Aquinas on Moral Mistakes
A Conversation With Nicholas Ogle

12.00-1.30pm | Friday, February 7
Elm Library, 31 Whitney Avenue

Judgments of moral culpability play a crucial role in our lives, providing a rational basis for practices of accountability that are essential to any just society. Yet when they exceed their proper limits, such judgments can breed resentment and mistrust, thereby undermining the social bonds they are meant to preserve. How can we judge others fairly in a morally pluralistic world? When is someone blameworthy for acting on a sincerely held, yet mistaken, moral belief?

Nicholas Ogle is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania.

This event is open to all members of the Yale community. Lunch will be served.

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Causes that diminish the judgment of reason, such as ignorance, or that diminish the free movement of the will, such as weakness, violence, fear, or something of that sort, diminish sin.

—Aquinas, Summa Theologiae