“Moral certainty versus moral objectivity: the perspective of personal ontology”, Nr.S-PD-22-58

Project No. S-PD-22-58             
Project title: „Moral certainty versus moral objectivity: the perspective of personal ontology”
Project duration: from 2022-11-03 to 2024-10-31
Postdoctoral supervisor:  doc. dr. Povilas Aleksandravičius

Postdoctoral trainee: Aistė Noreikaitė

Summary: Project focuses on a problem of moral objectivity which is dominating in contemporary academic discourse of moral philosophy and pressing in today’s post pandemic world tormented by moral and political conflicts. The aim is to develop an ontological conception of moral certainty that is discovered and experienced within the first-person perspective of a moral subject and to offer this conception as a reasonable alternative to a dominating conception of moral objectivity that distances itself from this moraly relevant personal perspective and therefore remains unable to adequately grasp and explain practical moral experiences of a moral subject. This development is implemented while invoking personal perspective reconstructed from the conception of a person found Spaemann’s philosophy, who is one of the main contemporary personalists integrating key insights from different personalist positions. A similar approach that would employ a personalist perspective, resting on a continental philosophy tradition, to the contemporary problem of moral objectivity in anglo-american analytic tradition has not been employed yet. Project responds to a pressing need of new approach and methods to the relevant philosophical controversy of moral objectivity. Project research will develop an ontological conception of moral certainty corresponding to practical experience of a person and enabling to respond to the pressing philosophical, practical, moral and political problems better than the conception of moral objectivity currently dominating in a moral philosophy discourse. Research results will be presented in two scientific articles and two scientific oral presentations at international academic conferences.