The Moral First Aid Manual: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
About this book
THE TANNER LECTURES ON HUMAN VALUESDelivered at The University of Michigan November 7 and 8, 1986 The invitation to deliver this lecture provided a great honor, and a bracing opportunity to indulge in what might be called “licensed poaching.” According to the letter of invitation, “The purpose of the Tanner Lectures is to advance and reflect upon the scholarly and scientific learning relating to human values and valuation.”Thus lured a little further into ethics—human values and valuation—than Dennett believes he belongs, he was nevertheless not an unwilling poacher, having long harbored dissatisfactions and skepticisms about the wildly unrealistic idealizations being used in the field of ethics, and taking this to be an occasion to express them.Having done the necessary homework, and concluded that the current salutary trend of reaction against the misuse of theoretical idealizations in ethics has not gone far enough in certain respects, what you are about to read is the somewhat misshapen product of time-pressured problem-solving. This lecture revises and expands on material presented in the Kathryn Fraser McKay Lecture, St. Lawrence University, September 1986; the George Brant Lecture, Montclair St. College, February 1986; a Distinguished Lecture to the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, March 1986, published as “Information, Technology, and the Virtues of Ignorance,” Daedalus, Summer 1986, pp. 135–53; and a Humanities Lecture at the University of Kansas, November 1986.