Fall 2026 Abstracts

October 2 – *11am–1pm CEST

Melissa Merritt (UNSW): Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism 

I examine how Kant draws upon and reworks the demanding cosmopolitan ideals of Stoic ethics in Part 3 of the 1793 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone — specifically, his account of the “ethical commonwealth” as a social order to promote “the good in the human being” given the moral corruption endemic in our communities. After showing how Kant’s understanding of the underlying problem draws on ancient Stoic sources, I turn to Seneca’s account of friendship between progressors as an approximation of the demanding cosmopolitan ideal.  Although Kant gives every sign of having thought deeply about Seneca’s conception of such friendship, in his 1793 lectures on moral philosophy he rejects the implicit upshot of Seneca’s account: namely, that the virtue towards which the friends are progressing would be a resource held in common.  Nevertheless, the idea figures in the Religion’s account of ethical commonwealth as a duty that the species, ostensibly as a corporate agent, has to itself.  Virtue (the human developmental telos) is thereby reconceived as a collective resource.  After reflecting on what this could mean, I conclude with doubts about how Kant’s normative ideal of the ethical commonwealth can avoid attracting the charge he most consistently laid against the Stoics: namely, that their standard of virtue calls for the transcendence of human nature.

October 16

Elizabeth Radcliffe (William and Mary): Hume and the Platonist: Human Virtue versus Becoming Like God

Hume’s essay “The Platonist” is the shortest of his four essays on happiness, and in some ways, his most inscrutable. I pose two questions: (1) why is “The Platonist” so brief (under 1150 words), and (2) why does Hume focus on contemplation of the Deity and Deity’s creation as the primary feature of Platonism? In response to the former, I consider Hume’s anti-metaphysical approach and his empirical psychological views on human happiness and virtue as a reason why he has less to say in the persona of the Platonist than he has in the personas of the Epicurean, Stoic, or Skeptic. In answering the latter question, I explore suggestions (i) that this characterization of Platonism came to Hume through the dialogue Timaeus, widely available in the modern period; (ii) that Hume was likely familiar with the idea of “becoming like God,” a theme in several Platonic dialogues; and (iii) that Hume was responding to the Christian Platonism of his contemporary, Ralph Cudworth.

November 6

Julia Jorati (UMass Amherst): Eighteenth-Century Debates about Slavery and their Implications for Ethics

How useful are ethical theories for resolving real-world moral disagreements, such as disagreements about the moral permissibility of transatlantic slavery in the eighteenth century? This paper investigates the ways in which various moral theories—including natural law ethics, moral sense theory, and proto-utilitarianism—were used to argue for and against the abolition of slavery in the eighteenth century. This investigation reveals two things. First, authors who disagreed about abolition often agreed about the relevant normative principles. Their moral disagreement frequently boiled down to a disagreement about empirical claims. Second, there are strong reasons to think that some authors who defended slavery employed versions of moral principles that are implicitly restricted to a subset of human beings. There are also reasons to think that some authors argued in bad faith or used motivated reasoning. This, in turn, raises many intriguing questions about the roles of moral theories in complex real-world debates.

December 11

Michael Gill (Edinburgh): Title and Abstract TBA