The Department of Philosophy will present Ralph Wedgwood, professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. His talk will be at 4 p.m. on Friday, April 14, in Old Main at Giffels Auditorium. We hope to see you there!

Wedgewood will speak on Decision-Theoretic Virtue Ethics. How can those who reject consequentialist ethical theories give an account of how to make decisions in the presence of uncertainty? A solution is proposed here: decision-theoretic virtue ethics, or DTVE, which provides an account of what makes acts subjectively permissible in cases where the agent is uncertain about some of the morally relevant facts, and also of what makes acts objectively permissible in cases where the workings of the world are indeterministic.

More specifically, DTVE is act-focused: it focuses on the virtue-properties­ such as justice or prudence or beneficence — that are instantiated by the available acts themselves (not by the agents of these acts). These virtues come in degrees: some acts are more just, or are beneficent, or better for the well-being of the agent herself, than others. In this way, this kind of virtue ethics is an essentially scalar view; this is what allows it to be united with decision theory in a precise and coherent way. 

For any additional information, please contact phildept@uark.edu.