Moral Reasoning First published Mon Sep 15, 2003; substantive revision Mon Feb 11, 2013

Moral Reasoning

First published Mon Sep 15, 2003; substantive revision Mon Feb 11, 2013

Moral reasoning is individual or collective practical reasoning about what, morally, one ought to do. Philosophical examination of moral reasoning faces both distinctive puzzles — about how we recognize moral considerations and cope with conflicts among them and about how they move us to act — and distinctive opportunities for gleaning insight about what we ought to do from how we reason about what we ought to do.

1. The Philosophical Importance of Moral Reasoning

1.1 Defining “Moral Reasoning”

This article takes up moral reasoning as a species of practical reasoning — that is, as a type of reasoning directed towards deciding what to do and, when successful, issuing in an intention (see entry on practical reason). Of course, we also reason theoretically about what morality requires of us; but the nature of purely theoretical reasoning about ethics is adequately addressed in the various articles on ethics. It is also true that, on some understandings, moral reasoning directed towards deciding what to do involves forming judgments about what one ought, morally, to do. On these understandings, asking what one ought (morally) to do can be a practical question, a certain way of asking about what to do. (See section 1.5 on the question of whether this is a distinctive practical question.) In order to do justice to the full range of philosophical views about moral reasoning, we will need to have a capacious understanding of what counts as a moral question. For instance, since a prominent position about moral reasoning is that the relevant considerations are not codifiable, we would beg a central question if we here defined “morality” as involving codifiable principles or rules. For present purposes, we may understand issues about what is right or wrong, or virtuous or vicious, as raising moral questions.

 

When we are faced with moral questions in daily life, just as when we are faced with child-rearing, agricultural, and business questions, sometimes we act impulsively or instinctively and sometimes we pause to reason, not just about what to do, but about what we ought to do. Jean-Paul Sartre described a case of one of his students who came to him in occupied Paris during World War II, asking advice about whether to stay by his mother, who otherwise would have been left alone, or rather to go join the forces of the Free French, then massing in England (Sartre 1975). In the capacious sense just described, this is probably a moral question; and the young man paused long enough to ask Sartre’s advice. Does that mean that this young man was reasoning about his practical question? Not necessarily. Indeed, Sartre used the case to expound his skepticism about the possibility of addressing such a practical question by reasoning. But what is reasoning?

 

Explicit reasoning is responsibly conducted thinking, in which the reasoner, guided by her assessments of her reasons (Kolodny 2005) and of any applicable requirements