Moral certainty: Do we really want to know more?

Every year, hundreds of U.S. citizens patrol the Mexican border dressed in camouflage and armed with pistols and assault rifles. Unsanctioned by the government, these militias aim to stop the movement of narcotics into the United States. Recent interest in the anthropology of ethics has focused on how individuals cultivate themselves toward a notion of the ethical. In contrast, within the militias, ethical self-cultivation was absent. I argue the volunteers derived the power to be ethical from the control of the dominant moral assemblage and the construction of an immoral “Other” which provided them the power to define a moral landscape that limited the potential for ethical conflicts. In the article, I discuss two instances Border Watch and its volunteers dismissed disruptions to their moral certainty and confirmed to themselves that their actions were not only the “right” thing to do, but the only ethical response available.

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Whose hearing matters? Context and regimes of perception in sociolinguistics

International Journal of the Sociology of Language ◽

10.1515/ijsl-2020-0103 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 2021 (267-268) ◽

pp. 153-162

Author(s):

Adrienne Lo

Keyword(s):

Ontological Status ◽

Subject Positions ◽

Linguistic Sign ◽

Moral Certainty

Abstract This piece argues for the importance of centering regimes of perception and the dynamics of power in sociolinguistics, drawing upon cases where Chinese and Korean terms have been heard and enregistered as English slurs. It notes how different interlocutors mobilize phenomena at various scales in invocations of context. It calls for greater attention to the range of subject positions that are produced by speakers, perceivers, and institutions and a reconsideration of the moral certainty of our analyses. It challenges us to rethink the ontological status of the linguistic sign as a self-presenting entity and to develop frameworks of analysis that can look across scales.

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Descartes, Divine Veracity, and Moral Certainty

Dialogue ◽

10.1017/s0012217300003723 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 44 (1) ◽

pp. 15-40 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Jean-Pierre Schachter

Keyword(s):

External World ◽

Other Minds ◽

Moral Certainty

AbstractThis article explores the relation between Descartes's appeal to God's veracity and his connected notions of “metaphysical” and “moral” certainty. I do this by showing their roles in his proof of the external world, his position on other minds, and his position on the “beast-machine.” Descartes uses God's veracity in the first proof, but not in the second or third. I suggest that the reason for this is that extending his appeal to God to other minds would have placed his beast-machine doctrine in jeopardy. I conclude by accounting for some Cartesian passages that might seem incompatible with my reading of moral certainty's important role in his philosophy.

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Moral Certainty

Philosophy ◽

10.1017/s0031819100046830 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 69 (268) ◽

pp. 181-204 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Judith Lichtenberg

Keyword(s):

Sexual Intercourse ◽

Moral Certainty

A man has sexual intercourse with his three-year-old niece. Teenagers standing beside a highway throw large rocks through the windshields of passing cars. A woman intentionally drives her car into a child on a bicycle. Cabdrivers cut off ambulances rushing to hospitals. Are these actions wrong? If we hesitate to say yes, that is only because the word ‘wrong’ is too mild to express our responses to such acts

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Selma and the Place of Fiction in Historical Films

Representations ◽

10.1525/rep.2018.142.1.91 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 142 (1) ◽

pp. 91-123

Author(s):

Jeffrey Knapp

Keyword(s):

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Voting Rights ◽

Voting Rights Act ◽

Hybrid Nature ◽

Historical Film ◽

Self Defense ◽

Historical Films ◽

Moral Certainty ◽

Historical Reenactments

Every historical film must contend with the possibility that its viewers will be scandalized by its mixture of fact and fiction, but no recent historical film has faced such pressure to justify its hybrid nature as Selma has, in large part because no recent film has taken on so momentous and controversial a historical subject: the civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The renewed urgency of the issues Selma dramatizes, along with the film’s own commitment to the “moral certainty” of the civil rights movement, helps explain why Selma wavers in a self-defense that links the fictionality of its historical reenactments to the purposely theatrical element of the marches themselves. But politics are not the only problem for fiction in Selma, and to show why, this essay compares Selma to an earlier historical film, The Westerner (1940), that openly flaunts the commercial nature of its fictionality.

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Moral Certainty

Moral Change ◽

10.1007/978-3-030-61037-1_14 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 105-108

Author(s):

Cecilie Eriksen

Keyword(s):

Moral Certainty

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On Two Arguments Against Moral Certainty

Mind ◽

10.1093/mind/xc.357.79 ◽

1981 ◽

Vol XC (357) ◽

pp. 79-90 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

DOUGLAS ODEGARD

Keyword(s):

Moral Certainty

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Basic Skills I

Ethics for Everyone ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190080891.003.0003 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 31-52

Author(s):

Larry R. Churchill

Keyword(s):

Basic Skills ◽

Cognitive Skill ◽

Skill Learning ◽

Basic Skill ◽

Moral Orientation ◽

Families Of Origin ◽

Moral Certainty

Nine different skills are discussed as essential to ethics, 5 in chapter 2 and 4 in chapter 3. These skills are named according to the capacity that is required to exercise them. The first and most basic skill discussed in this chapter is one of probing—interrogating our moral prehistories. A moral prehistory is what we all acquired from our families of origin and the communities that nurtured us through childhood. None of us chose our prehistories, rather they are the “taken for granted” moral orientation each of us begins with. Learning to look both critically and appreciatively at this moral inheritance is the initial skill for ethics. The others described in this chapter are decentering skill (taming moral vanity and recognizing others), relinquishing skill (the act of giving up the comforts of moral certainty), emotional skill (learning from our feelings), and cognitive skill (thinking slowly).

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