Obligation and Normativity in Modern Moral Philosophy

What is distinctive about modern moral philosophy, i.e., that written in the 17th and 18th centuries, is often considered to be its conception of obligation. G.E.M. Anscombe, for instance, famously argued that modern moral philosophers, and her contemporaries under their influence, were wrong to try and ground the normativity of morality without reference to a divine lawgiver. Whether they are critical or merely interpretive in nature, the views of many other influential philosophers such as H.A. Prichard, Bernard Williams, and Stephen Darwall have all agreed in this respect. Indeed, Christine Korsgaard describes what she calls ‘the normative question,’ that is, what justifies the demands that morality makes on us, as one that was especially pressing for modern moral philosophers from roughly Grotius to Kant. How did modern moral philosophers explain the normativity of morality? How do modern figures use the concept of obligation to account for the normativity of morality? This conference and the planned edited volume will address these and related questions. Collectively, the participants will engage with the works of a variety of major and minor figures from the modern period to enrich our historical and systematic understanding of the nature of morality’s normativity.