Considered judgments and coherence theories of justification in ethics: Moral conservatism defended (John Rawls)

The central aim of this project is to secure a better understanding of the notion of considered moral judgments with respect to their significance and role in coherence theories of moral justification. For they have been the target of much criticism at least since their most pronounced billing in John Rawls's celebrated A Theory of Justice (1971). Critics like Richard Brandt, Peter Singer, Steven Lukes, and Richard Bernstein charge that the appeal to our distinctively Western liberal democratic "intuitions" during theory construction precludes the possibility of reaching an Archimedean point, the objective or moral point of view. Utilizing our own considered judgments as "checks" against candidate theories and their principles commits us to some form of moral conservatism insofar as there seems little potential for progress if we leave our own fundamental beliefs unquestioned.; My strategy will be to offer an exhaustive reconceptualization of Rawls's considered judgments as closely analogous to Wittgenstein's "hinge" propositions. The former, like the latter, do not provide ultimate justifications for the rest of our web of beliefs but constitute the necessary guiding "framework" for our rational inquiries. Thus because they form the background conditions for our engaging in moral deliberation (the "language-game" of ethics) their "certainty" must be presupposed in that they are not immune but excluded from doubt. I defend the thesis, then, that considered judgments are not arbitrarily conceived beliefs or dressed up intuitions but the moral paradigms that go to form the moral infrastructure of our Western liberal democratic tradition. And, insofar as we hold to these beliefs, conservatism then becomes a virtue of coherence theories of justification, since conservatism inclines us to preserve our most cherished "bedrock" moral convictions, which are required if moral theorizing is to be possible at all.