Abstract

Ordinary requests for ethical justification are satisfied in ordinary ways. Yet it is rational and meaningful to demand justification of the ethical claims we use in meeting these ordinary requests. An ethical skepticism can easily be generated by simply asking "Why?" of any ethical claim we might make, and this skeptical "Why?" is ultimately unanswerable. The skeptic's success makes tempting the conclusion that no ethical claim or action is really justified. To block the skeptic's questioning, we would have to alter our justificatory practices to embody the realization that justification is itself a human activity with no external ultimate grounding. The force of ordinary ethical justifications is grounded not in some rock-bottom, indisputable principle, but in our immersion in the justificatory practices themselves--that is, in our implicit agreement in ways of acting, including ways of justifying. I find clues for developing these views in Hegel's ethical writings and in Wittgenstein's work on epistemological skepticism and the justification of knowledge claims. ;I have added to the main text two appendices. The first presents Heidegger's account of the relation between moral categories and existential guilt and the consequences of Heidegger's treatment of these matters for the project of moral theorizing. My interpretation of Heidegger provides an alternative formulation of the general view I present in the main body of the thesis. The second appendix applies the critique early in the thesis of the Kantian model of moral decisionmaking to the role of a "veil of ignorance" in Rawls' theory of justice