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Edward Elliot (Leeds)

Don't Stop Believing: On the Rationality of Inquiry into Moral Nihilism

It's natural to think that there's value to improving the accuracy of our beliefs. If beliefs are a map by which we steer our efforts to bring the world in line with our preferences, then, ceteris paribus, we should want a more accurate map. However, the world could be structured so as to punish learning with respect to certain topics; i.e., by coming into possession of new information, an agent's situation could be made worse than it otherwise would have been. In this paper, we investigate whether the world is structured so as to punish learning with respect to moral nihilism. We ask: If an ordinary human agent had the option to learn whether or not moral nihilism is true, then ought she to take it? We argue that, given intuitively plausible and empirically grounded assumptions about ordinary human preferences, she (probably) should not.

When
Wed Aug 1, 2018 3am – 4:30am Coordinated Universal Time
Where
Sydney Uni, Muniment Room (map)