Moral Testimony and Moral Disagreement

Abstract

AbstractIf you want to have and to use moral understanding in a way that could result in morally worthy action, you must not place your trust in moral testimony, defer to moral experts, or suspend judgement in response to moral disagreements. This is significant for the epistemic rationality of responses to disagreement and to testimony, because one of the functions of beliefs about moral matters is to play a role in morally worthy action. If this were their only important function, it would not be epistemically rational to trust moral testimony or to suspend judgment in response to moral disagreements. However, the epistemic rationality of moral beliefs is more complex, because moral beliefs have another function: they play a role in morally right action too. Yet it is still typically not epistemically rational to suspend judgement in response to moral disagreements.