Unbearable certainties

This chapter 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 pervasive 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 destructiveness – cannot, because we also inescapably care for those we wrong. The chapter discusses spurious justifications and disowned responsibility for destructive actions and attitudes, including in thecase of institutionalised social evils, and examines how the need to hide our destructiveness deforms our use of moral language and deadlocks moral debates. It also considers what it means to tell truthful moral understanding from self-deceptive rationalisation, and suggests that this telling is position-dependent in a non-relativistic sense (e.g., one cannot speak the truth aboutbullying from the bully’s position). Moral “disagreements” may not be caused by lack of basic moral certainty, but by our having more of it than we can stand. And moral certainty need not dispel our destructiveness; rather, we may turn destructive in the face of it.