Moral Sciences Club

In the past, accounts of genius have been put forward which explicitly exclude women from this category. Today genius does not tend to be explicated in such an explicitly gendered way. Nonetheless, stereotypes exist which indicate that whilst the category of genius may not explicitly exclude women, genius remains psychologically associated with men more than women. This paper explores what could b...

Pictures look like what they depict to those who understand them. That is a natural and seemingly unassailable thought. Looking at Mona Lisa, the painting strikes us as looking like a woman with a mysterious smile in front of a mountainous backdrop. Call this the ‘looks like’ intuition. It is tempting to think not just that the ‘looks like’ intuition is true, but that it gets at the heart of what...

Explaining the decline of the Roman Republic, the historian Sallust made a famous claim about the importance of fear, a claim which has influenced writers from Augustine to Schmitt. Drawing on phenomenological apparatus, including Lear on the collapse of Native American society, this paper has two goals. First, to show that the standard reading of Sallust is incoherent. Second, to propose a new re...

Manon Garcia has recently proposed a model of sexual consent as conversation, which emphasizes collaboration and that interlocutors work together toward a common goal. Independently, though in a similar spirit, John Gardner has developed an idea of consent as teamwork. There is much that is appealing about these models of consent as ideals. Still, this paper challenges the de facto possibility of...

In discussions concerning the possibility of AI consciousness, computational functionalism has been the dominant position. This is the view that consciousness is essentially kind of computation and therefore medium independent (not reliant on any one kind of physical realizer). The opposing position, biological naturalism, has recently been discussed by Block (2025) and Seth (forthcoming). This is...

In Politics 3.4 Aristotle distinguishes the virtue of the good citizen from the virtue of the good person by noting that the good citizen should both rule well and be ruled well. I show that ‘being ruled well’ here is best understood in terms of ‘being good at being ruled’ and find evidence elsewhere for what Aristotle thinks it is to be good at being ruled, how this differs from and is related to...

It is natural to think that one person touches another when their bodies make direct contact. However, much of interpersonal touch is not like this. We often touch people through things like their clothing. But this raises a puzzle: how can you touch someone without directly touching them? Moreover, where particular moral violations and crimes essentially involve touch, an account of when one pers...

There is an explanatory puzzle about the relationship between physics and the rest of science: if the lower-level facts from physics in some way underpin higher-level facts, why don’t the lower-level details matter more for the day-to-day practice of the special sciences? Is it just a pragmatic feature of the practice of science, or are the special science genuinely autonomous, and if so, in what...

Talk given by Professor Hasok Chang at the Moral Sciences Club on November 25th 2025.

Talk given by Professor Christine Korsgaard at the Moral Sciences Club on October 21st 2025.

Talk given by Dr Megan Blomfield at the Moral Sciences Club on November 4th 2025.

Talk given by Professor Michael Potter at the Moral Sciences Club on October 14th 2025.

A talk given by Ella Whiteley at the Moral Sciences Club on 19 November 2024.

A talk given by Monima Chadha at the Moral Sciences Club on 12 November 2024

A talk given by Facundo Rodríguez at the Moral Sciences Club on 5 November 2024

A talk given by Samuel Cole (Cambridge) at the Moral Sciences Club on 29 October 2024.

A talk given by Dr Jonathan Parry (LSE) at the Moral Sciences Club on 22 October 2024

A talk given by Jan Kandiyali at the Moral Sciences Club on 9th of May 2023

A talk given by Matthieu Queloz at the Moral Sciences Club on 15th of November 2022

A talk given by Bianca Cepollaro at the Moral Sciences Club on 21st May 2024

A talk given by Alix Cohen at the Moral Sciences Club on 14th May 2024

A talk given by Clare Chambers at the Moral Sciences Club on 30th April 2024

A talk given by Paul Billingham at the Moral Sciences Club on 12th March 2024

A talk given by Åsa Burman at the Moral Sciences Club on 5th March 2024

A talk given by Eric Mandelbaum at the Moral Sciences Club on 20th February 2024