Dr. Seiriol Morgan is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Bristol. He mainly works on moral psychology and its history, and more recently the intersection between moral psychology and political economy.
Abstract:
It is fundamental to any orthodox Christian account of sin that wrongdoing must remain a mystery at root, on pain of explaining or rationalising it in a manner that would make God responsible for evil. This is often taken to be the heart of Augustine's message about evil that he makes consistently throughout his corpus (e.g. City of God XII.7 "To seek to discover the causes of these defections... is as if someone sought to see darkness, or hear silence"). But how far should we take this prohibition to stretch? Is the message that in principle, is there nothing that can be said to illuminate the sources of wrongdoing in ourselves and others? Drawing on some later insights from the Kantian tradition, in this paper I offer a reading of Confessions Book II that finds a potential motive for wrongdoing in the elementary capacities of a free will, capacities which God could not have avoided giving to a being created as free, and argue that an illuminating substantive moral psychology of wrongdoing can be built upon it. To help the explanation along, in the course of the talk I will confess to a bad thing that I did as a boy, which was worse than stealing some pears.