Moral Intheses: Towards Conversational Ethics

In search of a moral frame of reference that seeks to bypass the challenges of binary moral principles, I argue for a conversational ethical framework that de-emphasizes the negative borders of a relativistic-absolutist conception of morality in favour of positive moral intheses to create an inclusive moral framework. Here, I present the idea of Intheses as a philosophical building block that allows for the interaction of divergent moral principles to open up new moral vistas that are inclusive and capable of providing a grounding for indeterminate moral positions and non-human entities like robots and non-human animals. At the centre of my proposition for Conversational Ethics – hereafter ‘CE’ – is the prioritization of the nuanced contents and demands of morality within a given ethical context in arriving at moral judgments. My proposal will draw heavily on the works of the Calabar School of Philosophy, the leading proponents of conversational thinking to make a case for CE. Thus, drawing on the principles of conversationalism, I attempt to formulate the idea of CE grounded in the system of conversational thinking.