Abstract

A developed moral outlook includes stable commitments to various moral values or principles. Yet agents occasionally undergo a form of change in moral outlook that is naturally characterized as change in the scope of accepted values. Philosophers who attend to moral change of this kind have been drawn to accounts relying on the notion of consistency; in its most popular incarnation, the consistency account centers on the notion that moral change involves the agent's attempt to remedy a systematic gap in her application of principles of conduct to which she was antecedently committed. This model has been found attractive in part because it seems to provide an account of how moral change can be justified, and it seems to explain the agent's motivation in moral change. ;The aim of my dissertation is to show that this view is, nevertheless, inadequate. I argue that it cannot do justice to central phenomena attending moral change, including the character of the moral uncertainty often associated with it. Moreover, when the notion of commitment to principles of conduct is given a plausible interpretation, serious problems arise concerning this model's ability to meet either of the theoretical aims referred to above. ;I end by developing a consistency account divorced from the traditional notion of a universalized moral principle of conduct. Here I discuss the susceptibility to expansions in application of some moral and non-moral concepts: for example, the concept of disloyalty and the concept of an occasion for aiding the needy . In discussing the "aspect changes" that can occur in agents' conceptions of their actions, and that contribute to conceptual expansions of the kind mentioned above, I suggest that moral change--and practical reason in general--is not the rule-governed phenomenon that many have supposed it to be. Moreover, I argue that my account provides a way of understanding moral change as justified in an intelligible and familiar sense--and so of answering the skeptical charge that without the governance of rules, moral change must be arbitrary.