The Epistemology and Ethics of Fundamentalism

Description du projet

Les croyances fondamentalistes sous le microscope de l’éthique

Le fondamentalisme est l’un des graves défis auxquels les sociétés font aujourd’hui face, les experts cherchent encore les raisons pour lesquelles certaines personnes sont vulnérables à la radicalisation, alors que d’autres ne le sont pas. Le projet EXTREME, financé par l’UE, offrira un nouveau modèle théorique normatif pour comprendre, évaluer et prévenir les croyances fondamentalistes. Contrairement à une grande partie de la littérature contemporaine, il n’essaiera pas d’expliquer le fondamentalisme par des facteurs psychologiques, politiques ou économiques. Il étudiera plutôt le fondamentaliste en tant que personne normale et relativement rationnelle ayant des idées erronées et nuisibles dont elle est généralement responsable. Le projet combinera la philosophie analytique avec la documentation de recherche historique et empirique et avec l’analyse théorique normative dans le but d’explorer la responsabilité des croyances fondamentalistes. Il étudiera en particulier les raisons qui sous-tendent la génération de croyances fondamentalistes, le rôle que joue l’environnement social, les obligations que les fondamentalistes sont enclins à enfreindre et les circonstances qui facilitent ces violations.

Objectif

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.