Open AccessDislocation and Self-Certainty
Author(s) -
Cressida J. Heyes
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
feminist philosophy quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2371-2570
DOI - 10.5206/fpq/2018.2.3485
Subject(s) - ambivalence , moral agency , value (mathematics) , agency (philosophy) , epistemology , certainty , action (physics) , argument (complex analysis) , embodied cognition , sociology , politics , environmental ethics , social psychology , psychology , political science , philosophy , law , biochemistry , physics , chemistry , quantum mechanics , machine learning , computer science
This article summarizes Ami Harbin’s 2016 monograph, Disorientation and Moral Life, which argues that disorientations are an invaluable ethical resource. Harbin offers what she calls a “non-resolvist account of moral agency,” in which non-deliberative and non-decisive action has the potential to be just as morally significant as fully thought-through and conclusive decision-making. It then suggests that Harbin’s moral method provides a useful way of thinking through political inequities in the discipline of Philosophy, and illustrates this with some examples. It highlights three lacunae or possible extensions to the argument: the value but also the complexity of understanding “doubling back” strategies; the ambivalence between psychological and philosophical claims about the value of irresoluteness and the paradoxical nature of being certain of the value of moral uncertainty; and the spatial, temporal, and embodied nature of disorientation.