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Oscar North-Concar (PhD)

Title: Thick concepts and Objectivity; Assessing Vayrynen's Pragmatic view.

Thursday 26th in S2.77 and on teams. Everyone welcomed!

Abstract:

Moral and ethical concepts are sometimes divided into two categories, ‘thin’ and ‘thick’. The difference can be characterised in the following way: when we describe an action thinly as ‘wrong’, we evaluate it negatively. However, when we evaluate an action with a thick concept like ‘selfish’ or ‘cruel’, we also describe the way in which it is wrong. Bernard Williams uses the notion of thick concepts to challenge the idea that objectivity is possible in the domain of ethics through claiming that they are both central to ethics and constitutively linked with particular ethical outlooks. However, the notion of thick concepts has proven to be problematic. The coherency of any metaethical view that puts thick concepts front and centre stage has been challenged on the grounds that there might not be anything distinctively significant about them after all. In this paper I’ll explore this tension. Specifically, I’ll discuss an argument from Pekka Vayrynen (2013) that claims thick concepts do not have distinctive significance. I aim to argue that Vayrynen does not demonstrate that thick concepts have no bearing on questions surrounding objectivity in ethics.