Fully Expanding Moral Theories
Fully Expanding Moral Theories
Research Presentation
In Making Morality Work, Smith argues that we need to expand moral theories by making them larger and more complex in order to accommodate cases of uncertainty. And it describes a framework—the ‘Constrained Standards Hybrid Approach’—that can do this job. But one limitation of the Constrained Standards Hybrid Approach is that it isn’t designed to handle cases of moral uncertainty. I offered a way in which the approach could be extended to accommodate cases of moral uncertainty as well as cases of ordinary descriptive uncertainty. However, even with this extension, there are some tricky cases of uncertainty left over. I examined Smith’s reasons for thinking that it’s okay that some cases are left over, and argued that they aren’t satisfying. We should want more from our moral theories, and even an extended version of the approach offered in Making Morality Work may just be the beginning of a solution.
This paper has been presented at the Workshop on Holly Smith's book, Making Morality Work, October 18 2019.