I’ve increasingly come to believe that people outside of philosophy, certainly – and even within philosophy – talk about morality without having a very clear idea of what it is that they’re claiming when they say that something is morally wrong, or that people are morally obligated to do something. What does that word, “morally,” do?
And I wish that there was more discussion of that question. I think the answer is that people are a) very unclear about it – even people who aren’t moral skeptics are relatively unclear about it; and b) there’s probably a lot of variety in what people basically have in mind, and it would be good to bring that variety to light.
So one way of addressing this question the way I conceive it, of what morality involves, is to just focus on cases where we think we’ve done something morally wrong. And I ask: “Well, what is it that seems morally bad about it? Other than the factors that make it morally wrong – why do those factors matter?” And I think that people maybe come up with different answers to that question, I don’t know.
Por Yascha Mounk
Philosophy is about deciding what to think, not about convincing other people what to think
