Naturalizing Moral Justification: Rethinking the Method of Moral Epistemology

Abstract

The companion piece to this article, "Situating Moral Justification," challenges the idea that moral epistemology's mission is to establish a single, all-purpose reasoning strategy for moral justification because no reasoning practice can be expected to deliver authoritative moral conclusions in all social contexts. The present article argues that rethinking the mission of moral epistemology requires rethinking its method as well. Philosophers cannot learn which reasoning practices are suitable to use in particular contexts exclusively by exploring logical relations among concepts. Instead, in order to understand which reasoning practices are capable of justifying moral claims in different types of contexts, we need to study empirically the relationships between reasoning practices and the contexts in which they are used. The article proposes that philosophers investigate case studies of real-world moral disputes in which people lack shared cultural assumptions and/or are unequal in social power. It motivates and explains the proposed case study method and illustrates the philosophical value of this method through a case study.

The usefulness of concepts as a methodological point of reference in applied ethics

“…As a starting point, consider what Theresa W. Tobin and Alison M. Jaggar write in the broader context of moral epistemology: “Rather than searching for the single, multipurpose model of reasoning capable of justifying moral claims in all contexts, our mission instead should be to seek guidelines enabling reasoners to select reasoning practices likely to be effective in particular types of situations” (2013, 411). This works as an epistemic baseline for the standard of usefulness in applied ethics.…”

Ideal and Nonideal Reasoning in Educational Theory

“…Our idea is to identify models of reasoning that actually work, rather than models simply imagined to work, and to explain why different models "fit" different types of contexts. 43…”

Poverty, agency, and human rights

“…This has some initial plausibility because gender disparities indeed tend to be wider in poorer countries (though there are some striking exceptions) but this hypothesis too disregards the history of the real world, in which the status of women in indigenous cultures was often undermined by European colonialization. One example is the impact of British colonialism on the Maasai in Kenya, where several British colonial policies significantly reshaped Maasai gender relations (Tobin and Jaggar 2013). First, the British treated only male elders as political leaders, thereby strengthening the authority and power of this group over all women and junior men.…”