Benedict Lane
College: College of Social Sciences and International Studies
Discipline: Sociology and Philosophy
Department: Philosophy
Benedict Lane is in the final year of an AHRC-funded PhD in philosophy at the University of Exeter, working on problems in the philosophy of moral progress. His main interest is in the structure of moral inquiry, and how changes in that structure can help or hinder moral progress. He is also interested in metaethics and philosophy of morality more generally. I draw on a wide array of philosophical perspectives in my research; I am particularly interested in the application of ideas in philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and social philosophy to moral problems.
In a recent publication (open access), I coined the term "pure procedural progress" to describe theories of moral progress in which the progressive status of a moral change are constituted by the methodology by which it came about. I have written reviews of Philip Kitcher's 2021 book Moral Progress and Robert Baker's 2019 book The Structure of Moral Revolutions.
