Moral Conviction and Moral Uncertainty

This book introduces a novel challenge at the intersection of normative ethics, moral psychology and moral epistemology and develops a solution to it that has important implications for moral epistemology generally. The challenge arises from the observation that people who act in morally heroic ways often profess certainty in the rightness of their actions. Such moral conviction seems highly admirable. Yet in light of our general fallibility, it seems that moral certainty is epistemically unjustified. It thus looks as though we would have to conclude that moral heroism comes at the price of epistemic irrationality. Drawing this conclusion, however, is shown not be a viable option. The same holds for attempts at accounting for the moral hero’s conviction in alternative, entirely non-doxastic terms, or denying its admirability on the grounds that it is entangled with fanaticism. This leaves the claim that moral certainty is never epistemically justified. Via an in-depth discussion of the nature of epistemic justification for moral beliefs, this claim is shown to be false. In exceptional moral circumstances, the value of living up to one’s fundamental moral commitments encroaches upon the standards of epistemic justification.

Francesca Bunkenborg, Georg August University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.