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Articles

Justifying Our Moral Judgments

Thomas Dabay combines the ideas of David Hume and Immanuel Kant to help show how we can be right about what’s right.

How ought we to justify our moral judgments? To take a concrete case, consider the fact that throughout much of the Western world, poor and ethnic minority children are significantly less likely than their richer white counterparts to receive a satisfactory education. Although we can make some judgments about this fact in purely descriptive terms – perhaps judging it to be an inefficiency in the education system – we also make judgments about it in prescriptive terms. In particular, we might judge that there ought not be this sort of educational inequality; that it is morally wrong that there is. But what makes us think that we are right in making such a judgment?

When asked this sort of question people often employ one of two strategies of thought. On the one hand, Amy might find it intuitively shameful for such things to happen, especially in a country with a virulent history of racial discrimination such as the United States.

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