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Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory
PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES
ON MORAL CERTAINTY
Edited by Cecilie Eriksen, Julia Hermann,
Neil O’Hara, and Nigel Pleasants
Philosophical Perspectives
on Moral Certainty
Moral certainty refers to those aspects of morality – moral acting, feel-

ing, and thinking – that are beyond doubt, explanation, and justifica-
tion. The essays in this book explore the concept of moral certainty and
its application and usefulness in contemporary moral debates.
The notion of moral certainty, which is inspired by the philosophy
of Ludwig Wittgenstein, is emerging as a key reference point in con-
temporary moral philosophy. An investigation into the implications of
moral certainty is called for, given that so many discussions in moral
philosophy concern the possibility of justifying our moral beliefs. The
concept of moral certainty also feeds directly into the emerging field of
hinge epistemology. The chapters in this volume tackle the following
issues: meta-questions around whether and how we can make sense of
the concept of moral certainty; the role of moral certainty in contempo-
rary debates on gender, racism, bias, and historically unjust practices;
ways in which radical change in society engendered by new technologies
might affect moral certainties; and the role of the notion of moral cer-
tainty in the debates on free will and moral responsibility.
Philosophical Perspectives on Moral Certainty will appeal to research-
ers and advanced students working on ethics and moral philosophy,
epistemology, philosophy of technology, and Wittgenstein.
Cecilie Eriksen is a Special Consultant at the National Center of Ethics,

The Ministry of Health, Copenhagen, Denmark. She is also an affiliated
researcher on the research programme The Ethics of Socially Disruptive
Technologies and the author of Moral Change: Dynamics, Structure and
Normativity (2020).
Julia Hermann is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy and Ethics of

Technology and fellow on the NWO-funded research programme The
Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies, University of Twente, The
Netherlands. She is the author of On Moral Certainty, Justification and
Practice: A Wittgensteinian Perspective (2015).
Neil O’Hara is a Visiting Lecturer at London School of Theology, and an
Independent Scholar, UK. He is the author of Moral Certainty and the
Foundations of Morality (2018).
Nigel Pleasants is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Sociology at the

University of Exeter, UK. He is the author of Wittgenstein and the Idea of
a Critical Social Theory (Routledge, 1999) and recent articles on moral
certainty, moral revolution, slavery and abolition, the Holocaust, and
issues in philosophy of social science.
Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory
Desert Collapses
Why No One Deserves Anything
Stephen Kershnar
Neglected Virtues
Edited by Glen Pettigrove and Christine Swanton
Incomparable Values
Analysis, Axiomatics and Applications
John Nolt
Value Incommensurability
Ethics, Risk, and Decision-Making
Edited by Henrik Andersson and Anders Herlitz
A Philosophical Defense of Misanthropy

Toby Svoboda
The Ethics of Attention

Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil
Silvia Caprioglio Panizza
The Transcendent Character of the Good

Philosophical and Theological Perspectives
Edited by Petruschka Schaafsma
Philosophical Perspectives on Moral Certainty

Edited by Cecilie Eriksen, Julia Hermann, Neil O’Hara, and
Nigel Pleasants
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

com/Routledge-Studies-in-Ethics-and-Moral-Theory/book-series/SE0423
Philosophical Perspectives
on Moral Certainty
Edited by Cecilie Eriksen,

Julia Hermann, Neil O’Hara,
and Nigel Pleasants
First published 2023
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Cecilie Eriksen, Julia
Hermann, Neil O’Hara, and Nigel Pleasants; individual chapters,
the contributors
The right of Cecilie Eriksen, Julia Hermann, Neil O’Hara, and
Nigel Pleasants to be identified as the authors of the editorial
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Eriksen, Cecilie, editor. | Hermann, Julia, 1979- editor. |
O’Hara, Neil (Novelist) editor. | Pleasants, Nigel, 1962- editor.
Title: Philosophical perspectives on moral certainty / edited by
Cecilie Eriksen, Julia Hermann, Neil O’Hara, and Nigel Pleasants.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022035704 | ISBN 9781032006758 (hbk) |
ISBN 9781032015095 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003178927 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Ethics. | Certainty.
Classification: LCC BJ1012 .P4865 2023 | DDC 170--dc23/
eng/20221017
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035704
ISBN: 978-1-032-00675-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-01509-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-17892-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178927
Typeset in Sabon
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Contents
Contributorsix
Acknowledgementsxii
Abbreviationsxiii
1 Introduction: On Moral Certainty 1

NEIL O’HARA, CECILIE ERIKSEN, JULIA HERMANN, AND NIGEL PLEASANTS
2 Socially Disruptive Technologies and Moral Certainty 19

JULIA HERMANN
3 Bedrock Gender 35
DANIELE MOYAL-SHARROCK AND CONSTANTINE SANDIS
4 “The Frightening Thing Is the Uncertainty”: Wittgenstein

on Love and the Desire for Certainty 58
CAMILLA KRONQVIST
5 Unbearable Certainties 76
JOEL BACKSTRÖM
6 Wrong Hinges 98
ANNA BONCOMPAGNI
7 Local Moral Certainty and the Possibility of Cross-Cultural

Understanding 117
NEIL O’HARA
8 A Wittgensteinian Account of Free Will and Moral

Responsibility 132
STEFAN RUMMENS AND BENJAMIN DE MESEL
viii Contents
9 Moral Certainty and Conceptual Deficiency:
A Wittgensteinian Critique of the Moral Fixed
Points Proposal 156
SAMUEL LAVES
10 Moral Certainties – Subjective, Objective, Objectionable? 171

HANS-JOHANN GLOCK
11 Nigel Pleasants on Moral Certainties: A Critical Discussion 192

MARTIN KUSCH
12 Is There an Internal Link between Seeing a Human

and Seeing One to Whom Moral Consideration Is Due? 212
JOSÉ MARÍA ARISO
Index 229
Contributors
José María Ariso obtained his PhD from Complutense University of

Madrid in 2003. He has made research visits to Norwegian and
German universities. Since 2011 he is an Assistant Professor at the
International University of La Rioja. His main line of investigation is
the analysis of Wittgenstein’s later work. He has published a number
of journal articles on Wittgenstein.
Joel Backström is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Helsinki. He is the author of The Fear of Openness: An Essay on
Friendship and the Roots of Morality (Åbo Akademi University Press,
2007), and co-editor of Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). He has published on ethics, Wittgenstein,
and the philosophical dimensions of psychoanalysis.
Anna Boncompagni is an Assistant Professor at the University of
California, Irvine. Her work focuses on Wittgenstein, social epistemol-
ogy, and American pragmatism. Her publications include Wittgenstein
and Pragmatism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Wittgenstein on
Forms of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and “Prejudice in
testimonial justification: A hinge account” (Episteme, 2021).
Hans-Johann Glock is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Zürich. Among his published books are A Wittgenstein Dictionary
(Blackwell, 1996) and A Companion to Wittgenstein (Wiley, 2017,
co-edited with John Hyman). A collection of some of his essays on
Wittgenstein is due to be published under the title Normativity,
Meaning and Philosophy (Anthem Press, forthcoming).
Julia Hermann is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy and Ethics of
Technology and fellow on the NWO-funded research programme The
Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies, University of Twente, the
Netherlands. She is the author of On Moral Certainty, Justification and
Practice: A Wittgensteinian Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
x Contributors
Camilla Kronqvist is University Lecturer in Philosophy and Global Ethics
at Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland. She is the co-editor of
two anthologies on emotion and ethics in Wittgenstein’s philosophy
(Emotions and Understanding: Wittgensteinian Perspectives,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 and Ethics and the Philosophy of Culture:
Wittgensteinian Approaches, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013)
and has published several articles on love from a Wittgensteinian
perspective.
Martin Kusch is a Professor of Applied Philosophy of Science and
Epistemology at the University of Vienna. His published books
include Psychologism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Philosophical
Knowledge (Routledge, 1995); A Sceptical Guide to Meaning and
Rules: Defending Kripke’s Wittgenstein (Acumen, 2006); and
Relativism in the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge University
Press, 2020). He is currently writing a book on Wittgenstein and
relativism.
Samuel Laves is a doctoral candidate at NOVA University of Lisbon,
Portugal. His research focuses on the concept of moral certainty and
attempts to bring recent insights from research on Wittgensteinian
moral epistemology into contemporary debates in metaethics. He
has published a number of journal articles on Wittgenstein and
ethics.
Benjamin De Mesel is an Assistant Professor at RIPPLE (Research in
Political Philosophy and Ethics Leuven), KU Leuven, Belgium. His
current research centres around responsibility theory. He is the author
of The later Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy (Springer, 2018) and
co-editor (with Oskari Kuusela) of Ethics in the wake of Wittgenstein
(Routledge, 2019).
Daniele Moyal-Sharrock is a Professor in Philosophy at the University of
Hertfordshire, UK. Much of her work focuses on what she calls “the
Third Wittgenstein”: the post-Investigations works, particularly On
Certainty. Her publications include Understanding Wittgenstein’s
On certainty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Certainty in Action:
Wittgenstein on Language, Mind and Epistemology (Bloomsbury
Academic, 2021). She is President of the British Wittgenstein
Society.
Neil O’Hara is a Visiting Lecturer at London School of Theology,
and an Independent Scholar, United Kingdom. He is the author
of Moral Certainty and the Foundations of Morality (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018).
Stefan Rummens is a Professor of Political Philosophy at the Institute
of Philosophy at KU Leuven, Belgium. His research mainly concerns
Contributors xi
democratic theory with a particular focus on populism and
deliberative democracy. In addition, he has a long-standing interest in
Wittgenstein and the problem of free will.
Professor Constantine Sandis is a Professor of Philosophy and a
Founding Director of Lex Academic and a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Arts. He is the author of The Things We Do and Why We Do
Them (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Character and Causation:
Hume’s Philosophy of Action (Routledge, 2019), as well as the editor
or co-editor of over a dozen volumes.
Acknowledgements
Julia Hermann’s work on this book is part of the research programme

Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies, which is funded through the
Gravitation programme of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture,
and Science and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research
(NWO grant number 024.004.031).
Abbreviations
CV Wittgenstein, L. (1998) Culture and Value. Oxford: Blackwell

Publishers Ltd.
LC Wittgenstein, L. (1966) Lectures and Conversations on
Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. C. Barrett (ed.).
Oxford: Blackwell.
LE Wittgenstein, L. (1965) “A Lecture on Ethics”, The
Philosophical Review 74: 3–12.
LFW Wittgenstein, L. (1993) “Lectures on Freedom of the Will”, in
J. C. Klagge and A. Nordmann (eds.), Philosophical
Occasions 1912–1951, Indianapolis, IN & Cambridge:
Hackett Publishing, 429–444.
LW Wittgenstein, L. (1982) Last Writings on the Philosophy of
Psychology. Volume 2. Oxford: Blackwell.
OC Wittgenstein, L. (1974) On Certainty. G. E. M. Anscombe and
G. H. von Wright (eds.). Oxford: Blackwell.
PI Wittgenstein, L. (2009) Philosophical Investigations. 4th
edition. P. M. S. Hacker and J. Schulte (eds). Oxford:
Blackwell.
PPO Wittgenstein, L. (2003) Public and Private Occasions. Lanham
et al.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
RFM Wittgenstein, L. (1978) Remarks on the Foundations of
Mathematics. Oxford: Blackwell.
RPP Wittgenstein, L. (1980) Remarks on the Philosophy of
Psychology. Volume I. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
TLP Wittgenstein, L. (1993) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
WN Wittgenstein, L. (2016) Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Nachlass (edited by the Wittgenstein Archives at the
University of Bergen under the direction of Alois Pichler).
Bergen: Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen.
http://wittgensteinonline.no/
xiv Abbreviations
WVC Wittgenstein, L. (1979) Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle.
Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann.
B. McGuinness (ed.). New York: Harper and Row Publishers.
Z Wittgenstein, L. (1981) Zettel. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H.
von Wright (eds.). Oxford: Blackwell.
1 Introduction
On Moral Certainty
Neil O’Hara, Cecilie Eriksen,
Julia Hermann, and Nigel Pleasants
If the concept of certainty seems least at home anywhere it is in moral-

ity. Moral problems are often hard, sometimes perhaps interminably so.
Even those moral decisions we are most sure of can rarely be described
as “certainly” right, so little is certainly wrong. Those who speak with
certainty in the moral realm are more likely grandstanders, moralists,
virtue signallers, or just not honest. Moral certainty can sound danger-
ous (MacAskill, Bykvist and Ord 2020, 11–38). But this kind of (mis-
placed) certainty is not what this volume is about. The very fact that
this disclaimer is necessary speaks to the need for greater clarity and
nuanced thinking on an important and useful notion of moral certainty.
In order to lay the groundwork for what follows, in this introduction
we give the background and scope of the idea of moral certainty from
a Wittgensteinian standpoint and rehearse some of the debate to this
point. Philosophical debates on the notion(s) of moral certainty have
their roots in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s more general discussion of “cer-
tainty”, found in the notes published posthumously as On Certainty.1 In
those notes, Wittgenstein begins to sort through the various ways and
contexts in which we manifest “certainty” (“Gewißheit”) or things that
“stand fast” for us.2 What he is looking for is something different from
mere assurance. Taking his lead from the work of his Cambridge con-
temporary and sometime friend G. E. Moore (1939, 1959), Wittgenstein
considers Moore’s claim that he knows that he has two hands. He
observes that the use of the word “know” is inappropriate in such a case
because, for one thing, knowing implies the possibility of verification.
1 The theme of certainty appears elsewhere in his work but is most fully discussed in
On Certainty. Another less influential source for work on moral certainty has been
K.E. Løgstrup’s work (see, for example, Lagerspetz [1998]; O’Hara [2018]; Eriksen
[2020a]).
2 In the original German the term for certainty is “Gewißheit”, and the phrase is “es
steht (für mich) fest”. See for example, OC, §425, §620, §194, §86, §308, §337, §253
and §116, §125, §144, §151, §152, §234, §235; cf. Moyal-Sharrock (2005, 208).
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178927-1
2 Neil O’Hara, Cecilie Eriksen, Julia Hermann, and Nigel Pleasants
But what would we take as evidence, how might we conclusively verify
the existence of our own hands?
If a blind man were to ask me “Have you got two hands?” I should
not make sure by looking. If I were to have any doubt of it, then I
don’t know why I should trust my eyes. For why shouldn’t I test my
eyes by looking to find out whether I see my two hands? What is to
be tested by what?
(OC, §163)
However, it is equally inappropriate to say we don’t know that we have

two hands – of what could we be more sure! This leads to Wittgenstein
distinguishing between knowing something (where that knowledge
can be tested, justified, doubted) and something being certain.3 Such
certainties include, for Wittgenstein, the familiar Moorean examples
that one has hands, that one has a body, that “the earth is more than a
few minutes old”, etc. (cf. for example, OC, §1, §84, §244).
What has the foregoing got to do with morality? Writers on moral
certainty typically begin by observing that in On Certainty, Wittgenstein
doesn’t consider any examples of moral beliefs, practices, actions,
or propositions. The idea of moral certainty emerged from the work
of pioneering studies such as those by Goodman (1982), Lichtenberg
(1994), Timmons (1999), Kober (1997), and Arrington (2002). These
philosophers sought to extend Wittgenstein’s seminal reflections on
certainty by exploring the possibility of moral certainties in human
thinking and acting. Goodman, who seems to have been the first to do
this, argued that “some moral activity, and the associated moral judg-
ments are … as much a prototype of our way of thinking as is the belief
that the world has existed for more than the last five minutes” (1982,
145). Later, Nigel Pleasants coined the phrase “basic moral certainty”
and proposed two central contenders for basic moral certainties – “the
wrongness of killing” (2008, 255; 2009, 671) and “the badness of death”
(2008, 257; 2009, 671).4 While the latter has been less fully discussed,
the wrongness of killing and its status as a basic certainty have become
central in recent philosophers’ exploration of the notion of basic moral
certainty.
3 Kim van Gennip (2008, 124) points out that this distinction dates back to
Wittgenstein’s work in the 1930s.
4 Though Pleasants would now acknowledge that if the latter is moral certainty at all,
it is so in a different way to the former, that is, it is morally bad, but not wrong. Nor
would he proffer it as an instance of moral certainty. That said, it is, in Pleasants’
view, the bad-making fact that makes killing wrong.
Introduction 3
1.1 Justifying our most basic moral beliefs
Consider the following imaginary conversation:
N: I’m struggling for money at the moment.

P: Well, you get on really well with the nice elderly lady next door. You
shop for her, sit and have tea with her. Perhaps she would consider
lending you some money?
N: That is a fine idea. But I don’t think she will do that. Though, instead
of borrowing, perhaps I should simply kill her. Then I can take all
the money I want.
P: Are you mad? You can’t do that!
N: Why not?
P: Because it’s wrong!
N: Really, what makes it wrong?
P: The killing, of course!
N: Why is killing wrong?
P: Well, because it’s taking the most precious thing from another per-
son, taking their life.
N: So it’s a form of stealing. But people say stealing is less wrong than
killing, so how can killing be wrong because it’s stealing?
P: Yes, you’re right, killing is more wrong than stealing.
N: So why is killing wrong?
P: Well … if you don’t know I can’t explain it to you!
We can’t imagine having such a conversation in earnest, at least without

suspecting the doubter of making a sinister joke, being in some sense
pathological, or “only doing philosophy” (OC, §467). As in the case of
having two hands, we seem to know the wrongness of killing in such a
way that further explanation and justification of it seem out of place, if
not impossible.
Nonetheless, as Pleasants points out, many philosophers have tried, and
continue to try, to explain the wrongness of killing. But after surveying
such philosophical explanations, he concludes that they amount to no
more than “gross pseudo-explanations … such theories are either tautol-
ogies dressed up as explanations, or utterly banal (under)- statements of
the blatantly obvious” (2008, 260). Do we really explain the wrongness
of killing by calling it, for example, “the ultimate form of theft” (Sumner
1976, 162)? Why then is theft wrong? Or we might say killing “is wrong
when and because it is murder, which is a species of injustice” (Ewin 1972,
139). But this, too, begs the question about the wrongness of injustice.5
5 Also, something being unjust or unfair can, like theft, sometimes be a very mild
wrong; these descriptors no more capture the essence of the wrongness of killing than
does theft.
So we seem to have a philosophical impasse: Our most deeply
held moral beliefs (surely the wrongness of killing is such) cannot be
explained or justified. We cannot give reasons for holding them; so we
cannot give reasons to act on them. This result seems to be of more
than purely philosophical import. To be sure, we can, and do, get along
morally without posing or answering these difficulties about explana-
tion and justification. But it does seem, to invoke Kant’s phrase on the
knowability of the external world, something of a scandal.6 The notion
of basic moral certainty, for some of those who write on it, provides an
explanation or dissolution of the seeming paradox between the unjus-
tifiability of our basic moral beliefs and their unshakeable certainty. It
does so in a way that does not depict “basic moral certainty” as words
that have mere psychological force but by showing that our practices and
language-games in which we talk about and react to wrongful killings
are beyond the possibility of doubt.
1.2 Four debates on moral certainty

The way we have formulated the notion of moral certainty will not be
acceptable to all, indeed not even to all the contributors (or editors!) of
this volume. There is, as with all philosophical debates, nuance, variety,
and disagreement. We will, therefore, in the following, flag what we
discern as the four major themes in debates on the nature of moral
certainty.7
The wrongness of killing

Much of the debate on moral certainty has so far centred around the
key example of the wrongness of killing. It seems, as some protagonists
claim, that if we are certain of anything in the moral world, the act of
killing is taken to be justified in some circumstances, for instance, if it is
the only way to defend oneself against lethal attack. There is debate over
whether killing embryos or non-human animals is justified, but such
debates presuppose the fundamental wrongness of killing in the absence
of justifying circumstances. Or perhaps it is better to say that we, whether
at the cultural or simply the human level, have some shared certain-
ties around the wrongness of killing. Pleasants’ 2008 and 2009 papers,
6 In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant (2007, Bxxxix) writes that it “remains a scandal
to philosophy and to human reason in general that the existence of things outside
us … must be accepted merely on faith”, which is Moore’s motivation for seeking
empirical certainty.
7 One central debate not dealt with here is the one that centres around the nature of
“the moral” (see, for example, Crary [2005, 275–6, 285–7]; Pleasants [2008, 242];
Manhire [2022, 47–52]).
Introduction 5
which galvanised the debate, defended this example. Since then, many
have responded directly to his presentation of the issues (for example,
Burley [2010]; Brice [2013]; Rummens [2013]; Fairhurst [2019]; Ariso
[2020]; Laves [2021]; and Martin Kusch’s and Hans-Johann Glock’s
contributions to this volume). These responses (except perhaps Burley’s)
have focused on doubt about the scope of this certainty (do all humans/
societies share this moral certainty?) and its generality (is it right to say
that killing as such is wrong?). That is to say, both the extension and the
content of this putative basic moral certainty are debated.
Yet this uncertainty about boundaries and possible outliers should
not draw our attention away from two fundamental facts – unshakeable
certainty over the wrongness of killing is core to our moral selves, and
most humans take it, in some form, for granted. There is no culture in
human history that has not had some prohibitions around killing and
has not taken it seriously.8
Universalism/relativism: Do we all have the same

moral certainties?
The second debate to be identified is about the extension of moral
certainties – do they hold for everybody, or are they all relative in some
sense?9 While some authors take some objects of moral certainty to
“stand fast” for all morally competent agents (for example, Lichtenberg
[1994, 183]; Hermann [2015, 107]; Pleasants [2015, 210 and passim];
O’Hara [2018, 100–6]), others regard all of them as relative to particu-
lar communities at particular times and places, and greatly variable in
what does and doesn’t count as wrongful/legitimate killing (for exam-
ple, Kober [1997, 365]). Against the more universalistic interpretation of
moral certainty, critique has been offered by both Robert Greenleaf Brice
(2013) and Stefan Rummens (2013). Neither wants to affirm outright
relativism regarding our moral certainties, but both have strong reser-
vations about the possibility of them standing fast for all of humanity.
8 Even in non-human animals that share our social proclivities we see a concern for
who may or may not be killed and when – out and out psychopathy is just as out
of place in a wolf-pack as in any human community. We are not making the claim
that non-human animals have moral certainties but simply pointing out that even
some non-human animals share an aversion to killing members of their own species.
See Midgley (1991, 7), where she points out that “social traits like parental care,
co-operative foraging and reciprocal kindness show plainly that such creatures [social
birds and mammals – authors’ insertion] are not in fact crude, exclusive egoists, but
beings who have evolved the strong and special motivations needed to form and main-
tain a simple society”.
9 Stefan Rummens (2013, 137–41) notes and critically discusses some relativistic read-
ings of On Certainty in general, such as Kober (1997) and Colby (1999).
For Rummens, moral certainty must be limited in extension because
doubt can only arise within practices. In explaining this distinction, he
says,
I propose to use the term “basic certainties” in reference to basic

certainties simpliciter and use the term “hinges of the language
game L” to refer to basic certainties as relativised to the language
game L.
(ibid., 141)10
“Basic certainties” then “cannot be meaningfully doubted in any

framework or language game” (ibid.). This sets up an opposition
between universal (or, for Rummens, perhaps “exceptionless”) moral
certainties and relativised ones. And for Rummens, the former cate-
gory is empty – there are no defensible examples. Part of the reason for
this lies in differences between empirical and moral certainties, and
how they are (or are not) capable of constraining our behaviour. For
example, though we may not (successfully) violate the basic certainty
that “Humans cannot fly”, we may so violate our moral certainty on
the wrongness of killing. Also key in the critique of indubitable and/
or universal moral certainty are issues of the variety of human moral
systems, and the fact that so many exceptions may be made for our
certainties around, say the wrongness of killing – it isn’t at all certain
that we may not kill in war, in self-defence (indeed, most think this is
permissible), in capital punishment, etc. To these, and to Rummens’
critique, we will return below.
To continue our sketch of the positions taken regarding the exten-
sion of moral certainty, we should mention what we might call “mixed
models”. Moyal-Sharrock has argued that basic certainties in general
come in both universal and local varieties. The distinction is between
“universal hinges” that “delimit the universal bounds of sense for
us” and “certainties” that “constitute the underlying framework of
knowledge for all or only some human beings at a given time” (Moyal-
Sharrock 2004, 102–3 – authors’ italics).11 O’Hara in particular has
applied this distinction to the debate on moral certainty with the aim
of addressing the question of moral relativism.12 He argues that moral
relativism is often motivated by two key factors, “the possibility of
interminable moral disagreement” and “the existence of significant
variation between moral systems” (2018, 173–4). That is to say, inter-
cultural moral disagreement is real and sometimes irresolvable, and
10 The precise meaning of the basic terms is still a matter for debate, which adds to the
difficulty of the discussion. We make no effort here, though, to standardise the terms.
11 “Hinge” here refers to what we generally call “certainty”.
12 See O’Hara (2018, chaps 4 & 5 and 173–80).
Introduction 7
this leads some to affirm (cultural) moral relativism. But the mixed
model of local and universal moral certainties gives a way, so he argues,
of understanding “deep disagreement” about morality without taking
this step into relativism.13
Getting a sense of the scope of positions on this can help us see the
potential, and potential limitations, the concept of moral certainty has
for tackling some difficult problems in moral philosophy. Can it help us
tackle global moral scepticism? Can it help us deal with moral relativism?
Contextualist versus foundationalist frameworks

Our next point of disagreement is between contextualist and founda-
tionalist understandings of moral certainty. This debate draws on a
wider one in hinge epistemology (the movement in epistemology which
seeks to extend the use and understanding of the notion of hinges/basic
certainties) but extends into that on moral certainty. The issue arises
from attempts to solve the problem of justificatory regress. If we assume
that “justification can only be conferred by a belief which is itself justi-
fied”, then a problem quickly arises: “If a belief B is inferentially justified
by a belief B2 , and B2 by a further belief B3 and so on, then the threat of
an infinite justificatory regress seems to be lurking” (Hermann 2015, 9).
Within the discussion of basic certainty, the different solutions revolve
around whether there is “a class of special beliefs for which the demand
for justification does not arise” (ibid., 13). Broadly speaking, foundation-
alist approaches see moral certainties (and basic certainties in general)
precisely as this kind of “special class of belief”.14 For the foundation-
alist in this debate, moral certainties are a special kind of belief or atti-
tude that, either for all or for some, are immune from the possibility of
doubt. In this way, perhaps, it is more “theoretical” than the contextu-
alist counterpart, in that it posits a specific kind of item underlying our
epistemological makeup.
For the contextualists, on the other hand, and Hermann in particu-
lar, the problem of moral regress cannot be solved by theory but rather
should be dissolved in characteristic Wittgensteinian fashion. This dis-
solution comes in the form of realising, first, that putative doubt needs a
reason to serve as real doubt (OC, §450). This then leads us to see that,
the process of justifying an assertion comes to an end when either

the person defending the assertion or the one uttering doubts runs
out of reasons. As soon as the doubter has no reason for further
13 See O’Hara’s contribution to this volume for further discussion.

14 Whether basic certainties qualify as beliefs is controversial. Some commentators,
such as Pleasants (2018, 584 n61), see basic certainties as akin to aliefs rather than
beliefs.
doubt, the asserter does not have to provide any more reasons for
his assertion.
(Hermann 2015, 13)
Justificatory regress is halted by whichever beliefs admit of no justifica-

tion in that context. So a belief which in one place functions as a basic
certainty may in another be open to doubt and rational revision. This
obviates the need to posit a special kind of belief – though Hermann is
open to the possibility that “there may be beliefs that are beyond doubt
in any context” (ibid.).
In moral contexts, this offers another potential way of explaining the
variety of moral beliefs and the interminability of some moral disagree-
ments. In contemporary Western societies, it might, for example, be a
certainty that leaving old people to die in the cold, or senicide in general,
is wrong. But in some situations in Inuit culture, for example, this may
not be the case.15 That which we do not doubt or justify in our cultural
context might be open to doubt and justification by people in other cul-
tural contexts.16
This does not imply, however, that what has the status of a certainty is
in constant flux. For Hermann, the relevant contexts for moral certain-
ties are moral practices. These moral practices have developed over time,
and their certainties can be seen as (provisional) fixed points. Something
that has the status of a moral certainty can lose this status and become
open to doubt, but this does not happen easily, though the history of
moral progress shows some central and important instances of it (cf.
Boncompagni’s contribution to this volume). Other contextualists, such
as Eriksen, point to human biological nature, with our shared basic
reactions, needs, and vulnerabilities, as another example of a stable con-
text for moral certainties (2020b, 90–3). Most humans take great care to
provide their children with food and shelter, displaying a certainty that
not providing them with this will have bad outcomes for the quality of
their life. In some cases, such as the wrongness of killing, it seems that
for this certainty to lose its status, the human condition itself would
have to change fundamentally (cf. Laves’ contribution to this volume). In
other cases, we can imagine how changing circumstances, including the
spreading of a new religious worldview or new technological possibili-
ties (cf. Hermann’s contribution to this volume) would lead to new moral
certainties, for example, the certain wrongness of eating non-human
animals.
15 Cf. for example, “Senilicide and Invalidicide among the Eskimos” by Rolf Kjellström
(1974–5). Cf. also Rachels (2009).
16 Contextual epistemologists would go further than this though and affirm that the
same belief can sometimes act as a basic certainty, sometimes not, even within the
same culture. We return to this briefly below.
Introduction 9
On foundationalist readings, however, basic certainties (or hinges) are
not beliefs like any other, beliefs whose logical status may change with
context. Basic certainties are, for the foundationalist, a discrete collec-
tion of beliefs, or belief-like states, of a particular logical status. This
may seem to be un-Wittgensteinian in spirit, positing as it does a special
kind of something. But Wittgenstein himself seemingly uses foundation-
alist language in On Certainty in several places, for example, at OC,
§246, §248, and §§401–3. He expresses a foundationalist perspective
most concisely at OC, §253 – “At the foundation of well-founded belief
lies belief that is not founded”.17
One reason for positing a special class of belief, rather than a special
kind of treatment of ordinary beliefs, is that there are in fact some (moral)
beliefs that appear to be exceptionlessly indubitable. This possibility is
usefully discussed, for our purposes, by Jonathan Dancy (2007) in his
defence of moral particularism (though he did not write on the topic of
“moral certainty”). Dancy wants to show that there are no necessary
moral principles. In order to do this, he argues that all moral reasons
can shift valence – a wrong-making reason in one context may become
morally neutral or right-making in another. A nice example Dancy gives
is about an action’s lawfulness:
That there is a law against a certain sort of action normally gives us

some moral reason not to do actions of that sort; but sometimes it
might do exactly the opposite. Many in the pioneering days of the
New World thought that the laws curtailing hunting were ones that
it was important to break.
(2007, 773)
But despite the fact that moral reasons can almost always shift valence
(that is, moral atomism is false), there remain examples of what Dancy
calls “invariant reasons” (ibid.). These are moral reasons that always
count either for or against a certain action. So Dancy concedes that,
many people [including himself – authors’ insertion] are convinced

that there are at least some invariant moral reasons. It may be, for
instance, that it is always wrong, so far as that goes, to torture a
baby, even if in terrible circumstances that might be the thing we
should do, all things considered.
(ibid.)18
17 Though see, for example, Michael Williams (2005).

18 During an interview on the radio programme Philosophy Bites, Dancy also cites “the
wrongness of killing a baby at a football match because one is bored” as an invariant
(moral) reason.
Our aim here is not to take issue with moral particularism but simply
to contend that even while defending the position that (almost) noth-
ing need always be morally certain, we cannot sensibly deny that some
moral beliefs remain indubitable. Even within his moral particularism,
Dancy must allow room for these “invariant reasons”.
However, this does not get us to moral certainty, at least as founda-
tionalists have it. These immovable moral beliefs, cited by Dancy, do
seem beyond doubt. But they hardly play a serious justificatory role in
our moral thinking as a whole! Moral certainties, understood as a spe-
cial class of belief, need to be both indubitable (which is not to say they
must be true [for the realist] or unchangeable [for the non-realist]) and
foundational. This is where the purported moral certainty regarding
the wrongness of killing becomes important in the debate. If anything
is going to be both indubitable and foundational for us, it seems that
some kind of belief about wrongful killing is the most compelling can-
didate. This is because so much of our moral thinking would be unin-
telligible if killing as such isn’t wrong, and seems to rely fundamentally
on the notion that killing other human beings (without justifying rea-
son) is wrong.
Returning to the debate between contextualists and foundational-
ists, we want to make one more, potentially conciliatory, remark. If we
allow for a distinction between local and universal basic certainties,
then the gap between contextualist and foundationalist positions is not
as great as might otherwise have been thought. With some morally cer-
tain beliefs, doubt seems unintelligible tout court (we have discussed
some examples above). But other morally certain beliefs seem to oper-
ate only within particular communities, at particular times. To take
an example from O’Hara’s contribution to this volume, the wrongness
of using pig’s blood in cultic settings is not something we all take for
granted – but in Second Temple Judaism, it had the status of a moral
certainty.19 This helps to show that the foundationalist does not need
to posit a single group of exceptionless indubitable beliefs held to by
all of humanity. Context plays an inescapable role. But for the foun-
dationalist this is at the cultural level. So a hinge in one culture may
be dubitable moral knowledge in another. But this is not fully fledged
contextualism because, within the orbit of a particular culture, hinges
always function as such while the culture as a whole so holds them.
That is to say, within a particular culture, a hinge belief, say in the
wrongness of pig sacrifice, will not be open to doubt. 20
19 Cf. O’Hara (2018, 118–27).

20 O’Hara looks at the possible relationship between those holding different local moral
certainties in his contribution to this volume.
Introduction 11
Propositional versus non-propositional accounts
Our last area of divergence in accounts of moral certainty is that
between propositional and non-propositional views. Large parts of
this debate are inspired by the more general one on the nature of
so-called “epistemic hinges” (see, for example, Prichard [2012, 261]).
In the epistemic debate, there is a dichotomy between those who see
basic epistemic certainties as contentful propositions that have a
particular logical status (for example, Annalisa Coliva and Michele
Palmira [2020]) and those who take a more enactive approach to cer-
tainty (for example, Avrum Stroll [1994]; Daniele Moyal-Sharrock
[2005]). For the former, the nature of certainty is sentential, con-
tentful, and linguistic. One is certain, for example, when uttering
or entertaining the proposition “I have a body” that the proposition
is true (see also Laves’ contribution in this volume for a critical dis-
cussion of the view that there are “basic moral propositions that are
conceptual truths”, and which form the “foundation for any moral
system”).
From the enactive point of view, certainty is not – or not only –
propositional beliefs that “stand fast” for us, but something that is man-
ifest in action. From this perspective, certainty is:
akin to something not of the order of justification, reason or thought,

but of the order of thoughtlessness, automatism or animality …
Hinge certainty is not a form of life, but a kind of animal, unrea-
soned, unhesitating belief. A belief that cannot meaningfully be
said, but only enacted, exhibited, shown.
(Moyal-Sharrock 2005, 98)
We might take as examples reaching out to catch a falling apple while

entertaining no doubt as to its solidity or reality or putting one’s keys
in a drawer without worrying that they might disappear when one no
longer sees them. In these instances, one is certain that the apple is real
and that the keys will not simply disappear. One’s certainty is consti-
tuted by the way one acts towards these things. An often-cited dictum of
Wittgenstein’s on this point is OC, §204:
Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; -

but the end is not certain propositions’ striking us immediately as
true, that is, it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting,
which lies at the bottom of the language-game.
Against this, in terms of exegesis of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, there are

many places in On Certainty where propositions are presented as the
objects of certainty. This is memorably the case at OC, §96:
It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empiri-
cal propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such
empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this
relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and
hard ones became fluid.
(OC, §96 [authors’ italics])
This is not the place to rehearse the more general debate any further.
But in speaking of moral certainty, the issue of the propositionality or
otherwise of certainties takes on some characteristic features.
One place where this is so is the allegedly highly conceptual nature of
our moral thinking. This tells against a purely enactive understanding
of hinges. Brice’s critique of Pleasants is relevant here. While Brice is
criticising the view that hinge beliefs are “natural” as opposed to cul-
turally inculcated, his arguments are also relevant for discussing the
propositional/non-propositional nature of hinges, which he does not
address. We are here using his arguments in service of the latter purpose.
Moral certainties, says Brice, and particularly our certainties around the
wrongness of killing, rely on some pretty thick concepts. This includes
concepts such as “innocence” and “person” (presuming our certainty is
something like “It is wrong to kill innocent persons”). However,
our comprehension of concepts like innocent and person only make

sense (only take on meaning) within a form of life. Wittgenstein
is surely right that “it is difficult to think, or try to think, really
honestly about your life and other people’s lives”; it is almost impos-
sible to do so outside of a form of life. In time [our belief about
the wrongness of killing innocents – authors’ insertion] may become
certain, but it is only through repetition and positive reinforcement
within a culture that this can occur.
(2013, 480)
This leads Brice to conclude that basic certainties cannot be natural – we

are not born with them. 21 But we could equally well say that this tells
against the non-propositional nature of moral certainties. Surely such
thick concepts as virtue, justice, fairness, or kindness need some kind of
propositional framework if they are to be understood? If we can be sure
of the fairness of equal distribution of resources, or the virtuousness of
courage, then a purely enactive understanding of moral certainty seems
to lack the conceptual equipment to explain this.
Philosophers who take a more enactive approach to moral certainty
argue that it manifests itself in what we do. Against the admittedly highly
21 See José Ariso’s contribution to this volume for further discussion of this topic, where
he criticises O’Hara’s view that basic moral certainty is natural rather than purely
inculcated.
Introduction 13
conceptual nature of human moral thinking, we could point to examples
of instinctive human behaviour. Eriksen suggests the following case:
A small child trips, falls from the sidewalk and is hit by a car. His
father runs to him, attends to his wounds, calms him and calls an
ambulance. In this situation there is certainty and blind, instinctive
reaction. Certainty that there is pain. Certainty that the right thing
to do is to tend to the person in pain.
(Eriksen 2020b, 105)
Even though an observer can of course describe this situation, intro-

ducing a debate on “propositions” and “propositional content” to con-
ceptualise what is going on in such a case seems otiose, and places the
scene in an inappropriate distorting light. It would be more illuminating
to point to similar behaviour in other social animals, involving care,
concern, or loyalty, as when a dog cares for its young or for a grieving
human, where such behaviour is clearly of a non-propositional char-
acter. Eriksen would argue that some of our most fundamental moral
behaviours do not require us to be able to formulate propositions and
that we express such moral certainty, for example, when we display “a
primitive reaction to tend, to treat, the part that hurts when someone
else is in pain” (Z, §540).
In any case, both sides of the propositional/non-propositional divide
are represented in the chapters of this volume.
1.3 Guide to the themes and contributions to this volume

Chapters 2 and 3 reflect upon the notion of moral certainty in the context
of two recent developments: technological developments and the strug-
gle for recognition of trans people. Hermann relates her Wittgenstein-
inspired account of moral certainty to recent work on socially disruptive
technologies and the phenomenon of technosocial disruption. In a
complex interplay with other factors, technologies such as artificially
intelligent systems and robots challenge norms, practices, and concepts
that play a fundamental role in human life. Hermann argues that tech-
nosocial disruption involves the disruption of moral certainty and that
we should refine our notion of moral certainty by integrating the idea
of technological mediation. She discusses two examples of contexts in
which technological developments challenge moral agency at the most
fundamental level, the level of moral certainty: practices of elderly care
in which care robots are being introduced and parenting practices in
light of the development of an artificial womb.
Daniele Moyal-Sharrock and Constantine Sandis explore the
“unswerving conviction” (Whittle 2015) of trans people that they
incorrigibly know their own gender. This conviction has been deemed
unreliable because non-biological by trans exclusionary philosophers.
But Moyal-Sharrock and Sandis argue that this conviction has the “ani-
mal” nature of Wittgenstein’s bedrock certainty. While this certainty
is in itself non-moral, its being an indubitable part of one’s personal bed-
rock gives it an existential quality which should make it morally unques-
tionable by others. This isn’t to say that we need to be certain about our
own gender to earn the right not to be questioned about it, but it at least
moves the unquestionability of gender from something that is an exclu-
sively cis prerogative to one that is equally a trans prerogative.
Chapters 4 and 5 consider moral certainty in the context of the rich-
ness of human moral life. Camilla Kronqvist addresses how a form of
existential uncertainty and doubt can contribute to our understand-
ing of what is morally certain in the context of love. Considering
Wittgenstein’s own difficulties of confronting the facts of his life and
love for Ben Richards, Kronqvist discusses how they relate to what Lars
Hertzberg (1983) calls “the indeterminacy of the mental”, and how this
indeterminacy contributes to what role courage, trust, and faith may
have in gaining knowledge of oneself and another in a loving relation-
ship. Connecting Wittgenstein’s ways of despairing about the meaning
of his own or Richards’ words to some of his explicit remarks on cer-
tainty and love in the context of religious faith, Kronqvist then considers
how “the certainty of this ‘taking-for-true’” relates to the certainties
discussed in On Certainty, and to moral certainty.
Joel Backström elaborates a conception of the core difficulty of moral
life, according to which moral certainty is not hard to find but hard to
take. Moral life is structured by unresolved tensions manifest in a perva-
sive ambivalence of moral responses and beliefs, created by our attempts
to deny something between us – a longing and concern – that will not
go away but that also appears somehow unbearable. Various aspects of
the dynamics involved are considered, focusing on how, when we wrong
each other, we cannot fully admit this and face our own destructive-
ness. The chapter discusses spurious justifications and disowned respon-
sibility for destructive actions and examines how the need to hide our
destructiveness deforms our use of moral language and deadlocks moral
debate. It also considers what it means to tell truthful moral understand-
ing from self-deceptive rationalisation.
Chapters 6 and 7 consider the notion of moral certainty in the light
of moral change and differences across cultures. Anna Boncompagni
introduces the notion of what she calls “wrong hinges”. It is sometimes
argued that in cases of deep disagreement, when confronted with a dif-
ferent view, one is not rationally mandated to revise one’s convictions
(the “asymmetry view”). Boncompagni critically assesses Chris Ranalli’s
use of hinge epistemology to defend the asymmetry view in the moral
domain. She argues that while this is unproblematic for largely basic and
shared moral hinges, it can raise troublesome questions if we are dealing
Introduction 15
with wrong hinges. History shows that moral standards change and that
some deeply entrenched practices and convictions considered obviously
morally acceptable in the past later turned out to be wrong, and what
was then experienced as moral certainty is now seen to have been severe
moral prejudice. Boncompagni argues that moral change presents a chal-
lenge to the asymmetry view based on hinge epistemology. She examines
some existing responses to the challenge, which she finds inadequate,
and proposes an alternative view based on a more nuanced notion of
moral hinges.
O’Hara addresses the possibility of cross-cultural moral understand-
ing. He points to some reasons for thinking that mutual moral under-
standing is possible, even if some local moral beliefs are beyond rational
doubt in their cultural contexts. He argues that, though we may not
always be able to believe with local-certainty-believers, some significant
level of understanding is possible. He also explores the limits of such
understanding and concludes that we must necessarily be outsiders vis-à-
vis particular moral communities if local moral certainties are at stake.
Chapters 8 and 9 develop Wittgensteinian arguments in relation to
two fundamental and longstanding philosophical problems: the prob-
lem of free will and the problem of scepticism. Rummens and De Mesel
deal with the challenge to the existence of free will and moral respon-
sibility that is raised by the threat of determinism, drawing upon a
Wittgensteinian perspective. Their argument starts by briefly recapitu-
lating Wittgenstein’s analysis of the practice of doubt in On Certainty.
They subsequently turn to the problem of free will and argue that the
existence of free will is a basic certainty and that the thesis of determin-
ism fails to cast doubt on it. They thereby make use of – but also try to
go beyond – Wittgenstein’s remarks in his “Lectures on Freedom of the
Will”. In the final section of the chapter, they focus more explicitly on
moral responsibility, inspired by P. F. Strawson’s work on free will and
moral responsibility, which they take to be deeply Wittgensteinian. They
argue that our practices of holding each other responsible manifest basic
human certainties which cannot be meaningfully challenged by invok-
ing the thesis of determinism.
Sam Laves provides a Wittgensteinian critique of Terence Cuneo
and Russ Shafer-Landau’s novel and influential answer to the problem
of moral scepticism: the proposal that there are “moral fixed points”.
Cuneo and Shafer-Landau propose that there is a substantive group of
basic moral propositions that are conceptual truths. These propositions
fix the boundaries of moral thought and provide a foundation for any
minimally eccentric moral system. Relying on arguments developed in
the existing literature on the concept of moral certainty, Laves argues
that our deeply held moral convictions are better conceived of as moral
certainties than as conceptual truths. There are some cases where action
is primary to conceptual understanding, and this shows that the concept
of certainty gives us a better way of understanding our most fundamen-
tal moral convictions than Cuneo and Shafer-Landau’s idea of moral
fixed points.
Chapters 10 and 11 critically discuss Pleasants’ work on moral
certainties, while chapter 12 provides a critique of O’Hara’s contribu-
tion to the field. In his contribution, Hans-Johann Glock describes the
idea of moral certainties as venerable, highly contentious, but neverthe-
less alive. He critically assesses what he calls “hinge ethics”, focusing
on Pleasants’ work. Glock’s main objection is not that Wittgensteinian
ideas about certainty cannot be transferred from the domain of physical
phenomena to the moral domain or that moral relativism is true.
Instead, he argues that (i) hinge ethicists propose several views that are
not echt Wittgensteinian, (ii) in so far as morality has foundations, it is
not certainties but capacities, and (iii) at least some of these capacities
are cognitive, a matter of social cognition.
Martin Kusch provides another critical discussion of Pleasants’ work.
He articulates two misgivings about Pleasants’ conception of moral cer-
tainty. The first concerns what he sees as Pleasants’ disregard for the
variety of certainties contemplated in On Certainty and his consequent
failure to appreciate the variety of moral certainties. The second misgiv-
ing relates to the uses to which Pleasants puts his conception of moral
certainties: the critique of relativism and the defence of moral progress
through moral revolutions. Kusch says he is not fully convinced by either
train of thought, and he details his main objections.
Jose Maria Ariso Salgado critically discusses Neil O’Hara’s view that
the source of moral thinking lies in certainties such as the unmediated
experience of seeing other humans as beings to whom moral concern
is due when recognising a person in a human-like face. Firstly, Salgado
argues that the moral concern to which O’Hara refers may sometimes be
replaced by indifference or even hostility. Secondly, he criticises the argu-
ments that lead O’Hara to conclude that moral responding is based on a
biologically grounded aversion to other people’s harm. Thus, Salgado calls
into question the existence of an internal relation between seeing a human
being and seeing someone who deserves moral consideration. In addition,
he wonders whether a moral certainty – understood as the conviction that
moral concern is the right course of action when primary recognition
takes place – can be regarded as certainty in Wittgenstein’s sense.
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2 Socially Disruptive Technologies
and Moral Certainty
Julia Hermann
2.1 Introduction
The work of Wittgenstein has so far received little attention from schol-
ars working in the philosophy of technology, a lacuna recently pointed
out by Mark Coeckelbergh and Michael Funk (Coeckelbergh 2018;
Coeckelbergh and Funk 2018). An exception is Langdon Winner, who
is inspired by Wittgenstein and, borrowing his notion of a form of life,
speaks about “technologies as forms of life” (Winner 1989, 11). In this
chapter, I relate a Wittgenstein-inspired account of moral certainty to
recent scholarship in the philosophy and ethics of technology that stud-
ies the phenomenon of “technosocial disruption”, that is, the disruption
by technology of “social relations, institutions, epistemic paradigms,
foundational concepts, values, and the very nature of human cogni-
tion and experience” (Hopster 2021, 1). Developments in, for instance,
robotics, artificial intelligence, and gene-editing technologies might cre-
ate conditions in which some certainties, both moral and non-moral,
will be challenged and new certainties will emerge. Such technological
developments could affect “our fundamental ways of being and acting
in the world” (Pleasants 2009, 670), which underlie our epistemic and
moral practices and reflect various certainties.
I shall explore ways in which what have been called “socially disrup-
tive technologies” (Hopster 2021) could affect moral agency at its most
fundamental level, the level of moral certainty,1 by considering two dif-
ferent contexts in which technology disrupts moral practices: the intro-
duction of robots in elderly care practices and, at a more speculative
level, the use of ectogestative technology for foetal development. As I
shall argue, those technologies disrupt moral routines, thereby affecting
what moral competence involves in the respective practices and challeng-
ing some of the things that “stand fast” for morally competent agents.
Furthermore, the possibility of moral disruption suggests a refinement
1 I address the disruption of non-moral certainty in Hermann (in preparation).
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178927-2
20 Julia Hermann
of Wittgenstein-inspired accounts of moral certainty: moral certainty
should be understood as being susceptible to technological mediation.
Integrating the idea of the technological mediation of morality into
an account of moral certainty expands the idea of moral certainty by
explicitly situating it in our technological world. The notion of moral
certainty, in turn, can inform accounts of “technosocial disruption”.
In the next section, I briefly present the relationship between moral
certainty and moral competence (Section 2.2). I then introduce the
notions of “socially disruptive technologies” and “technosocial disrup-
tion” as well as the idea that this disruption can go as deep as the level
of moral certainty (Section 2.3). I explore this idea by looking at the
ways in which two different technologies might be technosocially dis-
ruptive in specific contexts: care robots in the context of elderly care and
ectogestative technology in the context of becoming and being a parent.
After briefly explicating the idea that moral certainty should be con-
ceived of as being susceptible to technological mediation (Section 2.4), I
conclude by summarising the main insights of my analysis (Section 2.5).
2.2 Moral certainty and moral competence

Elsewhere (Hermann 2015) I have defended an account of moral
certainty that relates it closely to moral competence. Moral competence
is the result of training, which in turn builds upon natural inclinations
(see Hermann 2015, 138ff.). For morally competent agents, some things
are certain, for example, the moral wrongness of hurting someone for
no reason or the moral praiseworthiness of helping someone in need.
These are the “axes” around which our moral doubts and justifications
turn (see Hermann 2015, 108ff.). Peter Winch (1998, 198) has empha-
sised the fittingness of the metaphor of the axis, as opposed to the hinge
metaphor that has led some interpreters of On Certainty to talk about
certainties in terms of “hinge propositions”. While a hinge is fixed and
exists independently of the motion of the door, an axis is determined by
the movement around it. An axis has “no existence or meaning apart
from the movement” (Winch 1998, 198).
I have argued that moral certainties are acquired during the acqui-
sition of moral competence and manifest themselves in the habitual
actions of morally competent agents. A person who has mastered the
moral language-games of her community usually engages in moral
action habitually, without conscious reflection. Wittgenstein (OC, §510)
illustrates the unreflective character of certainty by means of the way we
take hold of a towel: “It is just like directly taking hold of something,
as I take hold of my towel without having doubts”. This resonates with
the pragmatist view of morality as consisting primarily of practical rou-
tines, first expressed by John Dewey (see Swierstra 2013, 203). I would
argue that such routines are grounded in moral certainty and can be
Socially Disruptive Technologies and Moral Certainty 21
understood as part of the acting that lies at the bottom of our moral
language-games. 2
In my book, I have distinguished different components of that acting:
(i) “primitive reactions to pain or signs of distress, which are non-ver-
bal and instinctive and can also be found among non-human animals”;
(ii) “natural reactions of children and caregivers within the process
of moral teaching and learning (for example, a parent’s expression
of approval and affection in response to good behaviour, the cries of
another child which has been hurt, the child’s reaction to those reac-
tions, and so on)”3; (iii) “the immediate responses of morally compe-
tent agents”, that is, responses that do not involve conscious thought
or explicit decision-making (Hermann 2015, 112). We could say that
(i) and (ii) belong to our first, that is, biological nature, while (iii) belongs
to our second, that is, socialised/encultured nature. Moral certainty is
“partly instinctive and partly the result of enculturation” (ibid., 111). An
example of (i) is provided by Wittgenstein: “In its most primitive form
it [the behaviour towards someone with toothache; J.H.] is a reaction to
somebody’s cries and gestures, a reaction of sympathy or something of
the form. We comfort him, try to help him” (CE, 381).
Elsewhere I have argued for the heterogeneity of Wittgenstein’s
examples of certainty (Hermann 2015, 53f.). Likewise, I take moral cer-
tainty to take different forms. While some moral certainties, such as
the wrongness of killing as such, are universal, others are certainties of
particular groups or those participating in particular practices, such as
care practices. The certainty of caregivers over particular moral respon-
sibilities that they take themselves to have constitutes an example of this.
Rather than thinking of some certainties as being basic while others
are not, I prefer to distinguish between different kinds of certainty. The
reason for this is that I take certainty to be basic per definition. The
moral thinking, feeling, and acting of a caregiver turns around certain-
ties related to his moral obligations in his role of caregiver and related
to what constitutes good care, just as the moral thinking, feeling, and
acting of any morally competent agent turns around the wrongness of
killing as such, and similar certainties.
Moral competence, understood as a complex capacity involving emo-
tional as well as reasoning skills, habits, and dispositions, manifests
2 “Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; - but the end is
not certain propositions’ striking us immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing
on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game” (OC,
§204). I speak about moral language games in the plural to avoid the idea that there
is only one moral language game.
3 It is a “fact of human life” that children can be a nuisance, a fact to which parents
naturally react by expressing displeasure. When their children behave well, parents
naturally express pleasure (Hanfling 2003, 30; see Hermann 2015, 153).
22 Julia Hermann
itself in different contexts or domains. At the most general level, moral
competence is the mastery of moral practices, ranging from treating oth-
ers with respect to justifying an action by reference to moral reasons.
Morally competent agents have mastered numerous overlapping moral
practices, such as the practice of promising and the practice of helping
someone. Moral competence resembles certain practical skills in the way
in which it is acquired: “We become morally competent through moral
training, that is we learn how to act, feel and think morally through
practice” (Hermann 2015, 195).
In concrete contexts, moral competence takes on a more specific form.
For instance, in the context of education, it manifests itself in qualities
such as patience, empathy, and consistency. A morally competent teacher
attends to the individual needs of her pupils, treats her pupils justly, is
patient when a pupil needs more time to understand what she is trying
to teach him, does not favour one pupil over another based on personal
preferences, and so forth. Although not everyone would agree with this
description, I expect it to be widely shared by members of contemporary
Western societies.
2.3 Technosocial disruption and moral certainty:

Two examples
Socially disruptive technologies

The term “socially disruptive technologies” refers to 21st-century tech-
nologies that deeply affect human life, including human being’s relation-
ship to the rest of nature, core institutions of human societies, and the
human condition itself.4 In a complex interplay with other forces, socially
disruptive technologies challenge the status quo, making it impossible to
go on as before. Examples of socially disruptive technologies are artificial
intelligence, robotics, synthetic biology, and solar geo-engineering. The
disruption brought about by socially disruptive technologies “manifests
itself in the overturning of stably entrenched norms, practices, as well as
concepts” (Hopster 2021, 4). It is important to note that a technology
does not in and of itself bring about these effects. Jeroen Hopster coins
the term “technosocial disruption” to denote the disruption by technol-
ogy of “social relations, institutions, epistemic paradigms, foundational
concepts, values, and the very nature of human cognition and experi-
ence” (ibid., 1). Socially disruptive technologies are those technologies
that play a major role in processes of technosocial disruption (ibid.).
Hopster (2021, 6f.) identifies seven criteria for “technosocial disruptive-
ness”: (1) depth of impact, (2) range of impact, (3) valence of impact,
4 See https://www.esdit.nl/
(4) ethical salience of impact, (5) extent of uncertainty, (6) pace of
change, and (7) reversibility of impact. For the purposes of this chapter,
the first and the fifth criterion are the most relevant.
The first criterion – depth of impacts – concerns the impact on “deeply
held beliefs, values, social norms, and basic human capacities” (ibid., 6).
Socially disruptive technologies “affect basic human practices, fundamen-
tal concepts, ontological distinctions, and go to the heart of our human
self-understanding” (ibid.). They provoke different kinds of uncertainty
(fifth criterion): predictive uncertainty, “conceptual ambiguity and contes-
tation, moral confusion, and moral disagreement” (ibid., 7). Below I shall
consider these criteria in relation to care robots and ectogestative technology.
Moral certainty disrupted

Moral certainty constitutes “the very possibility of acting morally or
talking about moral issues” (Kober 1997, 374; see OC, §415). It belongs
to the foundation of our moral language-games (see OC, §403). This
foundation is not static. Wittgenstein’s view of certainty allows for the
possibility that something that is certain loses this status and becomes
subject to doubt and justification. The famous metaphor of the river-
bed (OC, §§96–99) illustrates the dynamic character of certainty. Yet
it also suggests that Wittgenstein envisaged the process in which some-
thing loses or acquires the status of a certainty as slow and sometimes
hardly noticeable. He metaphorically speaks about the riverbank, which
“consists partly of hard rock, subject to no alteration or only an imper-
ceptible one, partly of sand, which now in one place now in another gets
washed away, or deposited” (OC, §99). In light of the pace that techno-
logical development has reached, it seems plausible to assume that this
process can (and likely will) occur faster, and that it can even take the
form of disruption. The implementation of new technologies seems to be
able to shake the ground of the language-game, to cause the foundation
to totter. It could affect our fundamental ways of being and acting in the
world, including our fundamental ways of being and acting morally in
the world. Winner recognised this possibility when he metaphorically
described the development and implementation of new technologies as
the creation of new worlds (1989, 11).
While elsewhere I consider the possible disruption of certainty regard-
ing the empirical world (Hermann, in preparation), this chapter focuses
on moral certainty. In the following, I look at two examples of emerging
technologies that have the potential to disrupt moral certainty. I describe
how, prior to the introduction of the respective technology, moral com-
petence is manifested in those contexts. I then discuss how the tech-
nology (likely) affects the respective practices, which are core human
practices, and how it (likely) contributes to the disruption of moral cer-
tainty in these contexts.
24 Julia Hermann
The use of care robots in elderly care
Joan Tronto’s (1993, 105-37) four phases of a care practice – caring
about, taking care of, care-giving, and care-receiving – and their corre-
sponding moral elements – attention, responsibility, competence, and
responsiveness – express central dimensions of moral competence as it is
expressed in the context of providing care for the elderly. In this context,
moral competence involves being attentive to the needs of the elderly
person one is caring for, taking responsibility for responding to those
needs, and carrying out actions competently to meet these needs. On the
part of the elderly, it involves guiding the caregivers on how to respond
to the needs and thus playing an active role in the relationship. There
must be a reciprocal interaction between caregivers and care-receivers,
as otherwise it could not be determined whether the needs have been met
(van Wynsberghe 2013, 419). For the morally competent caregiver, some
things “stand fast”. He takes it for granted that the elderly persons he is
caring for are worthy of respect and that he must attend to their needs.
His interaction with the elderly shows that it is certain for him that they
have fundamental needs that must be met.
The introduction of care robots does not only provide human caregiv-
ers with technological assistance. It also affects the relationship between
them and the care-receivers, the distribution of moral responsibilities,
and the self-understanding of caregivers. It thus affects what competent
moral agency in the context of care means and what it requires from
the caregivers. Care robots are “robots designed for use in home, hos-
pital, or other settings to assist in, support, or provide care for the sick,
disabled, young, elderly or otherwise vulnerable persons” (Vallor 2011,
252). In elderly care, they are expected to be used primarily: “(1) to assist
the elderly, and/or their carers in daily tasks; (2) to help monitor their
behaviour and health; and (3) to provide companionship” (Sharkey and
Sharkey 2012, 27). Today, there are robots for lifting patients, mobile
remote control telepresence robots that facilitate communication with
family members, and multifunctional robots like “Zora”. Zora is a small
humanoid social robot that can give instructions for daily routines, such
as brushing teeth, fostering patients’ mobility, for example, by dancing
with them, or picking up trash in care facilities (see Niemelä and Melkas
2019).
These robots do not enter care practices that are devoid of technologies.
On the contrary, the context of care is one that is already pervaded by
technology, including, for instance, mechanical beds or heart monitor-
ing devices (van Wynsberghe 2013, 422). Yet, arguably, care robots can
be expected to alter these practices and the relationships in them more
fundamentally. They affect the distribution of moral responsibilities
among the different actors involved, the self-understanding of human
caregivers, and the concept of good care (see Bauer and Hermann,
under review). The care-robot will, upon entering a socio-technical
network, “alter the distribution of responsibilities and roles within the
network as well as the manner in which the practice takes place” (van
Wynsberghe 2013, 412). In the process of redistribution of responsibili-
ties, some responsibilities might be delegated to an artefact (ibid., 418).
As Aimee van Wynsberghe argues, the decision-making of nurses and
patients becomes “a hybrid affair between the nurse/patient and existing
technologies” (ibid.). In the case of a human-operated robot for lifting,
for instance, responsibility and competence become “shared endeavours
between the human and the robot”, and “responsibility for the safety of
the practice becomes a hybrid event between the human care-giver and
the robot” (ibid., 428). Here van Wynsberghe is inspired by Peter-Paul
Verbeek, who argues that moral agency is distributed among humans
and machines and is thus a “hybrid affair” (Verbeek 2014, 77).
At this point a short excursion into the idea of technological mediation
is in order. According to so-called postphenomenologists, technology
mediates human perception and action (Ihde, 1990; Verbeek, 2005). 5 In
everyday practice, the mediating effects of technology are often invisible
or unnoticed by us. We do not see the technology that in fact mediates
how we perceive the world or act in it. Take the simple example of a pair
of glasses. My glasses mediate my visual perception. They also mediate
my actions, for example, the act of cycling to the grocery store or the
act of taking a book out of a bookshelf. The theory of technological
mediation helps to uncover this unnoticed structure. Verbeek expands
Ihde’s postphenomenological theory and argues that both subjects and
objects are constituted in interactions between humans and technology.
He asks us to abandon the idea of an independently constituted sub-
ject that interacts with independently constituted objects (the world
around it), thus rejecting the modernist separation of subject and object.
As Verbeek (2008, 13) formulates it: “What the world ‘is’ and what
subjects ‘are,’ arises from the interplay between humans and reality; the
world humans experience is ‘interpreted reality,’ and human existence is
‘situated subjectivity’”.
As Verbeek has argued, technology also mediates moral agency, which
has become a “hybrid affair” involving both humans and technologies. It
is this idea that van Wynsberghe takes up when she describes the structure
of moral responsibility after the introduction of a care robot. Verbeek
discusses the example of obstetric ultrasound, which does not provide a
neutral “window to the womb” but helps to constitute child and parents
5 Postphenomenologists analyse human-world-relations and “the constitution of sub-

jectivity and objectivity within these relations” (Verbeek 2008, 13). They investigate
“the actual roles of technologies in human experience and existence” (ibid., 11).
26 Julia Hermann
in relation to each other (2008, 15). That technology contributes to the
constitution of the foetus as both a person and a patient (ibid., 15f.). The
foetus is constituted as a person by being presented visually in a way that
makes it appear bigger than it is, and by presenting it independently from
its mother’s body. An 11-week-old foetus, which is about 8.5 cm long and
weighs around 30 g, appears to have the size of a new-born (ibid., 15). It is
constituted as a patient by being presented in terms of medical variables.
The technology has created a “new moral landscape” (Verbeek 2014, 82)
by constituting future parents “as decision-makers regarding the life of
their unborn child” (Verbeek 2008, 17). They must decide whether to
undergo certain screenings and whether to continue or end the pregnancy
based on the results of those screenings. What used to be a matter of fate
becomes a matter of decision. The isolation of the foetus creates a new
relation between mother and unborn, where the mother is increasingly
seen as the (hostile) “environment in which the unborn is living, rather
than forming a unity with it” (ibid.).
The potential impact of care robots is such that it seems justified to
classify them as a socially disruptive technology. I assume that care
robots potentially have far-reaching impact, affecting values such as
touch and trust, basic human capacities such as the capacity to care for
someone, social norms guiding the interaction between the elderly and
their caregivers, and deeply held beliefs about the differences between
humans and machines, the importance of care provided by humans, and
the needs of the elderly. Robots that enter care practices, taking over all
sorts of tasks ranging from lifting people or feeding them to providing
companionship, could affect these practices at a fundamental level by
challenging the meaning of “good care”, and the distinction between
humans and machines. The potential impacts of care robots go to the
heart of our human self-understanding by challenging what we see as
exclusively human capacities (for example, the capacity to take and
provide care) and how we conceive of our relationship to machines.
It is currently widely assumed that good and authentic care can only
be provided by humans. Machines are associated with coldness and
a scenario in which care for the elderly is provided largely by robots
typically takes the form of a doom scenario (see Coeckelbergh 2016,
455, who mentions, for example, a scenario by Sparrow and Sparrow
[2006]). Machines cannot substitute the experience of the human touch,
which can be regarded as an expression of mutual recognition within
a dignified relationship (van Wynsberghe 2016, 416).6 The practice of
6 This is not to deny the experience of coldness in human-human care interactions,

which can surely in part be explained by the dire conditions, including very low sal-
aries, under which caregivers work. I thank Nigel Pleasants for reminding me of the
“cold human being”.
lifting, for instance, is regarded as being conducive to a trusting rela-
tionship between caregivers and care-receivers. It helps to establish a
bond between them, in the absence of which patients might not abide
by their treatment plan, for example, not take their medicine, etc. (van
Wynsberghe 2013, 417, 427). If the task of lifting patients is delegated
to a robot, other ways of establishing a trusting relationship between
human caregivers and care-receivers need to be found (see ibid., 428).
By affecting the exercise of moral competence in practices of care for
the elderly and the self-understanding of human caregivers as morally
competent agents, care robots potentially disrupt moral certainty of what
constitutes good care and what good care requires from human care-
giver. As Swierstra describes the phenomenon of “technology-induced
moral change” (van den Hoven, Lokhorst, and van de Poel 2012, 153),
“technology destabilizes moral routines, which then provokes ethical
reflection and discussion, which then do or do not result in new ethi-
cal answers that re-stabilize into new moral routines” (Swierstra 2013,
203).7 Technology-induced moral change is part of the phenomenon of
“technomoral change”, that is, the co-evolution or co-shaping of tech-
nology and morality (ibid., 205). The implementation of care robots
disrupts the habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting morally in
the context of elderly care that express moral certainty over what one’s
moral obligations are and what constitutes good care.
The changes in how roles and responsibilities are distributed can be
expected to bring about confusion and uncertainty.8 For some time,
human caregivers will probably not know what their roles and responsi-
bilities are. The elderly, in turn, will be uncertain about what to expect
from robots and nurses. Human-robot interaction will be troubled by
miscommunications, false expectations, a lack of orientation, and so
forth, especially if adequate training and knowledge are not sufficiently
provided (Niemelä and Melkas 2019, 191). We can imagine a situation
in which human caregivers are morally confused and disoriented, not
knowing what their responsibilities are and what their role in the care
practice is. They would be doubting what it means to be a good car-
egiver, what good care is, how moral responsibilities are distributed
among themselves and the robots, what they owe to the elderly and what
the moral status of the robots is.
As the decision-making of nurses and the elderly becomes a “hybrid
affair”, the moral self-understanding of caregivers also changes. The
robots do not only mediate the caregivers’ perceptions and actions
but also how caregivers see themselves as moral agents in their role
7 This chapter is a manifestation of such ethical reflection, suggesting that the

de-stabilisation of moral routines is already happening.
8 This paragraph and the following are based on Bauer and Hermann (under review).
28 Julia Hermann
as caregivers. For instance, a nurse might come to understand him-
self as being primarily responsible for making sure that the inter-
actions between the elderly and their care-robots are conducive to the
well-being of the elderly, while in the past he understood himself as
being wholly responsible for securing the elderly’s well-being. This
transition will likely be accompanied by uncertainty and feelings of
distress. As his roles and responsibilities become unclear, the nurse
might undergo an identity crisis. An example of a moral certainty that
is challenged in this context is the certainty of good care being neces-
sarily care provided by humans.
Ectogestative technology
The second example of a socially disruptive technology that I want to
discuss is ectogestative technology (more commonly known as artifi-
cial womb technology), which can potentially disrupt norms, values,
and practices related to the beginning of human life. The term “ecto-
genesis” refers to the “development of placental mammals – specifically
humans – outside the maternal body, where this development would
normally happen inside” (Kingma and Finn 2020, 356). Ectogestative
technology is a technology that facilitates gestation ex utero by “re-
plicating and replacing a biological process” (Romanis 2018, 753).
Scientists are working on such an artificial womb, which would enable
gestation outside of the body of the mother in an environment that
closely resembles the natural womb. At the University of Eindhoven in
the Netherlands, they are developing a first prototype, intended for use
in neonatal intensive care units.9 They expect to have their prototype
ready by the end of this decade, meaning that soon, the first human
embryo might be transferred to an artificial womb. While the scien-
tists involved in that research emphasise that the technology is only
intended as a replacement for the current incubator and will merely be
used for pre-term babies, philosophers, designers, and artists already
contemplate more far-reaching uses of the technology. Though full
ectogenesis,10 that is, the development of a placental mammal happen-
ing entirely outside the maternal womb, might never be possible, we
should use our “technomoral imagination” (Swierstra 2013, 216) to
9 https://www.tue.nl/en/our-university/departments/biomedical-engineering/the-
department/news/news-overview/08-10-2019-multimillion-grant-brings-artificial-
womb-one-step-closer/.
10 We can distinguish full ectogenesis from partial ectogenesis, where the latter refers to
cases where part of the development happens outside the maternal womb, for exam-
ple, if a human foetus were to be transferred into an artificial womb at 24 weeks of
gestation.
reflect upon ways in which ectogenesis, partial or full, could disrupt
fundamental norms, practices, and beliefs.
In the context of becoming and being a parent, moral competence
involves acting in the best interest of the child, providing the care that
a child needs at a particular stage of development, ensuring the child’s
safety, attending to its emotional needs, and so forth. A morally compe-
tent parent doesn’t take his eyes off a child that is playing in the water
and doesn’t yet know how to swim. He makes sure his child eats enough
healthy food, consoles the child when it is hurt, and takes it to the doctor
when the situation requires it, assuming that it is possible for him to do
so. For a morally competent parent, some things are certain. It is certain
for her that she is morally responsible for her child’s well-being and that
neglecting a child is morally wrong. It stands fast for her that she has
the duty to protect her child and ensure that its basic needs are met. In
many societies, one parent, the mother, is taken to have a special rela-
tionship with the child, which gives rise to special rights and duties. An
important theory that defined the institution of motherhood as we know
it in Western societies today is the theory of attachment developed pri-
marily by British psychiatrist John Bowlby in the 1950s. Although faced
with various criticisms over time, many elements of Bowlby’s attachment
theory are still prominent in current Western understandings of what it
means to be a good mother (Ross 2016, 20f.). The theory contributed
significantly to the “now almost commonplace view that good mother-
ing involves selfless, consistent, and continuous care and that adherence
to these prescriptions will lead to children’s healthy personality develop-
ment” (ibid., 18).
Pregnant women and mothers are judged by reference to high stand-
ards. A good mother is expected to make large sacrifices of her own
interests for the sake of her children. What exactly is expected from
mothers differs among and within societies. A widespread expectation
in countries like the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany, for example, is
that mothers breastfeed for at least a certain number of months. Due to
this societal expectation, women put themselves under a lot of pressure
to breastfeed and feel guilty when they are for some reason unable to,
experience it as too burdensome, or do not consider it to be best for the
child. During pregnancy, women are expected to refrain from smoking
and drinking alcohol, to avoid certain foods, such as raw fish and raw
milk cheese, and not to engage in high-risk sports. If a visibly pregnant
woman drinks alcohol in public, she can expect to be openly blamed and
chastised for it. Exactly what pregnant women are supposed to do and
to refrain from differs among societies, but the existence of behavioural
rules related to pregnancy is probably universal.
In relation to the beginning of human life, several things are certain.
It is certain that for each human being, independent life begins at birth,
that the gestation of human foetuses requires a maternal womb, and
30 Julia Hermann
that every human person has once been in her mother’s womb.11 “I have
once been in my mother’s womb” is comparable to “I have never been
far away from the earth” (see OC, §93). As Lynda Ross writes in the
introduction to her book Interrogating Motherhood, “we were all born
of mothers” (2016, 1). Practices and norms around pregnancy and par-
enting also reveal moral certainties, such as certainty over the mother
being the most important person during the first years of a child’s life or
her having the moral duty to be the primary caretaker of her child. These
certainties are not universal but manifest themselves in the practices,
rules, and regulations of many human societies. In the Netherlands, for
instance, women get 16 weeks of fully paid maternity leave, while men
get two weeks of fully paid leave at most. If it were possible for human
babies to develop entirely outside of the maternal body, in a technolog-
ical device, this could disrupt established gender roles, parenting prac-
tices, the parent-child relationship, and fundamental concepts such as
BIRTH or MOTHER.12
Inequalities between mothers and fathers can be traced back at least
in part to facts about pregnancy and lactation. The special expectations
related to mothers and their role as primary caregiver are related to the
fact that usually a child develops in its mother’s body for nine months
before it is born. In the womb, the foetus can feel the movements and
heartbeat of the mother and hear her voice. The mother’s behaviour and
moods affect the foetus. While women experience bodily changes during
pregnancy, including hormonal changes, and can feel the movements of
the baby from a certain stage onwards, for men, the fact that they are
becoming fathers usually remains rather abstract. Not having this close
physical connection to the foetus, they experience pregnancy differently
than women. After the child is born, it is assumed that the mother is
particularly capable of making the baby calm when it is upset, because
it is used to her heartbeat.
Let us return to the first criterion for technosocial disruptiveness
mentioned above, depth of impacts, which concerns the impact on
“deeply held beliefs, values, social norms, and basic human capacities”
(ibid., 6). As mentioned above, socially disruptive technologies “affect
basic human practices, fundamental concepts, ontological distinctions,
and go to the heart of our human self-understanding” (ibid.). The arti-
ficial womb, which should be seen in continuity with other reproductive
11 It might be more accurate to say that the requirement of a maternal womb for the
gestation of human foetuses is losing its status of certainty as the development of
ectogestative technology is progressing.
12 I will address the fact that to a certain extent traditional gender roles have already
been disrupted by, for instance, modern employment needs and ideas of equality at
the end of this section.
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agriculture their sole resource, 138.
Volney describes the American habits of diet, i. 44.
Voltaire, i. 161.
Wagner, Jacob, i. 236.

Ware, Henry, i. 311.
Warren, Dr. J. C., his description of Boston customs in 1800, i.
91.
Washington city in 1800, i. 30.
Washington, President, opinion of American farming-lands, i. 35;
his support of a national bank, 65;
on emancipation in Pennsylvania and its effects, 135;
establishes the precedent of addressing Congress in a
speech, 247;
his personal authority, 262, 320.
Water communication in 1800, i. 8.
Waterhouse, Dr., i. 93.
Webster, Noah, i. 62, 105.
Weld, Rev. Abijah, of Attleborough, i. 21.
Weld, Isaac, Jr., an English traveller, describes condition of inns
in America, i. 46, 52;
describes Princeton, 129;
quoted, 136;
at Wilmington, 182.
West, Benjamin, i. 127.
West Indian trade, English policy toward, ii. 318;
value of, to England, 331, 413, 415.
West Point Military Academy established, i. 301.
Whitney, Eli, i. 181.
Whittemore, Asa, i. 182.
Whitworth, Lord, British minister at Paris, Napoleon’s
announcement to, ii. 19.
Wilkinson, James, Brigadier-General and governor of the
Louisiana Territory, ii. 220;
portrayed by Turreau, 406;
his relations with Burr, 408.
William and Mary, college of, i. 136.
Wilson, Alexander, describes New England in 1808, i. 19;
on North Carolina, 36, 57, 124.
Wilson, Judge, i. 127.
Wistar, Dr. Caspar, i. 127.
Wordsworth, i. 94;
his lines on America, 169, 172.
Wythe, George, i. 133.
X. Y. Z. affair, i. 355, 358, 359.
Yale College, i. 106.

Yazoo Act, i. 304.
Yazoo Compromise, ii. 210;
Madison’s measure, 211;
vote upon, 217.
(See Georgia.)
Yrujo, Don Carlos Martinez, Spanish minister, his intimate
relations with Jefferson, i. 425;
writes to Morales with respect to the right of deposit, 427;
announces the restoration of the right of deposit, ii. 3;
protests against the sale of Louisiana, 92, 252 et seq.;
his anger, 258, 389;
obtains from American lawyers an opinion, 259;
attacks Madison, 260;
his affair with Jackson, 265;
visits Jefferson at Monticello, 266;
publishes his counter statement as to his affair with Jackson,
268;
relations of, with White House, 362;
indiscretion, 368;
at the White House, 369;
concerts reprisals with Merry, 373.
END OF VOL. II.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Cabinet Memoranda of Mr. Jefferson, April 8, 1803;
Jefferson MSS.
[2] Madison to Livingston and Monroe, April 18 and 20, 1803;
State Papers, ii. 555.
[3] Livingston to Madison, Nov. 11, 1802; State Papers, ii. 526.
[4] State Papers, ii. 556.
[5] Yrujo to Madison, Notes of April 19 and 20, 1803; MSS.
State Department Archives.
[6] Bonaparte to Decrès, 6 Fructidor, An x. (Aug. 24, 1802);
Correspondance, viii. 4.
[7] Instructions secrètes pour le Capitaine-Général de la
Louisiane, approuvées par le Premier Consul le 5 Frimaire, An xi.
(Nov. 26, 1802); Archives de la Marine, MSS.
[8] Livingston to Madison, Feb. 18, 1803; State Papers, ii. 533.
[9] Talleyrand to Bernadotte, 24 Nivôse, An xi. (Jan. 14, 1803);
Archives des Aff. Étr., MSS.
[10] Correspondance, viii. 145; Bonaparte to Decrès, 28
Frimaire, An xi. (Dec. 19, 1802).
[11] Correspondance, viii. 146; Bonaparte to Victor, 25
Frimaire, An xi. (Dec. 16, 1802).
[12] Livingston to Madison, Dec. 20, 1802; State Papers, ii.
528.
[13] Rochambeau to Decrès, 16 Frimaire, An xi. (Dec. 7,
1802); Archives de la Marine, MSS.
[14] Correspondance, viii. 201; Bonaparte to Decrès, 16
Pluviôse, An xi. (Feb. 5, 1803).
[15] Lucien Bonaparte et ses Mémoires, Th. Jung, ii. 165, n.;
Lanfrey’s Napoleon, ii. 495.
[16] Livingston to Madison, Feb. 18, 1803; State Papers, ii.
533.
[17] Beurnonville to Talleyrand, 15 Ventôse, An xi. (March 6,
1803); Archives des Aff. Étr., MSS.
[18] Cevallos to Beurnonville, March 10, 1803; Archives des
Aff. Étr., MSS.
[19] Livingston to Madison, March 12, 1803; State Papers, ii.
547.
[20] Amiot to Decrès, 19 Germinal, An xi. (April 9, 1803);
Archives de la Marine, MSS.
[21] Claims Convention, Aug. 11, 1802; State Papers, ii. 476.
[22] Madison to Pinckney, May 11, 1802; State Papers, ii. 517.
[23] Cevallos to Pinckney, May 4, 1803; State Papers, ii. 557.
[24] Rufus King to Madison, April 2, 1803; State Papers, ii.
551.
[25] History of Louisiana, Barbé Marbois, p. 277.
[26] History of Louisiana, Barbé Marbois, p. 263.
[27] Marbois’s Louisiana, p. 274.
[28] Livingston to Madison, April 11, 1803; State Papers, ii.
552.
[29] Livingston to Talleyrand, Jan. 10, 1803; Livingston to
Bonaparte, Feb. 27, 1803; State Papers, ii. 531, 539.
[30] Memoir of James Monroe, 1828; Colonel Mercer’s
Journal, p. 55.
552.
552, 544.
554.
[34] Lucien Bonaparte et ses Mémoires, Th. Jung, ii. 121–192.
[35] Correspondence, viii. 289.
[36] Monroe’s Memoranda, Monroe MSS., State Department
Archives.
[37] Livingston to Madison, May 3, 1804; MSS. State
Department Archives.
Archives.
[39] Draft of Convention in Monroe’s writing, Monroe MSS.,
State Department Archives.
[40] State Papers, ii. 507–509.
[41] Marbois, Louisiana, pp. 283, 286.
552.
[43] Monroe to Madison, April 19, 1803; State Department
Archives.
[44] Madison to Livingston and Monroe, March 2, 1803; State
Papers, ii. 540.
[45] Livingston to Madison, May 3, 1804; View of the Claims,
etc., by a Citizen of Baltimore, p. 75.
[46] View of the Claims, etc., by a Citizen of Baltimore. 1829.
[47] Livingston to Madison, Nov. 15, 1803; State Papers, ii.
573. Diary of John Quincy Adams, v. 433. Memoir of James
Monroe, 1828.
[48] Marbois’s Louisiana, pp. 311, 312.
[49] Marbois’s Louisiana, p. 276.
[50] Talleyrand to Decrès, 4 Prairial, An xi. (May 24, 1803);
[51] D’Azara to Talleyrand, June 6, 1803; Archives des Aff.
Étr., MSS.
[52] Beurnonville to Talleyrand, 24 Prairial, An xi. (June 13,
[53] Talleyrand to Beurnonville, 3 Messidor, An xi. (June 22,
[54] Madison to Livingston and Monroe, March 2, 1803; State
Papers, ii. 543.
[55] Jefferson to Monroe, Jan. 13, 1803; Works, iv. 455.
552.
[57] Ibid., July 30, 1802; State Papers, ii. 519.
[58] Ibid., May 12, 1803; State Papers, ii. 557.
[59] Ibid., May 20, 1803; State Papers, ii. 561.
[60] Livingston and Monroe to Madison, June 7, 1803; State
Papers, ii. 563–565.
[61] Livingston to Madison, May 20, 1803; Nov. 15, 1803;
State Papers, ii. 561, 573.
[62] Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, Nov. 29, 1802; Works, iv.
452.
[63] Report of the Secretary of the Treasury, Dec. 16, 1802.
Annals of Congress, 1802–1803, 1276.
[64] Lincoln to Jefferson, Jan. 10, 1803; Jefferson MSS.
[65] Gallatin to Jefferson, Jan. 13, 1803; Gallatin’s Works, i.
112.
[66] Jefferson to Governor McKean, Feb. 19, 1803; Jefferson
MSS.
[67] Jefferson to Colonel Hawkins, Feb. 18, 1803; Works, iv.
565.
[68] Jefferson to Levi Lincoln, June 8, 1803; Jefferson MSS.
[69] Amendment to the Constitution; Jefferson MSS.
[70] Gallatin to Jefferson, July 9, 1803; Works, i. 127.
[71] Robert Smith to Jefferson, July 9, 1803; Jefferson MSS.
[72] Jefferson to Breckenridge, Aug. 12, 1803; Works, iv. 498.
[73] Jefferson to Paine, Aug. 18, 1803; Jefferson MSS.
[74] Jefferson to Madison, Aug. 18, 1803; to R. Smith, Aug.
23; Jefferson MSS.
[75] Jefferson to Madison, Aug. 25; to Lincoln, Aug. 30, 1803;
Works, iv. 501–505; to Gallatin, Aug. 23, 1803; Gallatin’s Works, i.
144.
[76] W. C. Nicholas to Jefferson, Sept. 3, 1803; Jefferson
MSS.
[77] Jefferson to W. C. Nicholas, Sept. 7, 1803; Works, iv. 505.
[78] Yrujo to Madison, Sept. 4, Sept. 27, Oct. 12, 1803; State
Papers, ii. 569, 570.
[79] Morris to H. W. Livingston, Nov. 25, 1803. Writings of
Gouverneur Morris, iii. 185.
[80] Documents relating to New England Federalism, pp. 156,
157; Diary of J. Q. Adams, i. 267.
[81] Examination of the Decision of the Supreme Court in the
case of Dred Scott. By Thomas H. Benton, p. 55.
[82] Annals of Congress, 1803–1804, p. 514.
[83] Act of October 31, 1803. Annals of Congress, 1803–1804.
App. p. 1245.
[84] Diary of J. Q. Adams (Jan. 10, 1804), i. 287.
[85] American Insurance Company and Others v. Canter
(January Term, 1828), 1 Peters’s Reports, 511–546.
[86] Jefferson to Gallatin, Dec. 13, 1803; Works, iv. 518.
[87] Pichon to Talleyrand, 16 Fructidor, An xii. (Sept. 3, 1804);
[88] Dec. 8, 1803; Annals of Congress, 1803–1804, p. 751.
[89] Remarks on the Message, Gallatin’s Writings, i. 156;
Gallatin to Jefferson, Oct. 6, 1803; ibid., i. 162.
[90] Jefferson to R. Smith, Oct. 10, 1803; Jefferson MSS.
[91] Speech of John Randolph, March 22, 1804; Annals of
Congress, 1803–1804, p. 1221.
[92] Message of Feb. 3, 1803; Annals of Congress, 1802–
1803, p. 460.
[93] Jefferson to General Knox, March 27, 1801; Works, iv.
386.
[94] Cranch’s Reports, i. 153.
[95] Annals of Congress, 1804–1805, pp. 673–676.
[96] Jefferson to Nicholson, May 13, 1803; Works, iv. 486.
[97] Macon to Nicholson, Aug. 6, 1803; Nicholson MSS.
[98] Jan. 5, 1804; Annals of Congress, 1803–1804, p. 805.
[99] Diary of J. Q. Adams, i. 299.
[100] Ibid., i. 301–302. Pickering to George Cabot, Jan. 29,
1804; Pickering to Theodore Lyman, Feb. 11, 1804; New England
Federalism, pp. 340, 344.
[101] New England Federalism, pp. 106, 146, 342, 352;
Plumer’s Life of Plumer, pp. 284–311.
[102] Pickering to George Cabot, Jan. 29, 1804; Lodge’s
Cabot, p. 337.
[103] Roger Griswold to Oliver Wolcott, March 11, 1804;
Hamilton’s History of the Republic, vii. 781; New England
Federalism, p. 354.
[104] Cabot to Pickering, March 7, 1804; New England
Federalism, p. 353.
[105] Cabot to Pickering, Feb. 14, 1804; Lodge’s Cabot, p.
341.
[106] Tapping Reeve to Uriah Tracy, Feb. 7, 1804; Lodge’s
Cabot, p. 442.
[107] Theodore Lyman to Pickering, Feb. 29, 1804; Lodge’s
Cabot, p. 446.
[108] An Examination of the various Charges against Aaron
Burr, by Aristides. December, 1803.
[109] De Witt Clinton to Jefferson, Nov. 26, 1803; Jefferson
MSS.
[110] Jefferson to De Witt Clinton, Dec. 2, 1803; Jefferson
MSS.
[111] Jefferson to Governor Clinton, Dec. 31, 1803; Works, iv.
520.
[112] The Anas, Jan. 26, 1804; Works, ix. 204.
[113] Hamilton’s Works, vii. 851.
[114] Pickering to Rufus King, March 4, 1804; Lodge’s Cabot,
p. 447.
[115] Rufus King to Pickering, March 9, 1804; Lodge’s Cabot,
p. 450.
[116] Roger Griswold to Oliver Wolcott, March 11, 1804;
Hamilton’s History, vii. 781; New England Federalism, p. 354.
[117] George Cabot to Rufus King, March 17, 1804; Lodge’s
Cabot, p. 345.
[118] Hamilton’s History, vii. 787.
[119] New England Federalism, p. 148.
[120] Life of Plumer, p. 299.
[121] Hamilton’s History, vii. 806.
[122] Hamilton’s History, vii. pp. 816–819.
[123] Hamilton to Sedgwick, July 10, 1804; Works, vi. 567.
[124] Jefferson to Granger, March 9, 1814; Works, vi. 329.
[125] Jefferson to Granger, April 16, 1804; Works, iv. 542.
[126] Gallatin to Badollet, Oct. 25, 1805; Adams’s Gallatin, p.
331.
[127] Dallas to Gallatin, Oct. 16, 1804; Adams’s Gallatin, p.
326.
[128] Jefferson to Dr. Logan, May 11, 1805; Works, iv. 575.
[129] A. J. Dallas to Gallatin, Jan. 16, 1805; Adams’s Gallatin,
p. 327.
[130] Jefferson to Dr. Logan, May 11, 1805; Works, iv. 575.
[131] Dallas to Gallatin, April 4, 1805; April 21, 1811; Adams’s
Gallatin, pp. 333, 439.
[132] Jefferson to Volney, Feb. 8, 1805; Works, iv. 573.
[133] Jefferson to J. F. Mercer, Oct. 9, 1804; Works, iv. 563.
[135] See vol. i. p. 305.
[136] Diary of J. Q. Adams (Feb. 1, 1805), i. 343.
[137] Jefferson to General Smith, May 4, 1806; Works, v. 13.
[139] Diary of J. Q. Adams (Nov. 29, 30, 1804), i. 318.
[140] Boston Centinel, Jan. 9, 1805.
[141] Diary of J. Q. Adams (Dec. 21, 1804), i. 322.
[142] Ibid. (Dec. 24, 1804), i. 324, 325.
[144] Ibid., i. 361, 362.
[145] Diary of J. Q. Adams (March 1, 1805), i. 364.
[146] Randolph to Nicholson, April 30, 1805; Adams’s
Randolph, p. 157.
[147] Diary of J. Q. Adams (March 2, 1805), i. 367.
[148] Jefferson to Thomas Ritchie, Dec. 25, 1820; Works, vii.
192.
[149] Livingston to Madison, Nov. 15, 1803; State Papers, ii.
573, 574.
[150] Jefferson to Breckenridge, Aug. 12, 1803; Works, iv.
498.
[151] Madison to Pinckney, July 29, 1803; State Papers, ii.
614.
[152] Madison to Monroe, July 29, 1803; State Papers, ii. 626.
[153] Jefferson to Madison, Aug. 25, 1803; Works, iv. 501.
[154] Pinckney to Madison, Aug. 15, 1802; State Papers, ii.
482.
[156] Yrujo to Madison, Sept. 4 and 27, 1803; State Papers, ii.
569.
[157] Yrujo to Cevallos, Aug. 3, 1803; MSS. Spanish Archives.
[158] Yrujo to Cevallos, Sept. 12, 1803; MSS. Spanish
Archives.
[159] Yrujo to Cevallos, Nov. 5, 1803; MSS. Spanish Archives.
[160] Jefferson to Dupont, Nov. 1, 1803; Works, iv. 508.
[163] Jefferson to William Dunbar, March 13, 1804; Works, iv.
537.
[164] Madison to Livingston, Jan. 31, 1804; State Papers, ii.
574.
[165] Madison to Livingston, March 31, 1804; State Papers, ii.
575.
[166] Journal of Executive Sessions, Jan. 9, 1804.
[167] Madison to Pinckney, Jan. 31, 1804; State Papers, ii.
614.
[168] Madison to Pinckney, Feb. 6, 1804; State Papers, ii. 615.
[169] Yrujo to Madison, March 7, 1804; MSS. State
[170] Gallatin to Jefferson, October, 1804; Gallatin’s Works, i.
211.
575.
[172] Proclamation of May 30, 1804; State Papers, ii. 583.
[173] Message of Nov. 8, 1804. Annals of Congress, 1804–
1805, p. 11.
[174] Pichon to Talleyrand, 18 Brumaire, An xiii. (Nov. 9,
[175] Madison to Jefferson, Oct. 2, 1804; Jefferson MSS.
[176] Note du Premier Consul, 2 Floréal, An xi. (April 22,
1803); Correspondance, viii. 288.
[177] Turreau to Talleyrand, 23 Floréal, An xiii. (May 13, 1805);
[178] Turreau to Talleyrand, 6 Pluviôse, An xii. (Jan. 27, 1805);
Madison to Pinckney, July 29, 1803; State Papers, ii. 614.
[180] Madison to Pinckney, Oct. 12, 1803; State Papers, ii.
570.
[181] Madison to Jefferson, April 9, 1804; Jefferson MSS.
[182] Pinckney to Madison, Aug. 2, 1803; State Papers, ii.
597.
[183] Cevallos to Pinckney, Aug. 23, 1803; State Papers, ii.
604.
[184] Beurnonville to Talleyrand, 18 Nivôse, An xii. (Jan. 9,
[185] Talleyrand to D’Hervas, 12 Nivôse, An xii. (Jan. 3, 1804);
[186] Beurnonville to Talleyrand, 21 Nivôse, An xii. (Jan. 12,
[187] Cevallos to Pinckney, Feb. 10, 1804; State Papers, ii.
583.
[188] Yrujo to Madison, May 15, 1804; State Papers, ii. 583.
[189] Pinckney to Cevallos, June 1, 1804; State Papers, ii.
618.
[190] Beurnonville to Talleyrand, 18 Prairial, An xii. (June 7,
[191] Cevallos to Pinckney, July 2, 1804; State Papers, ii. 619.
[192] Pinckney to Cevallos, July 5, 1804; State Papers, ii. 620.
[193] Cevallos to Pinckney, July 8, 1804; State Papers, ii. 620.
[194] Pinckney to Cevallos, July 14, 1804; State Papers, ii.
621.
[195] Pinckney to Madison, July 20, 1804; MSS. State
[196] Pinckney to Madison, July 20, 1804; MSS. State
[197] Vandeul to Talleyrand, 7 Thermidor, An xii. (July 26,
[198] Vandeul to Talleyrand, 18 Thermidor, An xii. (Aug. 6,
[199] Yrujo to Madison, Oct. 13, 1804; State Papers, ii. 624.
[200] Madison to Yrujo, Oct. 15, 1804; State Papers, ii. 625.
[201] Madison to Monroe, Oct. 26, 1804; State Papers, ii. 631.
[202] Madison to Monroe, Nov. 9, 1804; Works, ii. 208.
[203] Madison to Monroe, Nov. 9, 1804; Works, ii. 208.
[204] Monroe to Madison, July 20, 1803; MSS. State
Archives.
[206] Skipwith to Madison, Feb. 21, 1804; State Department
Archives.
[207] Gouverneur Morris to Livingston, Nov. 28, 1803;
Sparks’s Morris, iii. 188.
[208] Vandeul to Talleyrand, July 26 and Aug. 6, 1804;
[209] Gravina to Talleyrand, July 24, 1804; Archives des Aff.
Étr., MSS. Cevallos to Monroe and Pinckney, 16 Feb. 1805; State
Papers, ii. 643.
[210] Talleyrand to Turreau (No. 99), 20 Thermidor, An xii.
(Aug. 8, 1804); Archives des Aff. Étr., MSS.
[211] Talleyrand to Turreau (No. 101), 27 Thermidor, An xii.
(Aug. 15, 1804); Archives des Aff. Étr., MSS.
[212] Instructions secrètes pour le Capitaine-Général de la
Louisiane, approuvées par le Premier Consul le 5 Frimaire, An xi.
(Nov. 26, 1802), Archives de la Marine, MSS.
575.
[214] Cf. Memoir upon the Negotiations between Spain and
the United States of America. By Don Luis de Onis, Madrid, 1820,
Washington, 1821; pp. 146, 147.
[215] Talleyrand to Gravina, 12 Fructidor, An xii. (Aug. 30,
[216] Jefferson to Madison, July 5, 1804; Works, iv. 550.
[217] Madison to Monroe, April 15, 1804; State Papers, ii. 627.
Madison to Monroe and Pinckney, July 8, 1804; State Papers, ii.
630.
[218] Monroe to Talleyrand, Nov. 8, 1804; State Papers, ii.
634.
[219] Monroe to Madison, Dec. 16, 1804; MSS. State
[220] Armstrong to Madison, Dec. 24, 1804; MSS. State
[221] Diary at Aranjuez, April 22, 1805; MSS. State
[222] Monroe to Madison, Dec. 16, 1804; MSS. State
[223] Armstrong to Madison, Dec. 24, 1804; MSS. State
[224] Rapport à l’Empereur, 28 Brumaire, An xii. (Nov. 19,
[225] Talleyrand to Armstrong, Dec. 21, 1804; State Papers, ii.
635.
[226] 28 George III. c. 6.
[227] Additional Instructions of Nov. 6, 1793; State Papers, i.
430.
[228] Reeves’s Law of Shipping and Navigation, part ii. chap.
iii.
[229] Appendix to 4 Robinson, 6.
[230] Advocate-General’s Report, March 16, 1801; State
Papers, ii. 491.
[231] See vol. i. p. 214.
[232] Thoughts on Commerce and Colonies, by Charles
Bosanquet.
[233] Thornton to Grenville, March 7, 1801; MSS. British
Archives.
[234] Act of Jan. 21, 1801, Statutes at Large of Virginia, New
Series, ii. 302.
[235] Thornton to Grenville, June 1, 1802; MSS. British
Archives.
[236] Trial of Isaac Williams, Hartford, 1799; Wharton’s State
Trials, 653. Shanks v. Dupont, 3 Peters, 242.
[237] 6 Anne, c. 20.
[238] Rufus King to Madison, April 12, 1801; State Papers, ii.
490.
[239] Liston to Grenville (private), May 7, 1800; MSS British
Archives.
[240] Thornton to Grenville, March 7, 1801; MSS. British
Archives.
[241] Thornton to Hawkesbury, Oct. 25 and Nov. 26, 1802:
MSS. British Archives.
[242] Thornton to Hawkesbury, July 3, 1802; MSS. British
Archives.
[243] Thornton to Hawkesbury, Dec. 31, 1802; MSS. British
Archives.
[244] Thornton to Hawkesbury, Jan. 3, 1803; MSS. British
Archives.
[245] Thornton to Hawkesbury, Jan. 31, 1803; MSS. British
Archives.
[246] See p. 2.
[247] Thornton to Hawkesbury, May 30, 1803; MSS. British
Archives.
[248] Pichon to Talleyrand, 8 Pluviôse, An xi. (Jan. 28, 1803);
[249] Pichon to Talleyrand, 14 Prairial, An xii. (June 3, 1803);
[250] Pichon to Talleyrand, 18 Messidor, An xii. (July 7, 1803);
[251] Jefferson to Mazzei, July 18, 1804; Works, iv. 552.
[252] Pichon to Talleyrand, 1 Ventôse, An xi. (Feb. 20, 1803);
[253] Pichon to Talleyrand, 18 Messidor, An xii. (July 7, 1803);
[254] Jefferson to Earl of Buchan, July 10, 1803; Works, iv.
493.
[255] Jefferson to General Gates, July 11, 1803; Works, iv.
494.
[258] Gallatin to Jefferson, Aug. 18, 1803; Gallatin’s Works, i.
140.
[259] King to Madison, April 10, 1802; MSS. State Department
Archives.
[260] Merry to Hammond, Dec. 7, 1803; MSS. British
Archives.
[261] Thornton to Hawkesbury, Dec. 9, 1801; MSS. British
Archives.
[262] Life of William Plumer, p. 245.
[263] Jefferson’s Works, ix. 454.
[264] Life of William Plumer, p. 242.
[265] Life of Joseph Story, pp. 151, 158.
[266] Pichon to Talleyrand, 15 Pluviôse, An xii. (Feb. 5, 1804);
[267] Merry to Hawkesbury, Dec. 6, 1803; MSS. British
Archives.
[268] Yrujo to Cevallos, Feb. 7, 1804; MSS. Spanish Archives.
[269] Merry to Hammond, Dec. 7, 1803; MSS. British
Archives.
[270] Madison to Monroe, 19 Jan., 1804. Madison MSS., State
Department Archives. Merry to Hawkesbury, 30 Jan., 1801. MSS.
British Archives.
[271] Pichon to Talleyrand, 15 Pluviôse, An xii. (Feb. 5, 1804);
Archives.
[273] Pichon to Talleyrand, 27 Pluviôse, An xii. (Feb. 13,
[274] Jefferson to Monroe, Jan. 8, 1804; Monroe MSS., State
Department Archives. Cf. Madison to Monroe, 16 Feb. 1804.
Madison’s Works, ii. 195–199.
[275] Pichon to Talleyrand, 30 Pluviôse, An xii. (Feb. 16,
[277] Ibid.
Archives.
Archives.
[280] Diary of J. Q. Adams (Oct. 31, 1803), i. 269.
Archives.
Archives.
[283] Merry to Hawkesbury, Jan. 20, 1804; Jan. 30, 1804;
MSS. British Archives.
[284] Thornton to Hammond, Jan. 29, 1804; MSS. British
Archives.
[285] Merry to Hawkesbury, Jan. 30, 1804; MSS. British
Archives.
[286] Merry to Hawkesbury, March 1, 1804; MSS. British
Archives.
[287] Merry to Harrowby, July 18, 1804; MSS. British Archives.
[288] Madison to Jefferson, Aug. 28, 1804; Jefferson MSS.
[289] Merry to Hawkesbury, June 2, 1804; MSS. British
Archives.
[290] Merry to Harrowby, Aug. 6, 1804; MSS. British Archives.
[291] Merry to Harrowby, March 4, 1805; MSS. British
Archives.
[292] Merry to Harrowby, March 29, 1805; MSS. British
Archives.
[293] Remonstrance of the People of Louisiana, Dec. 31,
1804; Annals of Congress, 1804–1805, Appendix, p. 1597.
[294] Report of Committee, Jan. 25, 1805; Annals of
Congress, 1804–1805, p. 1014.
[296] Merry to Harrowby, (No. 14), March 29, 1805; MSS.
British Archives.
[297] Merry to Harrowby, (No. 15), most secret, March 29,
1805.
[298] Pichon to Talleyrand, 16 Fructidor, An xii. (Sept. 3,
[300] Diary of J. Q. Adams (Nov. 23, 1804), i. 316.
[301] Turreau to Talleyrand, 27 Janvier, 1805; Archives des
Aff. Étr., MSS.
[302] Turreau to Talleyrand, 9 Mars, 1805; Archives des Aff.
Étr., MSS.
[303] Affidavit of Peter Derbigny, Aug. 27, 1807. Clark’s Proofs
against Wilkinson; Note 18. App. p. 38.
[304] Adams’s Randolph, p. 157.
[305] Strictures, etc., on the Navigation and Colonial System
of Great Britain. London, 1804.
[306] Claims of the British West Indian Colonists. By G. W.
Jordan. London, 1804.
[307] Lowe’s Enquiry, 4th edition, 1808.
[308] Anti-Jacobin Review, August, 1807, p. 368; Introduction
to Reports, etc., on Navigation, p. 22; Atcheson’s American
Encroachments, London, 1808, p. lxxvii; Baring’s Inquiry, London,
1808, p. 73.
[309] Monroe to Madison, June 3, 1804; State Papers, iii. 92.
[310] Monroe to Madison, Aug. 7, 1804; State Papers, iii. 94.
[311] Monroe to Madison, June 3, 1804; State Papers, iii. 92.
[312] Monroe to Madison, Sept. 8, 1804; MSS. State
[313] Harrowby to Merry, Nov. 7, 1804; MSS. British Archives.
[314] Life of General William Eaton, Brookfield, 1813, p. 262.
[315] Life of Eaton, p. 328.
Transcriber’s Notes:
1. Obvious printers’, punctuation and spelling errors have been corrected

silently.
2. Where hyphenation is in doubt, it has been retained as in the original.
3. Some hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions of the same words have

been retained as in the original.
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Philosophical Perspectives on Moral

Certainty 1st Edition Cecilie Eriksen

New Perspectives on Moral Change Anthropologists and

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Myth Chaos and Certainty Notes on Cosmos Life and

Moral certainty refers to those aspects of morality – moral acting, feel-

Cecilie Eriksen is a Special Consultant at the National Center of Ethics,

Julia Hermann is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy and Ethics of

Nigel Pleasants is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Sociology at the

A Philosophical Defense of Misanthropy

The Ethics of Attention

The Transcendent Character of the Good

Philosophical Perspectives on Moral Certainty

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

Edited by Cecilie Eriksen,

ISBN: 978-1-032-00675-8 (hbk)

1 Introduction: On Moral Certainty 1

2 Socially Disruptive Technologies and Moral Certainty 19

4 “The Frightening Thing Is the Uncertainty”: Wittgenstein

7 Local Moral Certainty and the Possibility of Cross-Cultural

8 A Wittgensteinian Account of Free Will and Moral

10 Moral Certainties – Subjective, Objective, Objectionable? 171

11 Nigel Pleasants on Moral Certainties: A Critical Discussion 192

12 Is There an Internal Link between Seeing a Human

José María Ariso obtained his PhD from Complutense University of

Julia Hermann’s work on this book is part of the research programme

CV Wittgenstein, L. (1998) Culture and Value. Oxford: Blackwell

If the concept of certainty seems least at home anywhere it is in moral-

However, it is equally inappropriate to say we don’t know that we have

N: I’m struggling for money at the moment.

We can’t imagine having such a conversation in earnest, at least without

1.2 Four debates on moral certainty

The wrongness of killing

Universalism/relativism: Do we all have the same

I propose to use the term “basic certainties” in reference to basic

“Basic certainties” then “cannot be meaningfully doubted in any

Contextualist versus foundationalist frameworks

the process of justifying an assertion comes to an end when either

13 See O’Hara’s contribution to this volume for further discussion.

Justificatory regress is halted by whichever beliefs admit of no justifica-

That there is a law against a certain sort of action normally gives us

many people [including himself – authors’ insertion] are convinced

17 Though see, for example, Michael Williams (2005).

19 Cf. O’Hara (2018, 118–27).

akin to something not of the order of justification, reason or thought,

We might take as examples reaching out to catch a falling apple while

Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; -

Against this, in terms of exegesis of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, there are

our comprehension of concepts like innocent and person only make

This leads Brice to conclude that basic certainties cannot be natural – we

Even though an observer can of course describe this situation, intro-

1.3 Guide to the themes and contributions to this volume

1 I address the disruption of non-moral certainty in Hermann (in preparation).

2.2 Moral certainty and moral competence

2.3 Technosocial disruption and moral certainty:

Socially disruptive technologies

Moral certainty disrupted

5 Postphenomenologists analyse human-world-relations and “the constitution of sub-

1 Introduction: On Moral Certainty 1

2 Socially Disruptive Technologies and Moral Certainty 19

10 Moral Certainties – Subjective, Objective, Objectionable? 171

11 Nigel Pleasants on Moral Certainties: A Critical Discussion 192

2.3 Technosocial disruption and moral certainty: