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Integrity, hypocrisy and the corruption of the 'ideal standard'

  • Dr Rachael Wiseman
  • Tuesday 18th October, 4pm - 5.30pm, ARC/014
  • Production team: Tbc

Interview

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Seminar synopsis

One of the difficulties one comes up against when considering the concept of integrity, is the unliveability of the lives of moral exemplars. If we don’t want to give up all our worldly belongings, leave our families, eschew pleasure and comfort, or go and fight in the resistance, does that leave us compromised and corrupted? If so, shouldn’t we stop worrying about integrity and adopt a more pragmatic — more realistic — outlook?

    The suggestion I want to extract from Anscombe’s work on ethics and religion is that the thought that integrity is unliveable is itself a kind of corruption, precisely because it leads to the sort of attitude just described. Anscombe insisted that it is practicable to live a life of integrity which is also a quite ordinary life of family, work, friends, politics and compromise. To see this, she thought, we need to return to an older—Hebrew-Christian—conception of ethics, in which morality does not create obligations and duties but rather places limits and restrictions on what is permissible to do. Limiting one’s possibilities for acting well, she thought, does not mean adopting standards that only the morally exceptional could meet.

Dr Rachael Wiseman

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Dr Rachael Wiseman is Addison Wheeler Research Fellow at Durham University. Rachael completed her PhD at the University of York and her recent publications include: 

Forthcoming 2016: 'G. E. M. Anscombe' in Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia (eds), Consciousness and the Great Philosophers. Routledge

2016: Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Anscombe's Intention

2016: 'The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Intention'. ACPQ, June 2016.

 

Directions and Parking: 

Please see the University campus map for the location of ARC/014 which is in the Alcuin Research Resource Centre. The building is opposite the Alcuin Teaching Block (Seebohm Rowntree Building) reception. The room is on the ground floor at the far end from the main entrance, around the corner, behind the lift. The closet public car park is Campus North car park. Parking costs £1 per hour and you can pay using coins or via a mobile phone via the RingGo parking. For information on public transport to the University please see the Travel and Transport webpages.

 

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