Abstract

In this article I challenge the standard view that clarity and coherence in moral philosophy and ethics are always good and obscurity necessarily bad. The appraisal of clarity, I argue, entails a risk of reducing and misrepresenting the complex and multifaceted nature of good, productive and true thinking and communication. Uncertainty and obscurity do not necessarily lead to vagueness, imprecision or meaning-obstruction. There are productive forms of uncertainty and there are unproductive forms. Indeed, to be precise, lucid and truthful sometimes requires respecting and linguistically and conceptually reproducing the incoherence, obscurity and uncertainty of reality.