Moral uncertainty and imaginative resistance

Abstract

There has been a recent surge of interest in normative internalism, according to which what you ought to do depends on your beliefs about morality. This view has potentially wide-reaching implications for practical action, policy choice, and societal norms. The view is motivated by certain compelling examples, but in this paper I argue that such examples may not support normative internalism after all, for the phenomenon of imaginative resistance – well-known to philosophers of fiction – is at work here, muddying our intuitions. Once these examples are set aside, we get a more realistic view of the limited interest and importance of an internalist sense of ‘ought’.