Uploaded October 2021 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
Talk Title: "What to Do When You Don't Make a Difference"
"Those of us who relish certain products of the global industrial economy but also believe it is wrong to consume them are often so demoralized by the apparent inefficacy of our private, individual choices that we are unable to resist. My goal here is to explore the challenges that this sort of futility poses to our moral resolve and argue for an approach that is at once non-consequentialist but still sensitive to the role that consequences play in our moral psychology. Along the way, I examine a number of different accounts of what it means to ‘make a difference' before articulating my own."
Andrew Chignell's (Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor, University Center for Human Values, Religion, and Philosophy, Princeton University) work focuses on 17th- and 18th-century philosophy (especially Immanuel Kant), the moral psychology of hope and despair, food ethics, and philosophy of religion.
Talk Title: "What to Do When You Don't Make a Difference"
"Those of us who relish certain products of the global industrial economy but also believe it is wrong to consume them are often so demoralized by the apparent inefficacy of our private, individual choices that we are unable to resist. My goal here is to explore the challenges that this sort of futility poses to our moral resolve and argue for an approach that is at once non-consequentialist but still sensitive to the role that consequences play in our moral psychology. Along the way, I examine a number of different accounts of what it means to ‘make a difference' before articulating my own."
Andrew Chignell's (Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor, University Center for Human Values, Religion, and Philosophy, Princeton University) work focuses on 17th- and 18th-century philosophy (especially Immanuel Kant), the moral psychology of hope and despair, food ethics, and philosophy of religion.
