Sterba on Amoralism and Begging the Question

Abstract

While sympathetic to Sterba’s equalitarian convictions, Lippert-Rasmussen attacks that Sterba’s rationality-to-morality argument. He presents six objections to show that Sterba’s main argument grounded on the principle of non-question-beggingness fails to defeat amoralism. He also argues that another argument offered by Sterba to defeat amoralism fails to distinguish between motivating and justi-
fying reasons. None of this shows that we should accept amoralism, but it discloses serious problems with the rationality-to-morality sub-argument. Fortunately, this subargument is, so I argue, independent of Sterba’s liberty-to-equality sub-argument.