The Institute for Philosophy in Public Life at UND will sponsor a lecture and discussion Wednesday called “When is a Pile a Heap? How to deal with moral vagueness†with Richard Gilmore, a professor of philosophy at Concordia College, Moorhead.
The presentation will be at 6 p.m. Wednesday at the UND Bookstore and is free and open to the public.
The lecture and discussion will look at the issues of right and wrong. Although some situations are morally clear — the right or wrong thing to do is obvious — most are ethically ambiguous. How can we act properly when what the right thing to do is so vague?
Gilmore will discuss the search for moral clarity by focusing on a classic philosophical problem: the paradox of the heap, a news release from IPPL said. How many grains of sand make a pile? When does the pile become a heap? Gilmore hopes to show that, in many ways, ethics is like this; there are no moments of absolute precision. But, he will argue, through trying to define the heap, we can also clarify what it means to accurately define the right thing to do.
You can RSVP for the lecture via Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid142017969177973. The lecture and discussion also will be broadcast live on the IPPL website.
Gilmore is author of “Philosophical Health: Wittgenstein’s Method in Philosophical Investigations†and “Doing Philosophy at the Movies.â€
