The Epistemology and Ethics of Fundamentalism

Descripción del proyecto

Las creencias fundamentalistas bajo el microscopio ético

El fundamentalismo es uno de los grandes retos a los que se enfrentan las sociedades hoy en día. Los expertos siguen buscando las razones por las que algunas personas son vulnerables a la radicalización y otras no. El proyecto EXTREME, financiado con fondos europeos, ofrecerá un nuevo modelo teórico-normativo para comprender, evaluar y prevenir creencias fundamentalistas. Al contrario que gran parte de la literatura contemporánea, no intentará explicar el fundamentalismo a través de factores económicos, políticos o psicológicos, sino que estudiará a los fundamentalistas como personas normales y relativamente racionales con ideas equivocadas y perjudiciales de las que suelen ser responsables. El proyecto combinará la filosofía analítica con la literatura de investigación empírica e histórica y el análisis teórico-normativo con el objetivo de estudiar la responsabilidad de las creencias fundamentalistas. En concreto, estudiará las razones tras la generación de creencias fundamentalistas, el papel que desempeña el entorno social, las obligaciones que los fundamentalistas tienden a violar y las circunstancias que facilitan estas violaciones.

Objetivo

Fundamentalism harms our societies. It consists of a complex set of actions, sentiments, and attitudes that have all sorts of detrimental effects regarding, for example, the education of fundamentalist minorities, the perception of public safety, and the general image of religions.

Scholars in fundamentalism studies have developed various models to better understand fundamentalism, such as the Radicalization Model. Increasingly, though, they are dissatisfied with these models, since they are often unable to explain why some individuals turn to fundamentalism while others do not. This project will provide a new normative-theoretical framework that is needed to better understand and assess one of the main reasons for fundamentalist behaviour: fundamentalist beliefs. In order to do this, I combine influential methods in analytic philosophy, like conceptual analysis and reflective equilibrium, with literature reviews of empirical and historical research and normative-theoretical analysis of case studies.

The epistemology and ethics of fundamentalism that I develop addresses five questions. First, what makes extreme beliefs fundamentalist beliefs, and how do they relate to other cognitively detrimental phenomena? Second, how does the social environment affect the rationality of fundamentalist beliefs? Third, what obligations regarding their beliefs do fundamentalists violate? Fourth, which circumstances, like indoctrination, excuse people for violating such obligations? Fifth, how does this epistemology and ethics of fundamentalist belief help to better understand and assess fundamentalism?

This project breaks new ground in epistemology and ethics by exploring responsibility for extreme beliefs and fundamentalist beliefs in particular. It is also beneficial to the academics fields involved in fundamentalism studies, because those fields are largely based on historical and empirical work rather than conceptual and ethical analysis.