Ohtani Hiroshi

Abstract Scholars have recently discussed the notion of moral certainty, inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion concerning empirical certainty in On Certainty. The idea is that within the basic commitments of our moral practices exists something objectively certain – the moral hinges on which our practices turn. Here, I explore this notion of moral certainty to illuminate an important aspect of our moral thinking. I argue that, indeed, there exist moral hinges, including our commitments to people’s equal moral worth and the wrongness of killing innocent, non-threatening people. Additionally, I point out that moral hinges provide the starting point for our clarificatory moral thinking. Importantly, clarification here is not merely a preparation for a morally-important sort of thinking, but a creative process that constitutes an important aspect of such thinking. The present article illustrates this aspect and thereby contributes not just to Wittgenstein scholarship, but also to our understanding of moral thinking’s nature.

<title>Abstract</title> Dominant interpretations of Plato's <italic>Crito</italic> attempt to reconstruct the text deductively, taking the arguments in the famous Laws’ speech as consisting solely in the application of general principles to facts. It is thus conceived that the principles and facts are grasped independently of each other, and then the former are applied to the latter, subsequently reaching the conclusion that Socrates must not escape. Following the lead of Cora Diamond, who argues against this ‘generalist interpretation’, I argue that the Laws’ speech essentially involves an exercise of our moral imagination through which both principles and the facts to which they apply are grasped. This is not to say that a deductive argument is absent from the Laws’ speech. Rather, for the first time, we understand how the deductive arguments in the Laws’ speech can function through imagining a life in which these arguments make sense. The <italic>Crito</italic> is an attempt to exercise the readers’ imagination, thereby presenting ethics that is both personal and objective. Understanding the Laws’ arguments essentially requires the readers’ imaginative involvement with Socrates’ personal story, but they still have objective import.