Moral Transformation and Duties of Beneficence

Abstract

Some ideas are at the heart of the world’s great ethical and religious traditions, yet they play little or no role within certain debates in modern philosophical ethics. One such idea is that most of us have unreliable moral intuitions and we must transform ourselves into better people before we can reliably judge how to behave. This paper explores that idea by focusing on a transformative experience that I will call the moral experience. In the paper’s initial sections, I describe the moral experience and explain why it constitutes a genuine transformation in ethical outlook. I then argue that the moral experience could thereby affect our views on certain contemporary ethical debates, illustrating those points with a discussion of the debate about global poverty.