An Examination and Contextual Expansion of Midgley's Ethical Naturalism

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

My doctoral research will be the first scholarly examination of Mary Midgley's ethical naturalism to situate her work within the context of the so-called 'Wartime Quartet' (Wiseman & Mac Cumhaill, 2018). Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Phillipa Foot and Mary Midgley are major 20th century figures - but they face almost sixty years of scholarly neglect. Until recently, there has been very little scholarly investigation into Midgley's philosophy (see Kidd & McKinnell, 2016). Building on the foundation of Durham University's In Parenthesis project , my research strives to undo this neglect by situating Midgely's naturalism within this mutually enlightening female school. I aim to establish Benjamin Lipscomb's claim that Midgley's was 'the first to present a positive proposal for a naturalistic ethics of the kind recommended but not developed by Anscombe, Foot, and Murdoch' (Lipscomb, 2016:209).I will address a central concern of the Wartime Quartet: the separation between fact and value, instigated by A.J Ayer. According to which, value-judgments are formally independent from natural facts about human nature and human need (Ayer, 1936). This fact/value separation remains a significant stumbling block for naturalisms today (De Caro and Macarthur, 2010). Liberal naturalist John McDowell (1994;2004), argues that the human subject needs to be reacquainted with the natural world, to which she has become divorced. I aim to pose Midgleyan naturalism as a solution to these twin historical and contemporary problems. My project will have three parts, detailed below.