At the Center, January 2001

From time to time, TOC holds colloquia at our offices to discuss philosophical ideas with other scholars, with the aim of increasing the respect our ideas receive in academia and to strengthen the philosophy by seeing how it faces up to challenges. One such occasion was the evening of December 6. The speaker was Louis Pojman, professor of philosophy at the United States Military Academy at West Point. A widely published author and anthologist, Pojman has summarized and commented critically on Ayn Rand and ethical egoism in his recent volume The Moral Life, which combines readings from literature and philosophy to bring ethical issues to life. In his colloquium presentation at TOC, Pojman's topic was "The Place of Self-Interest in the Moral Life." He described his own approach to ethics, which derives moral commitments from an expanded sense of self-interest or prudence, and a fruitful discussion ensued relating this approach to the Objectivist derivation of ethics from the standard of man's life.