( from philpapers) This question is one of the reasons philosophy departments ar

( from philpapers)

This question is one of the reasons philosophy departments are increasingly defunded and philosophy is demoted to the status of religious studies.

Why? You can justify your actions to a jury of your peers by arguing that you acted within ethical, moral, legal, norms.

Because you can justify ( sympathetically test ) contractual ( axiomatic or normative or contractual) rules.

You may justify the costs (opportunity, material, risk) of action to yourself or to your peers, or to the nation or even humanity.

But it is the COST that you justify, not the belief. We know this because people do not attempt to justify benefits ( gains ) or washes ( zero cost ) or cost entirely absorbed by the actor.

No belief then is ever justified or justifiable. The greater the cost the more evidence of due diligence we require of ourselves and others.

This is the difference between legal, scriptural, and normative justificationism, the persist of truth via criticism, wherein we require ourselves and others to do due diligence against harm (cost).

This is why philosophy fails to complete the enlightenment transition and to leave its relation to mysticism, Platonism, scripturalism, and justificationism.

There is only one epistemically method available to man: free association -> hypothesis -> theory —> law -> additional parsimony.

And we move from imaginary to law by acts of criticism: survival.