Question I thought that modern philosophy tended towards the tentative, the open-ended, and the permanent possibility of error, yet some philosophers on this site answer questions, usually on moral issues, with an almost dogmatic certainty worthy of Pope Ratzinger. How come?

Accepted:
December 19, 2007

Comments

Without discussing specific posts (though I dare say I'm one of the people who fit your bill), it might be something like this: just as some things are pretty clearly true or false, some things are pretty clearly right or wrong. And if the question posed is "first-level" -- i.e., one that asks about the rightness of wrongness of some particular act or policy, rather than raises the question of whether there's really any difference between right and wrong -- then there's not much point in pretending that something is unclear or up for grabs when it doesn't really seem to be.

Suppose the question was whether it's okay for Robert Mugabe to run Zimbabwe the way he does, because after all, he has the power to do it, and perhaps might makes right. (Far as I know, no one has ever said that on this board...) I may not know what the best meta-ethical theory is, but if I have any moral knowledge at all, I know that what Mugabe is up to is wrong. So why shilly-shally? Indeed, it's tempting to to say that anyone who thinks it might be perfectly okay for Mugabe to wreck his country and ruin the lives of thousands and thousands of people is a moral incompetent.

Is that dogmatic? Only if it's dogmatic to say firmly what there's no good reason to doubt.

Now of course, there's another conversation we might have: which things are the ones that there's no good reason to doubt? How does that get settled? It's a perfectly good question, and I don't have a good answer. But it's a different kind of question. Compare: do we have to be able to provide a theory of knowledge before we can make knowledge claims? If so, we're in big trouble.

In general, philosophers are quite happy to doubt things that other people take for granted, and to take seriously the possibility that their own long-cherished views might be wrong. But what some people describe as our "intuitions" about various matters are an important part of the data that philosophical thinking has to make sense of. Sometimes we end up rejecting some of our intuitions, and sometimes we find ourselves compelled to offer arguments for hanging on to them. But even philosophers have to start thinking somewhere, and if what we're thinking about is right and wrong, some cases seem pretty clear.