Im Rahmen des Kolloquiums Praktische Philosophie laden wir recht herzlich ein zum Vortrag:

Darrel Moellendorf (Frankfurt am Main): "Progress, Destruction, and the Anthropocene"

Enlightenment era optimism that technological and educational developments offer a progressive path to plenty and liberation supports a hope that human toil may be progressively reduced. The Development Thesis defended by G. A. Cohen is a piece of that Enlightenment optimism. The Development Thesis holds that productive forces tend to develop throughout history. The tendency for such an increase in productive forces to occur is, according to Cohen’s argument, due to persistent facts about human nature. If Cohen is correct, there is a tendency toward progress of an important sort, and this progress is due in significant part to human nature. But the development of productive forces also destroys non-human natural value. In the era of the Anthropocene this is occurring on a planetary scale. The simultaneous development and destruction entails that claims of progress must rely on an all-things-considered judgment. But due to the plurality of the relevant values, which cannot be compared according to a common metric, rational disagreement about the existence of progress and our progressive nature can be expected to persist.

Zur Person:

Darrel Moellendorf is Cluster Professor of International Political Theory at the Excellence Cluster Normative Orders and Professor of Philosophy at Johann Wolfgang Universität Frankfurt am Main. He is also a distinguished visiting professor of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg and a past Member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton). He is the author of Cosmopolitan Justice (2002), Global Inequality Matters (2009), and The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change: Values, Poverty, and Policy (2014). He co-edited (with Christopher J. Roederer) Jurisprudence (2004), (with Gillian Brock) Current Debates in Global Justice (2005), (with Thomas Pogge) Global Justice: Seminal Essays (2008) and (with Heather Widdows) The Routledge Handbook of Global Ethics (2014). He has published over sixty articles in scholarly journals, including “Treaty Norms and Climate Change Mitigation,” the most frequently downloaded paper in 2009 at the journal Ethics and International Affairs. He has also held academic positions at San Diego State University, the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), Cal Poly Pomona, and Riverside Community College.

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