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This chapter develops an application of contextualism in the specific case of moral knowledge. The overall aim is the final vindication of a contextualist account of moral justification that supports a cognitivist interpretation of morality. It explains how contextualism compares and contrasts with the dominant coherentist model of moral epistemology in contemporary ethics, namely, an understanding of Rawlsian reflective equilibrium as a coherence theory of justification. It argues that contextualism can be seen as arising from Rawls’s methodological assumptions, if one retains the assumption that considered moral judgements retain a direct source of moral justification even when they derive further warrant from their embedding in a context of justification.

In an age of moral skepticism, moral philosophers are often casual about their own positions to represent moral life in societies segmented by gender, race, class, and other differences. Drawing on resources of feminist epistemology and naturalized epistemology, this chapter critiques a theoretical-juridical model of morality and defends an expressive-collaborative one sensitive to questions about epistemic authority, credibility, and claims to represent common moral thought and life. Intuitions are moral judgments we have learned in common with others, but which may be modified or relinquished in a process of moral reasoning that involves analogy and narrative. Reflective equilibrium is recast as a moral equilibrium among persons sustaining moral understandings and mutual intelligibility in a shared and stable way of life they can find valuable. A key critical method is thus testing for transparency the actual arrangements of power and authority that hold moral understandings in place.

The objection to a naturalized, historically situated, and culturally embedded view of morality is that it amounts to moral relativism, and so fails to provide for real moral justification. On the contrary, such a view entails that a moral position can only be corrected or refuted by another better justified one. Moral justification, however, cannot carry the same authority for those who do not share enough factual, moral, social, and epistemic assumptions; this has moral as well as epistemological implications for cross-cultural criticism and persuasion. Within a moral order, transparency demands that moral understandings survive the impact of experiences from diverse places within that order. Because differentials of social power often allow some to obscure the real nature of moral and social arrangements, the revelation of experiences, testimonies, and knowledge that have been suppressed or excluded may challenge the moral authority of a way of living.

This second part of the book turns to an examination of the conditions under which it is morally justifiable to exercise political power to enforce international law in the pursuit of justice. Ch. 5 develops a justice‐based conception of political legitimacy, where “political legitimacy” is defined as follows: An entity has political legitimacy if and only if it is morally justified in exercising political power, where the exercise of political power may, in turn, be defined as the (credible) attempt to achieve supremacy in the making, application, and enforcement of laws within a jurisdiction. It is argued that an entity that exercises political power is morally justified in doing so only if it meets a minimal standard of justice, understood as the protection of basic human rights. The conception of political legitimacy offered is meant to be perfectly general, and applies to any entity that wields political power, whether at the state, regional, or international level; it is used again in Chs 6–8. The eight sections of the chapter are: I. Political Legitimacy and the Morality of Political Power; The Irrelevance of the Idea that We Owe Compliance to the Government; III. Explaining the Preoccupation with the Government's Right to be Obeyed; IV. Toward a Theory of Political Legitimacy; V. Why Should Some Persons Rather than Others Wield Political Power?; VI. Democracy and Mutual Obligations among Citizens; and VIII. Conclusions.

This chapter shows how and why the modest assignment of priority to agents is theoretically consequential. It talks about philosophers who extol the importance of virtue and are inclined to some form of anti-theoretical stance in ethics or to some form of particularism. It also argues significant restrictions on the role that moral principles can play in moral justification. The chapter examines the structure of moral justification, elaborating how one is justified in arriving at moral conclusions about specific cases. It addresses questions about the acquisition of moral knowledge, rather than practical questions about how to deliberate in particular cases or metaphysical questions about what makes a given action morally correct.

Sociologically, as explanatory theories, liberalism, constitutionalism, and democracy may yield compelling accounts of the political order of many societies. This follows if they serve the mutual advantage of the politically most important groups in modern societies. But they typically do not serve the mutual advantage of everyone in any particular society. This fact raises the normative question of how we could morally justify a liberal, democratic, constitutional regime and its actions. Workability is a necessary part of the morally right order for society; it is merely not sufficient for moral justification.

Ch. 5 outlined an argument for a justice‐based general conception of what might be called internal political legitimacy: the conditions under which the exercise of political power within a political entity's own borders is morally justified. This conception of internal political legitimacy is used in Ch. 6 as a component of an account of recognitional legitimacy (also called international legitimacy). The concept of recognitional legitimacy plays a central role in international legal institutions and international affairs, where states, governments, and insurgency movements may all be recognized or not recognized as legitimate by individual states, groups of states, or regional or international organizations. The primary focus of this chapter is recognitional legitimacy as applied to states—i.e. on the judgement that a particular entity should or should not be recognized as a member in good standing of the system of states, with all the rights, powers, liberties, and immunities that go with that status; the guiding idea of the approach is that recognition is an act with serious moral implications and, as such, ought to be governed by rules that are themselves morally justifiable. The three sections of the chapter are: The Concept of Recognitional Legitimacy; II. Justifying the Justice‐Based Theory of Recognitional Legitimacy; and III. Legitimacy of States Versus Legitimacy of Governments.

This chapter examines claims by some cognitive psychologists conducting functional neuroimaging experiments about the neural basis of moral intuitions. It questions the idea that there are distinct cognitive and emotional subsystems in the brain driving utilitarian and deontological judgments. The chapter appeals to neuroscientific research showing that cognition and emotion are interacting processes mediated by overlapping neural systems distributed throughout the brain, Still, the reasons we adduce to justify actions depend not only on overlapping brain systems but also on social and cultural factors external to the brain.

This chapter argues that the differences between Dworkinian interpretivism on one hand, and positivism and natural law on the other can be located not on the question of law's connection to moral justification, but rather on different types of moral justification in general. It focuses on what Liam Murphy has called monist and dualist theories of practical principle. It shows that what Gardner takes to be an inconsistency within Dworkin's interpretivism can be explained away under non-monist theories of practical principle. It identifies a non-monist interpretivist position that stands on its own as a separate view even if it cannot be attributed to Dworkin.

This chapter continues the argument of why ideal levels of scientific accuracy should not be applied in torts and administrative law by focusing on two issues. Firstly, the standards of evidence ought to be appropriate to the institutional context. Secondly, justice requires that priority be given to avoiding false negatives and underregulation. One requires justification of the epistemic presupposition, the other, justification of the underlying moral view. The first issue states that the burden of proof that must be satisfied in order to make a particular institutional decision will depend at least in large part upon the kinds of mistakes one seeks to avoid. For example, criminal law stringently protects against convicting innocent people. To avoid this, the equivalent of false positives, the state must overcome a high burden of proof to establish its case. By contrast, in screening patients for life-threatening diseases we might seek very much to avoid missing someone who has the disease, to avoid false negatives. The second issue comes from the premise that in the common law of torts, distributive issues are not decided as a matter of consistent theory but are developed by means of case-by-case adjudication between two parties. Although judges try to produce consistent decisions over time, but they do not always succeed. If the law is not necessarily consistent, it is especially important to have a better view of more fundamental and consistent normative principles to guide epistemology.

Attempts to morally justify the IRA's armed struggle in terms of Just War Theory encounter a number of serious problems. However, it might be morally justified according to the standards of other moral theories. Some scholars have concluded that if terrorist campaigns such as the IRA's can be morally justified at all, it will be in terms of their overall beneficial consequences. It is therefore worthwhile to examine the morality of terrorism in general and of the IRA's armed struggle in particular, in relation to consequentialist moral considerations. This chapter aims to understand how consequentialist considerations could be used to morally justify at least some terrorist acts, and then to determine whether any of the IRA's acts of terrorism should be judged as among those so justified. The prospects for such a defence, it argues, are slim.

This chapter deals with explanations that have been given by leading commentators for the key justificatory characteristic of the doctrine of provocation, and with the concepts of anger that underpin those explanations. The sections that follow in this chapter examine the importance of moral justification; provocation and causation; causation and conceptions of anger; anger as irresistible impulse; provocation and personality as causes; anger and moral character; character and criminal culpability; and justified retribution and law reform.

This chapter examines the experimental evidence which purports to demonstrate the ubiquity of a phenomena called “moral dumbfounding”. A careful study of the evidence demonstrates that the experiments are unable to support any meaningful conclusions about whether or not moral dumbfounding exists, and if so, how prevalent the phenomena happens to be

Chapter 4 remains on the offensive against liberal neutralism, as it contests the efforts by Gerald Gaus to ground his libertarian version of neutralism on supposedly thin and uncontroversial premises. As will be seen, those putatively thin premises in fact depend on a number of deeply controversial assumptions. Although at least some of those assumptions are very likely false, this chapter does not need to establish their falsity. Instead, the point will be to reveal that liberal neutralism in one of its most prominent and perceptive instantiations is fundamentally non-neutral. In addition, the chapter will expose the oddly asymmetrical reasoning through which Gaus argues against anarchism and in favor of private property.

This chapter is devoted to Hobbes’s attempt to set up the moral theory that grounds his political argument in a way that makes it equally acceptable to proponents of quite different religious and ideological views. The purpose of the chapter is, first, to demonstrate that Hobbes does in fact pursue this strategy and appeal to a consensus omnium at various points of his derivation of the state of war and his doctrine of natural law and natural right; secondly, to systematically describe Hobbes’s underlying approach as an example of ‘extra-moral justification’ and contrast it with John Rawls’s appeal to an ‘overlapping consensus’ as an example of ‘intra-moral justification’; and thirdly, to assess the respective merits of the two types of moral justification with regard to the challenge of religious pluralism.

The chapter presents a critique of the idea that morality is impersonal and an investigation of how and to what extent personal features of our lives may be morally relevant and shape us as moral agents. In doing so, the chapter explains why moral life resists theorisation of the form criticised in Chapter 2, and it provides a better understanding of the challenges involved in developing a form of moral philosophy that can take the particularities of moral life into consideration. The chapter opens with a clarification of the approach and the central concepts of chapters 5 and 6, before turning to two suggestions of how to account for the personal dimension of moral life in terms of agent-relativity and strong moral self-definition. As these suggestions are shown to be inadequate, this leads to an investigation of the role of personal particularities in the moral formation and the moral positions of individuals. The centrality of the personal in moral life furthermore creates a demand on the subject to engage in justification in relation to others and self-understanding in relation to oneself, where self-understanding in many cases is to be understood as a process of both self-discovery and self-determination; of striving to settle both who one is and who one wants to be.