Webb Keane will deliver a lecture at the intersections of ethnography, psychology and social history, exploring the emergence of ethics, morality and virtue in social interaction. Keane is the George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.
The propensity for evaluation saturates everyday life, but cannot be fully captured by the dictates of explicit moral precepts. Nor can ordinary ethics be reduced to psychological foundations, although it draws on their affordances. This talk looks at one crucial site for the emergence of ethics, in social interaction. For it is in social interaction that people are summoned to account for themselves to one another. In the process, the affordances of first person experience and the third person perspective of morality systems are brought into articulation.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Theology, Science and Human Flourishing and the Department of Anthropology