Collective Identities and Moral Refl ection
Collective Identities and Moral Refl ection

Summary/Abstract: This paper investigates the question about the possibility of justifying a universal framework for individual moral judgment and action against the background of moral pluralism. The paper is based on two theses: fi rst, that moral pluralism is a basic theoretical fact, therefore any viable unifying framework cannot be presupposed, it can only be constructed from the available moral resources; and second, that if there are some universally shared values worldwide, their universality is not based on rational refl ection and therefore cannot be used in a rationally justifi ed framework. Borrowing Bernard Williams’s example of saving one out of two people in a burning house, the author argues that in implementing the supposedly universal value of life in our moral refl ection and action, we are at the same time rejecting its universality. Another approach to grounding moral refl ection, which accounts better for moral conditionality, is that of collective identities. But it does not help much with interpreting pluralism, since community values monopolize individual moral refl ection. The author concludes that to approach the problem of pluralism more appropriately, we need a kind of ‘deep pluralism’ (William Connolly), incorporating a more fl exible pattern of the ‘us-them’ relation in our moral judgment, which allows complex moral refl ection.

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