Abstract
Nussbaum claims that ‘it is very difficult to think of traditional values as having any normative authority at all: tradition gives us only a conversation, a debate, and we have no choice but to evaluate the different positions within it’. This line of thinking is argued to be too rationalistic and is contrasted with the idea of ‘moral certainty’ as a prominent trait of human life, designating what is beyond being morally justified and unjustified, but as enabling practices of ethical investigation, debate and justification.
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Notes
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‘Stand fast’ is a translation of Wittgenstein’s expression ‘fest stehen’, which denotes our relation to, for example, basic certainties.
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I write that this is an image this quote could suggest, as I doubt Nussbaum, if asked, holds this view of human life, as her early writings suggest otherwise. But modern humans do occasionally get caught up in a rationalistic image of human life, where instincts, habits and traditions are considered suspect if not based on enlightened debate and rational choice or on scientific knowledge and proofs. Being captivated by this image can be problematic because it can have us ask for ‘more information’ and ‘proofs’ before being willing to act in cases where we ought to have acted (the opposite default position, captured in the phrase ‘shoot first and ask afterward’, is from a moral point of view of course equally problematic).
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Eriksen, C. (2020). Moral Certainty. In: Moral Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61037-1_14
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