The Modesty of the Moral Point of View

In Errol Lord & Barry Maguire (eds.), Weighing Reasons. Oup Usa (2016)
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Abstract

In recent years, several philosophers - including Joshua Gert, Douglas Portmore, and Elizabeth Harman - have argued that there is a sense in which morality itself does not treat moral reasons as consistently overriding.2 My aim in the present essay is to develop and extend this idea from a somewhat different perspective. In doing so, I offer an alternative way of formalizing the idea that morality is modest about the weight of moral reasons in this way, thereby making more explicit the connections between this thesis and similar issues in the epistemic sphere. In addition, I discuss how these ideas can transform our thinking about familiar questions in ethics such as the nature of self-effacement, the significance of reflective endorsement, the weight that moral reasons ought to be given in all things consideration, and the plausibility of “indirect” moral theories. Finally, I show that these ideas are compatible even with pictures of morality – such as Kant’s – on which morality might seem to anything but modest about its own importance. In doing so, I stress that it is possible to see morality as modest about the weight of specifically moral reasons, while also seeing all practical reasons as grounded in morality more indirectly – namely, by seeing morality as determining the weight that both moral and non-moral considerations deserve to have in all things considered deliberation.

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Karl Schafer
University of Texas at Austin

Citations of this work

Skepticism about Ought Simpliciter.Derek Clayton Baker - 2018 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 13.
The Authority of Formality.Jack Woods - 2018 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 13.
On Scepticism About Ought Simpliciter.James L. D. Brown - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
The Self-Effacement Gambit.Jack Woods - 2019 - Res Philosophica 96 (2):113-139.

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References found in this work

The sources of normativity.Christine M. Korsgaard - 1996 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Onora O'Neill.
The Sources of Normativity.Christine Korsgaard - 1999 - Philosophical Quarterly 49 (196):384-394.
Rational Self-Doubt and the Failure of Closure.Joshua Schechter - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 163 (2):428-452.
How to Disagree about How to Disagree.Adam Elga - 2010 - In Richard Feldman & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Disagreement. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press. pp. 175-186.

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