ABSTRACT
It has often been said by commentators of many ideological hues that we are living in an age of moral “uncertainty”. If (fittingly enough) it is hardly certain that they are all talking about exactly the same phenomenon, we can nevertheless formulate one very influential version of their proposition thus: a significant and perhaps growing number of us have experienced an erosion of belief relating to the sources of the objective authority which moral judgments claim for themselves (for example, “‘murder is wrong’ is a fact and those who disagree with it are objectively in error”). This development has actually stripped away much of our confidence that even our deepest moral convictions are anything more than subjective “matters of opinion”, personal-if sometimes shared-feelings or predilections, with no more objective authority over other views than the statement “I like banana ice cream” has over your statement that you like chocolate ice cream (statements which are not venturing claims about any supposed objective superiority of either flavor, even when they are replies to the ostensibly objectivist question, “what is the best flavor of ice cream?”).
