Enzo Rossi

University of Amsterdam

The Hobgoblin of Moralist Minds

11 April 2023, 17h00 (Lisbon Summer Time — GMT+1)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

In this paper I put forward an argument against political moralism—the view that the primary task of political philosophy is to render moral judgments about politics. I focus on the currently predominant form of moralism in Anglophone political philosophy, which renders such judgments by drawing controversial conclusions from widely shared moral commitments. The argument questions the value of seeking consistency between one’s moral commitments, intuitions, and judgments, which is a central desideratum of most moralist approaches. I contend that, in politics, the specific form of consistency sought by philosophers yields virtually no motivational or practical advantage over inconsistency. The only good reason to seek this type of consistency, then, would be if we had sufficient indication that our moral premises are true or justified; but moralists typically seek to bracket these sorts of metaethical questions, and not without reason. Besides, consistency is not a requirement of rationality when it concerns claims that lack epistemic warrant. And so much political moralism ends up looking like a gratuitous intellectual exercise. The upshot is that ordinary practice of making moral judgments about politics does not merit a philosophical extension—unlike the way in which the ordinary practice of making empirical observations merits extension into science, or naturalised philosophy. This argument provides indirect support for certain forms of realism in normative political theory. On these realist approaches normative political judgments should draw exclusively or primarily from non-moral sources of normativity, such as epistemic normativity, prudential normativity, and other options, so as to derive evaluative (but not prescriptive) judgments from social-scientific descriptions of reality.