This is Philosophy Bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy Bites is available at www. www.com.

If a man slowly loses his hair, at what point should we say he's bald?

The tricky issue of vagueness is well known in philosophy,

but it's not normally discussed in the context of morality.

Othra Magidore of Oxford University says it applies here too.

This episode of Philosophy Bites is made in association with vagueness and ethics, a research project

funded by the European Commission and based at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Offra Magadour, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Hi.

The topic we're going to talk about is epistemicism and moral vagueness.

Let's start with a vagueness.

Epistemicism isn't obvious either, but what do you mean by vagueness in this context?

Okay, so let's take a word like tall. So we know that someone who's one meters in height is definitely not tall and someone

who's two meters in height is definitely tall. But there are lots of heights in the middle,

like, you know, what about someone who's

one meter 85? It's really hard to tell. They don't seem to be clearly tall. They don't seem to be

clearly not tall. It doesn't seem like there's any further information we could find out about

them to decide whether they're tall or not tall. So this is the kind of case that

makes us think that words like tall are vague. They have borderline cases, cases in the middle where

it's really hard to tell and it's not clear what would determine whether they're tall or not.

Actually, even with tall, a meter could be tall if you were in Lilliput or if you're in a,

...