Murphy-Philosophy Seminar: David Schmidtz (West Virginia)

The Murphy Institute Seminar Series in Philosophy 

Organized by the Tulane Philosophy Department, the Murphy-Philosophy Seminars are a series of workshops where CE Faculty Fellows and distinguished guest speakers present works in progress on ethics, political philosophy, political theory, moral psychology, the philosophy of law, and intellectual history. Papers are distributed one week beforehand to the participants who read the paper and prepare discussion questions for the presenter.

David Schmidtz is the Presidential Chair of Moral Science and editor-in-chief of Social Philosophy & Policy at West Virginia University's Chambers College of Business and Economics.

Dave treats Ethics as a subject that begins not with abstract theory but with concrete observation—specifically, observation of the human condition and of what tends to improve it. While our main moral theories today are theories about what to do, Scottish Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith studied what observably works, that is, the  organizing principles of actual thriving communities at their best. So, instead of arguing about how much more you should be donating to famine relief efforts, Smith observed and explained how some nations got wealthy enough to make famine a thing of the past. Today, we barely recognize Smith's work as philosophy at all, but that's our loss.

Dave continues to explore humanly rational choice in the real world: What makes a strategy rational?  What is the right way to choose a  goal? When is  altruism rational? He still studies some of the drifts in the academy that left theorists unable to track what ordinary people do to deserve their good fortune, and he still ponders the meaning of life. His work has now been reprinted 120+ times in 16 languages.