MORAL ACTION, REASON AND INCLINATION

Abstract

The present chapter aims, first, at making more attractive the thesis that moral agents don’t have an overriding obligation to act based on moral beliefs arrived at through reasoning and, second, at demonstrating how a substantive argument for this thesis would be able to defeat the argument that if reasoning brings about more certainty about what is morally correct, it follows that one should always reason before acting. To be sure, the thesis that I want to make more attractive is not simply that in some circumstances there are good excuses not to reason before acting (lack of time or of serenity, for instance), but that there are circumstances in which, although the ideal conditions for reasoning are present, there is no moral obligation to perform reasoning. The way in which I expect to make the thesis that there is no moral obligation to reason more attractive is to defend a conception of ethical life that is a necessary condition for the thesis to be true against objections which have been raised against it. And the way in which I want to demonstrate how a substantive argument could defeat the argument of moral certainty is, first, to identify which sort of argument this substantive argument would have to be and then show how this sort of argument can defeat arguments based on moral certainty.