The Structure of Moral Reasoning: Hume, Kant and the Evidence of Psychopathology
Jeanette Kennett and Phil Gerrans (Adelaide). ARC Discovery Grant 2004-06 ($191,000)
What can moral philosophers hope to learn from the sciences of the mind? Recent work on the disorders of autism and psychopathy, has promised to reshape a longstanding philosophical debate between Kantians and Humeans on the role of empathy (sympathy) in moral thinking. This project will draw out the implications of a range of neuroscientific findings for key questions in moral theory and also consider how the normative and conceptual claims made by such theories, about what must be true of a moral judgment, are connected to descriptive claims about the psychology of the moral agents who make them.