Moral Justification

A central project in epistemology is to spell out the conditions under which a belief is epistemically justified. By contrast, ethicists have not given much attention to the conditions under which an action is morally justified. This state of affairs is surprising, given the way we use the term “justified” in everyday discourse. This paper argues that the concept of moral justification has an important role to play in ethics—a role that closely parallels the role epistemic justification plays in epistemology. After articulating this role, I take some first steps towards providing a unified theory of moral and epistemic justification. Along the way, I highlight the theoretical payoff of adding moral justification to our conceptual toolkit.