Christopher Cowie (Durham): 'The Unsolvable Puzzle: How Moral Paradoxes Support Scepticism'
For much of the past half century moral philosophers have grappled with a series of troubling paradoxes concerning the comparative values of populations of different sizes, trade-offs between types of goods, basic principles of practical reasoning, group actions, future generations, and action under uncertainty, among others. They seem increasingly intractable. Might this have sceptical consequences? While an argument of this kind has been under the surface in moral philosophy for some time it has yet to be explicitly argued for. In this article I make the case for it. It is argued that the scope, ubiquity and intractability of the paradoxes supports a thorough-going scepticism about moral judgment: we should suspend judgment on all moral matters, even those that the paradoxes themselves do not directly concern.
