Dislocation and Self-Certainty

Abstract

This article summarizes Ami Harbin’s 2016 monograph, Disorientation and Moral Life, which argues that disorientations are an invaluable ethical resource. Harbin offers what she calls a “non-resolvist account of moral agency,” in which non-deliberative and non-decisive action has the potential to be just as morally significant as fully thought-through and conclusive decision-making. It then suggests that Harbin’s moral method provides a useful way of thinking through political inequities in the discipline of Philosophy, and illustrates this with some examples. It highlights three lacunae or possible extensions to the argument: the value but also the complexity of understanding “doubling back” strategies; the ambivalence between psychological and philosophical claims about the value of irresoluteness and the paradoxical nature of being certain of the value of moral uncertainty; and the spatial, temporal, and embodied nature of disorientation.