Copyright © 2023 The Author(s): This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Corresponding author: Sergei Korchevoi 183 ISRG Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (ISRGJAHSS) ISRG PUBLISHERS Abbreviated Key Title: ISRG J Arts Humanit Soc Sci ISSN 2583-7672 (Online) Journal homepage: https://isrgpublishers.com/isrgjahss Volume -1 Issue-1V (July-August) 2023 Frequency: Bimonthly Ethics-mathematics analogy: can ethical pluralism be a good model for practical moral problems? Sergei Korchevoi MA in Theology and Leadership, University of Roehampton (London); BSc in Theory of probability, Moscow State University (Moscow). | Received: 30.07.2023 | Accepted: 01.08.2023 | Published: 03.08.2023 *Corresponding author: Sergei Korchevoi MA in Theology and Leadership, University of Roehampton (London); BSc in Theory of probability, Moscow State University (Moscow). Introduction Skeptical argument has been bothering epistemologists for a long time. Yet, if one tries to grasp its theoretical challenge, first of all she is likely to deal with a set of somewhat bizarre thought experiments, e.g. «brain-in-a-vat», «epistemological evil demon», and others. However, when one is asked to place those experiments in a real-life context, she is likely to come up with a situation of dreaming or hallucinating (Beebe, 2010). The pressure of skeptical argument stands but it remains mostly abstract for lay people. Many epistemologists want to build epistemology that would be consistent with the intuition that we do know a lot of simple things, e.g. «I have hands». People rarely travel through a «fake barn facade country»; epistemologists do. Unfortunately, in the area of moral epistemology the situation seems to be different. A moral sceptic has at her disposal a very reasonable hypothesis asserting that there is no moral knowledge: the evolutional explanation of the genealogy of our moral beliefs (Lutz, 2015; Kappel, 2002). In such way, all our moral beliefs are mere rationalizations of our best surviving strategies. This hypothesis is elegant, simple, and explanatory. Thus, one who is uncomfortable adopting moral skepticism should propose at least a similarly reasonable non- skeptical explanation. One candidate for such explanation is an analogy between mathematical knowledge and moral knowledge (Korchevoi, 2023). At first glance, this analogy may seem to steer us too far from a real ground of common sense; it is too «academic», too abstract. Yet, it is hard to debunk the immersion of mathematics in our society. It is easy to see that this analogy stubbornly occurs in ethical thinking (Ross, 1930; Audi, 2004, 2008; Lutz, 2015; Clarke-Doane, 2019). One may even entertain herself by noting that sometimes arguments concerning pure matter of philosophy of mathematics end up seeking support from ethics, though this support is metaphorical as Shapiro (2009: 204-205) does in his critique of the concept of self-evident axioms in mathematics. He compares its vagueness with the unclearness of the same term of self-evidence in the «Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies». Yet the purpose of this article is not to develop arguments of pro and contra to the above analogy in general. This consideration rather aims to answer one peculiar issue raised by Clarke-Doane (2019) - the unreliability of moral knowledge based on a mathematical «blueprint» due to the difficulties in practical decision-making procedures in ethically challenging situations. In other words, while reliability of mathematics can be explained through mathematical pluralism, the same strategy works poorly in ethics because 'there is something transparently unsatisfactory about ethical pluralism' (Clarke-Doane, 2019: 6). Thus, the target question of our further speculations is the following: 'ethical theories are supposed to tell us what to do, and ethical pluralism Abstract The article aims to develop an ethics—mathematics analogy. In particular, it considers an objection that while mathematical pluralism works for practical tasks, ethical pluralism does not. Yet, epistemology cannot ignore the way of thinking of a person who tries to obtain knowledge. Taking into account a very basic structure of mathematical thinking, the article presents an argumentation in favor of ethical pluralism, especially in cases of practical decision-making. Keywords: moral epistemology, self-evidence, pluralism, skeptical argument.