Theresa Tobin

This is the first of two companion articles drawn from a larger project, provisionally entitled Undisciplining Moral Epistemology. The overall goal is to understand how moral claims may be rationally justified in a world characterized by cultural diversity and social inequality. To show why a new approach to moral justification is needed, it is argued that several currently influential philosophical accounts of moral justification lend themselves to rationalizing the moral claims of those with more social power. The present article explains how discourse ethics is flawed just in this way. The article begins by identifying several conditions of adequacy for assessing reasoning practices designed to achieve moral justification and shows that, when used in contexts of cultural diversity and social inequality, discourse ethics fails these conditions. It goes on to argue that the failure of discourse ethics is rooted in its reliance on a broader conception of moral epistemology that is invidiously idealized. It concludes by pointing to the need to rethink both the mission and the method of moral epistemology

The companion piece to this article, “Situating Moral Justification,” challenges the idea that moral epistemology's mission is to establish a single, all-purpose reasoning strategy for moral justification because no reasoning practice can be expected to deliver authoritative moral conclusions in all social contexts. The present article argues that rethinking the mission of moral epistemology requires rethinking its method as well. Philosophers cannot learn which reasoning practices are suitable to use in particular contexts exclusively by exploring logical relations among concepts. Instead, in order to understand which reasoning practices are capable of justifying moral claims in different types of contexts, we need to study empirically the relationships between reasoning practices and the contexts in which they are used. The article proposes that philosophers investigate case studies of real-world moral disputes in which people lack shared cultural assumptions and/or are unequal in social power. It motivates and explains the proposed case study method and illustrates the philosophical value of this method through a case study

While some philosophers suggest that mystical experience may provide evidence for belief in God, skeptics doubt that there is adequate warrant for even accepting the claim of a mystical experience as evidence for anything, except perhaps for some kind of mental instability. Drawing from the work of Gabriel Marcel, I argue that the pervasive philosophical skepticism about the evidential status of mystical experiences is misguided because it rests on too narrow a view about ways of knowing and about what can count as evidence for belief in the divine. I illustrate the advantages of Marcel’s approach by applying it to the respective spiritual journeys of Augustine of Hippo and Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali. I then argue that Marcel’s framework improves on contemporary analytic approaches because it captures more accurately the kind of knowledge that mystical experiences convey as reported by the subjects who claim to have them.

One popular strategy of opposition to practices of female genital cutting (FCG) is rooted in the global feminist movement. Arguing that women’s rights are human rights, global feminists contend that practices of FGC are a culturally specific manifestation of gender-based oppression that violates a number of rights. Many African feminists resist a women’s rights approach. They argue that by focusing on gender as the primary axis of oppression affecting the African communities where FGC occurs, a women’s rights approach has misrepresented African women as passive victims who need to be rescued from African men and has obscured the role of certain international institutions that have perpetuated the oppression of African women. In this paper, I defend these critiques by arguing that the use of a women’s rights framework to combat practices of female genital cutting among African communities has often been practically ineffective and morally inappropriate

In this paper, I argue that relationships of trust are often necessary for moral justification. Even if a moral claim is likely to be true, it may not be adequately justified, and thus may not have normative force, unless those who are to accept the claim have good reason to believe that the one entering the claim is a trustworthy moral interlocutor. The complexity of moral knowledge coupled with differences among people in moral experience, capacities for moral perception, and reasoning abilities creates relations of epistemic dependence that make trust necessary in order to achieve adequate moral justification.

Many contemporary human rights theorists argue that we can establish the normative universality of human rights despite extensive cultural and moral diversity by appealing to the notion of overlapping consensus. In this paper I argue that proposals to ground the universality of human rights in overlapping consensus on the list of rights are unsuccessful. I consider an example from Islamic comprehensive doctrine in order to demonstrate that apparent consensus on the list of rights may not in fact constitute meaningful agreement and may not be sufficient to ground the universality of human rights. I conclude with some general suggestions for establishing the universality of human rights. Instead of presuming the universality of human rights based on apparent overlapping consensus we need to construct universality through actual dialogue both within and between communities.

Many contemporary human rights theorists argue that we can establish the normative universality of human rights despite extensive cultural and moral diversity by appealing to the notion of overlapping consensus. In this paper I argue that proposals to ground the universality of human rights in overlapping consensus on the list of rights are unsuccessful. I consider an example from Islamic comprehensive doctrine in order to demonstrate that apparent consensus on the list of rights may not in fact constitute meaningful agreement and may not be sufficient to ground the universality of human rights. I conclude with some general suggestions for establishing the universality of human rights. Instead of presuming the universality of human rights based on apparent overlapping consensus we need to construct universality through actual dialogue both within and between communities.