On the Epistemic Significance of Convergence in Ethical Theory

Abstract The major ethical theories—welfarist consequentialism, Kantianism, contractualism, common sense morality, and virtue ethics—appear to converge on the same practical advice in many situations. Such convergence seems epistemically significant. A natural thought would be that the convergence should assure us about the advice. However, what would be the rationale behind this—why should the convergence increase our assurance? That’s the main question we pursue in this paper. As the question is only sparsely addressed in the existing literature, we begin by detailing various kinds and structures of convergence. In relation, we propose a specific way to think about the epistemic significance of convergence. The remainder of the paper is primarily negative. We argue that even granting non-skeptical assumptions that are common in moral epistemology, the epistemic significance of convergence is harder to account for than most would probably think.