Does Philosophy Make Us More Ethical?

Ole Martin Sandberg, postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Ethics, gives a talk at 12-13, Wednesday 12 November, in HT-103. This event is a part of the lunch meeting series of the Centre for Ethics, which is this fall dedicated to research projects currently hosted by the Centre. The talk will be in English and followed by a discussion.

Ole Martin Sandberg is a postdoctoral researcher in the project Climate Crisis and  Affect (climateaffect.hi.is), hosted by the Centre for Ethics, and a teacher of philosophy at the University of Iceland. His specialties are environmental philosophy and the ethics of the climate crisis.

In this talk, the limitations of philosophical approaches to the environment and the climate are addressed. It has been acknowledged by many that necessary, scientific forms of knowledge alone are not sufficient to motivate changes in behavior and attitudes, neither at the individual nor the social/political level. Perhaps philosophy can help by articulating the ethical values that are at stake? This also seems  insufficient. We are not lacking in scientific data about the ecological crises and even without reading philosophical treaties, most people are aware that it is bad. The problems are not caused by lack of knowledge or theory but by an inability to feel and to act upon that feeling. Feelings are typically either ignored or placed at the margins of philosophical analysis, but as argued by philosophers as diverse as Whitehead and Wittgenstein, they are foundational to life and to ethics. The sense that something matters and has value cannot be proven  by empirical sciences or philosophical theory. It must be felt. So the question of what is preventing the necessary environmental changes becomes the question of what is preventing us from feeling.