Moral Encroachment and Competing Moral Norms

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dc.contributorCoates, Justin
dc.contributorSommers, Tamler
dc.contributorMorrisson, Iain
dc.contributor.authorWasel, Esraa
dc.date.accessioned2023-07-12T20:44:15Z
dc.date.available2023-07-12T20:44:15Z
dc.date.issued2023-05-10
dc.description.abstractAlthough purism, the view that only truth-relevant factors can make a difference to the epistemic status of a belief, is commonly regarded as orthodoxy in epistemology, it has recently faced some serious pushback in the form of moral encroachment. Proponents of moral encroachment claim that moral factors can affect the epistemic status of our beliefs. They motivate this argument through examples that show someone forming a morally costly or risky belief if they only rely on their current evidence to form the belief. So given the high moral stakes of only relying on one's current evidence, more evidence is needed to justify the belief in question, and in the meantime, one ought to suspend judgement. In this paper, I'm primarily interested in examining cases that challenge an assumption underlying moral encroachment: that we know which moral norms we ought to be responsive to and which ought to bear on our belief forming practices. I do this by setting up a case where two sets of moral norms, whose value relative to each other we're uncertain of, encroach on the same belief. I argue that unlike traditional cases motivating moral encroachment where suspending judgment is almost always cast as the morally safe doxastic option, in cases of moral encroachment involving moral uncertainty, there's no clear morally safe doxastic option. This makes it difficult to know how we ought to proceed in forming an epistemically rational belief while remaining responsive to the various relevant moral norms that we care about in a context.
dc.description.departmentPhilosophy, Department of
dc.description.departmentHonors College
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10657/14971
dc.language.isoen
dc.relation.ispartofSenior Honors Theses
dc.rightsThe author of this work is the copyright owner. UH Libraries and the Texas Digital Library have their permission to store and provide access to this work. Further transmission, reproduction, or presentation of this work is prohibited except with permission of the author(s).
dc.subjectPurism
dc.subjectMoral encroachment
dc.subjectMoral uncertainty
dc.subjectPhilosophy
dc.titleMoral Encroachment and Competing Moral Norms
dc.typeHonors Thesis
dc.type.dcmiText
thesis.degree.collegeCollege of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
thesis.degree.levelBachelors
thesis.degree.nameBachelor of Arts

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