So far we’ve been dealing with a lot of empirical uncertainty – we don’t always know what will happen and what will work. In this lesson we will deal with the problem of moral uncertainty – when we don’t know with certainty what are the correct moral principles (and whether they even exist). We will examine different approaches, while discussing one of the most important open-ended questions in modern ethics.
Additional reading:
- William MacAskill, “Practical Ethics Given Moral Uncertainty”, Oxford 2019
- William MacAskill, “Moral Uncertainty”, Oxford University Press, 2020
- George Sher, “But I Could be Wrong”
- Evan G. Williams, “The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe”, 2015
- Moral Cluelessness, Hilary Greaves
- Simplifying Cluelessness, Philip Trammell
Applied Ethics Course 