Title: Moral Understanding Between You and Me
Domain: philosophy

Question: Why shared moral understanding is important?

Background: 1.Much attention has been paid to moral understanding as an individual achievement, when a single agent gains insight into distinctly moral matters. But the importance of moral understanding cannot be fully explained by merely focusing on individuals’ moral understanding. | 2.When considering the constitutive aim of justifying one’s action to another person, a common perspective, referred to as the Delivery Model, posits that justifying an action involves simply providing reasons to demonstrate its correctness. However, this model has several limitations. | 3.Apologies are part of the basic fabric of interpersonal morality. The common explanation of apology, such as the Feeling Bad Model and the Moral Address View, has its limitations.

Definitions: 1.moral understanding:The capacity to grasp the moral significance of actions, principles, or situations. It involves not only knowing moral facts or rules but also appreciating the reasons behind them, recognizing the perspectives and experiences of others, and being able to make sense of moral demands in context. 2.shared moral understanding:A mutual recognition and agreement between individuals regarding the moral significance of a situation, action, or principle. It involves not merely knowledge of each other's moral views, but a joint appreciation of why certain actions are right or wrong, grounded in common values or reasoning. This understanding forms the basis for practices such as interpersonal justification, moral accountability, and genuine apology.3.Delivery Model:A model of moral communication in which moral understanding is treated as a one-sided transfer of moral knowledge or judgment from one agent to another. This model conceptualizes moral interaction as the transmission of a moral claim or evaluation, without necessarily involving mutual recognition, dialogue, or shared interpretation. 4.moral address view:A perspective in moral philosophy that conceives moral claims, judgments, or practices as forms of address directed toward others. According to this view, moral interactions are inherently relational and communicative, involving a speaker and a respondent. The act of addressing another morally presupposes their moral agency, capacity for understanding, and potential responsiveness.5.Feeling Bad Model:A model of moral apology or moral response that centers on the expression of guilt, remorse, or feeling bad as the defining feature of a moral agent’s acknowledgment of wrongdoing. According to this model, what makes an apology morally adequate is primarily the offender's internal emotional state, particularly their sincere regret or sorrow.

Methodology: 1.giving an account of what it takes for you and me to share moral understanding.2.Through comparison of the Delivery Model, the moral address view, and shared moral understanding, the constitutive aim of interpersonal justification is clarified as shared moral understanding.3.Critiquing the Feeling Bad Model reveals that an apology should aim to reflect a shared moral understanding of the wrong it seeks to address.

Answer: 1.give an account of what it takes for you and me to share moral understanding | 1.1 what it takes to have moral understanding | Understanding is a positive epistemic status that is graded along both objective and subjective dimensions. On the objective side of things, I understand something only if my conception of it is accurate. On the subjective side of things, I understand something only if I conceive of it in a way that makes sense to me. | You can know more than you understand. In the case of Immoral Debt, whereas Maya may understand why Madagascar’s external debt ought to have been abolished, Jared does not. His belief that the debt ought to have been abolished is not based in his own appreciation of the reasons that make it so. He doesn’t understand himself why that moral proposition is true. | Conclusion: Moral understanding is an epistemic achievement about moral matters. When you have moral understanding, you are getting things right: you represent moral reality in an accurate way. But in addition to this, you also represent that part of moral reality in a way that makes sense to you: your moral beliefs are themselves based directly in the reasons that make those beliefs true. | 1.2 Moral understanding that is shared between you and me | When you and I share moral understanding, not only do we have moral understanding in common, but the very fact of our having moral understanding in common is itself out in the open, in a shared space between you and me. We together acknowledge that we understand things the same way and in so doing we jointly commit to this way of understanding things. | The notion of a shared space: In the example, a hot day, from Charles Taylor, the sort of public space that communication makes possible is that it creates a “common vantage point from which we survey the world together”. When you and I share moral understanding, we survey moral considerations from such a common vantage point. | The basic idea is that sharing moral understanding is structurally like sharing the experience of a hot day, with two small differences. One is that understanding is itself a committal attitude. The other is that what enters a shared space between us when we share moral understanding is usually more complex. | 2.Within the central moral practices of interpersonal justification, we owe it to others to aim at sharing moral understanding with them. | one way to get at the nature of interpersonal justification is to ask ourselves what it aims at. That is, what is the constitutive aim of justifying your action to another person? | There are two complementary ways of thinking about constitutive aims. One is in terms of success conditions. If C is what it takes for some activity A to be successful, then C is the constitutive aim of A. The second way of thinking about constitutive aims is in terms of what it takes for an agent to count as performing the activity at all. | Delivery Model of interpersonal justification points that to justify your action to someone is just to give them the reasons why your action is right. | The Delivery Model runs into two major problems. First, the Delivery Model is unable to account for the fact that the duty to justify myself to you is specifically mine to carry out. Second, in the Delivery Model, it does not matter how you respond—whether you accept or reject the reasons I have provided, whether you call into question my way of describing the situation, whether you draw my attention to considerations you think I have overlooked, and so on. | Limitations of the Delivery Model: first, Delivery Model fails to account for the fact that the practice of interpersonal justification aims at a kind of uptake on the part of the addressee. Second, the Delivery Model is unable to make sense of why we engage in the practice of justifying ourselves to others, since it does not matter how you respond. | Our account of interpersonal justification, that is, should explain the personal character of the duty to justify ourselves to others, as well as the importance of the response of the agent to whom such a justification is addressed. | The constitutive aim of interpersonal justification is shared moral understanding, which can be called Shared Understanding Model. When I am justifying myself to you, what I am doing is trying to bring it about that you understand my reasons for acting as I did, and thereby why I was justified in acting as I did. On this picture, interpersonal justification overlaps with the process of making oneself understood. I put my reasons out in the open, the reasons I take to justify my action, in the hope that you will understand me as having acted reasonably, or on good grounds. In so doing, I aim for us to understand the reasons for which I acted in the same light, as reasons justifying what I did. | The Shared Understanding Model provides a unified explanation of our two desiderata. First, it can explain the observation that, when I owe you a justification for my action, that duty is specifically mine to carry out. Second, the view can also accommodate the observation that uptake matters to interpersonal justification—that whether I am successful in justifying myself to you depends on how you respond. | The Moral address view, as another alternative, points that the aim of interpersonal justification remains to deliver or provide a justification, with the caveat that this information. But it neglects the uptake at which interpersonal justification aims. | The Knowledge view, as another alternative, pointing that knowledge is the aim of interpersonal justification, avoids the problem of indifference. But it runs into a different problem: asking you to take my word for it that I was justified in acting as I did is something altogether very different from trying to justify my action to you. Knowledge can always be acquired on the basis of someone else’s authority, but trying to secure agreement by appeal to authority is antithetical to the practice of interpersonal justification. In justifying my action, I don’t appeal to my authority. I appeal to your judgment. | Conclusion: The constitutive aim of interpersonal justification is shared moral understanding. When explicating interpersonal justification, the Shared Understanding Model outperforms the Delivery Model, the Moral Address View, and the knowledge view. | 3.An apology should aim to reflect a shared moral understanding of the wrong done to its recipient. | Feeling Bad Model of apology: It says that a good apology is one that communicates that I feel (sufficiently) bad about what I did, where the nature of the bad feeling—guilt, remorse, contriteness—is whatever feeling is either constituted by or appropriate in light of the judgment that I did something wrong. | Limitations of the Feeling Bad Model: First, it makes it too easy to delegate the duty to apologize to third parties. Second, there is more to apologizing than merely expressing a sufficient amount of bad feeling. I am not off the hook when I unwittingly express feelings of remorse. | Moral address view: It suggests that the duty to apologize is a duty to respond to a | second-personal demand. It is thus a clear improvement on the Feeling Bad Model since it adequately explains the personal character of the duty to apologize. But it fails to account for the importance of the apologizee’s perspective on the wrong at issue. | Shared Understanding Condition on apology: It suggests that an apology should aim to reflect a shared moral understanding of the wrong done to its recipient. It built up from more elementary ones. First, in apologizing to you, I need to understand what I did wrong. Second, I need to understand what I did wrong in relation to you, from your perspective: I need to recognize the appropriateness of your reasons for resenting23 or otherwise objecting to what I did. Third, that very recognition of your reasons needs to be addressed to you: I need to acknowledge, to you, that your reasons for objecting to what I did are my reasons too. | The Advantages of the Shared Understanding Model: It provides a unified explanation of these two central features of apology. What explains why I must apologize myself, as well as why your perspective on the wrong matters, is one and the same fact: that an apology should try to bring about moral understanding that is shared between us. | Conclusion: When we owe an apology, what we owe is an apology that reflects a shared moral understanding of the wrong done to its recipient. | 5.Reasoning with the Unreasonable | A worry about the shared understanding: How could I be under a moral obligation even to try to bring it about that I share moral understanding with another person, when I know that my attempt to do so is all but certainly doomed to end in failure? It seems there is no duty to try to reach a shared moral understanding. | Two general observations about the view to meet the challenge: First, the duty to justify ourselves to others, or to apologize, is a directed duty: it is the logical flipside of another person’s claim or right against me that I act in a certain way. Second, The right to a justification or an apology is really a cluster of rights is to say that it includes rights to the performance of separate actions. | Conclusion: The duty to justify ourselves to others, or to apologize, is best construed as a cluster of duties, to which a cluster of claim-rights corresponds. Central among these rights is a right that those who owe us a justification or an apology try to reach a shared moral understanding with us. When a claim-holder is sufficiently unreasonable, however, they may thereby forfeit their claim that others try to reach a shared moral understanding with them, even if they retain the more minimal claim to be given a justification or offered an apology. | | Conclusion: We sometimes owe it to others to try to share moral understanding with them, the first based on the nature of interpersonal justification, the second on the norms of apology. Moral understanding that is shared with another person is important.

Checklist: 1.Does the answer include content related to sharing moral understanding? | 2.Does the answer include the view that the constitutive aim of interpersonal justification is shared moral understanding? | 3.Does the answer include content on shared understanding in the context of interpersonal justification? | 4.Does the answer include the view that an apology should aim to reflect a shared moral understanding of the wrong done to its recipient? | 5.Does the answer include content on the Shared Understanding Condition of apology?