Philosophy for Hard Times: Ethics for Hard Times: Why Do (Other) People Make Bad Decisions?

The Philosophy Department at UNC Asheville will be presenting, as part of their “Philosophy for Hard Times” series, is Ethics for Hard Times: Why Do (Other) People Make Bad Decisions? The presentation will be given by Melissa Burchard on Friday, March 19 at 3:30 pm via Zoom. The event is free and open to the public. Register here. 

Melissa Burchard: “As the pandemic has created new hard times as well as exacerbated many ongoing difficulties, I believe we need to pay special attention to our ethics to make sure that they don’t let us down. Because we don’t have a strong public moral training or discourse even in good times, we may find ourselves baffled by the seeming absurdity of the decisions that others – or we – make when things get difficult. I will draw on work in moral theory by Laurence Thomas to help explain why people often don’t seem concerned to actually help others, by Seiriol Morgan to help explain why people are often inclined to treat others as a means to their own ends, and offer my own picture of how a misleading conception of liberty encourages people to mistake what is morally permissible. All these ideas about moral thinking in the US help explain some of the ways that people come to make the decisions that they do.”