Moral Epistemology Research Articles

Moral Epistemology and Ideological Conflict in American Political Behavior*

ObjectiveThe nature and extent of polarization in the American electorate remains fiercely disputed. This study investigates the depth of ideological and value cleavages in political behavior by examining the influence of adherence to three categories of moral epistemology: premodern (morality is absolute, and stems from the guidance of a supernatural source), modern (morality is absolute, and can be determined through scientific and rational means), and postmodern (morality is nonabsolute, and stems from the subjective values of individuals or groups).MethodsMultiple correspondence analysis and multiple regression are used to analyze data from Pew's 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey.ResultsPremodern adherence exerts a general rightward effect and postmodern adherence exerts a general leftward effect on political attitudes. Among politically attentive respondents, moral epistemology promotes ideological constraint across the economic, social, and foreign policy issue domains.ConclusionThese findings indicate that ideological divisions in the American electorate are at least partly reflective of fundamental differences in beliefs about the nature and sources of moral knowledge.

Emotion, Perception, and the Self in Moral Epistemology

In this paper, I argue against a perceptual model of moral epistemology. We should not reject the claim that there is a sense in which, on some occasions, emotions may be said to be perceptions of values or reasons. But going further than this, and taking perception as a model for moral epistemology is unhelpful and unilluminating. By focusing on the importance of the dispositions and structures of the self to moral knowledge, I bring out important disanalogies between moral epistemology and typical cases of perceptual expertise. As a result, how we gain, or fail to gain, moral knowledge should not be understood in terms of the operation of a perceptual capacity.

Peterman, James F., Whose Tradition? Which Dao?—Confucius and Wittgenstein on Moral Learning and Reflection

James Peterman’s book Whose Tradition? Which Dao? is offered as “the first fulllength comparative study of the ethics of ancient Chinese ethicist Confucius and the moral aspects of the later therapeutic approach to philosophy of twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein” (ix). This is a reasonable claim. A survey of the existing literature on Confucius and onWittgenstein both in English and in Chinese (for a survey of Wittgenstein study in China, see ZHANG Xueguang, “Wittgenstein in China,” Philosophical Investigations, Dec. 2014; DOI: 10.1111/phin.12067) reveals nothing comparable. In this regard this book is an important, pioneering comparative study. Peterman suggests that his project is “unlikely” (1) if only because Confucius’s teachings appear normative—“to clarify dao 道 [roughly the Way] with the goal of fostering self-cultivation and culture-wide recovery of dao” (5), while Wittgenstein’s later philosophy appears to be “meta-ethical” (3). Nevertheless, Peterman believes that Confucius and Wittgenstein share similar “ungrounded spirits” (4), in particular the spirit of leaving ethical practices non-justified theoretically or metaphysically. Moreover, he notes that Confucius and Wittgenstein provide “a roughly similar account of the norms embedded in human life and language,” norms that are acquired blindly “through learning” (4) and “bedrock practices” (5)—the questioning of which would betray “the questioner’s failure to understand them” (21). Peterman calls this “ungrounded spirit” shared by Wittgenstein and Confucius the “realistic spirit,” a phrase used by Wittgenstein scholar Cora Diamond which is not to be confused with philosophical realism. The realistic spirit, as Peterman puts it, is a spirit that avoids “abstract, theoretical reflection on questions of moral epistemology and ontology” (x). In the case of Confucius, he argues, this spirit is expressed as “open-ended,” resistant to Dao (2015) 14:467–471 DOI 10.1007/s11712-015-9446-x

The epistemic dimension of reasonableness

My aim in this article is to investigate the epistemic dimension of reasonableness. In the last decades, the concept of reasonableness has been deeply analysed, and yet, I maintain that a strictly epistemic analysis of reasonableness is still lacking. The goal of this article is to clarify which epistemic features characterize reasonableness as one of the fundamental virtues in the political domain. In order to justify political liberalism through a public justification that averts the risk of falling into a dilemma, it is important to establish in advance which are the epistemic constraints that should be respected. My proposal is that a moderate approach in moral epistemology expresses the best scheme available to us – as moral agents constrained by the limit of our rationality – for establishing a normatively binding, and yet realistic, procedure of justification for political institutions and practices.

Kant on Human Dignity

Abstract:In his book, “Kant on Human Dignity”, Oliver Sensen argues that the standard interpretation of Kant’s conception of human dignity as an absolute value property is mistaken. According to Sensen, the standard interpretation is based on the assumption that Kant endorses Moorean moral intutionism. This leads to the false view that we must first perceive that other human beings have value and then infer that we ought to respect them. Against this standard interpretation Sensen claims that Kant endorses moral prescriptivism. According to this view a value statement is “nothing more than a (rational) prescription that commands what we should value”. If we interpret Kant’s moral epistemology along these lines, we will come to see that dignity is in fact a relational concept. In this paper I want to agree with Sensen that Kant was not a moral intuitionist. In thinking that objectivity in morality would require that the moral law “exists” independently of rational cognizers the moral intuitionist presupposes a conception of objectivity rather than arguing for it. The unargued presupposition is that the object has to be something other than the cognizing subject itself. However, the fact that intuitionism is not the adequate account does not imply that the standard interprtation of Kant’s conception of human dignity is mistaken. In other words, the claim ‘intuitionism is false’ and ‘human dignity is an absolute value property’ are compatible. I believe that Sensen ultimately does not sufficiently appreciate the fact that the moral law is the form of

Empiricism and Henry Fielding’s Theory of Fiction

In this article, I argue that the theory of fiction Henry Fielding developed in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones is meant to address an understudied tension between empiricism and the pedagogic ambitions of the eighteenth-century novel. Empiricist philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume dismissed imaginative narratives as possible sources of socio-ethical knowledge, which they insisted should be drawn instead from direct experience or reliable factual reports. I argue that Fielding’s moral epistemology was more fundamentally empirical than scholars usually recognize, and that an important function of his theoretical chapters in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones is to show that prose fiction can be sufficiently grounded in the data of experience to meet the epistemic standards of empiricism. Fielding pursues this goal by developing two theses: first, that his characters and events are embodiments of principles derived inductively from observation and experience, and, second, that the conformity between the copies and the originals can be empirically measured by the reader’s subjective sense of probability.

A hard look at moral perception

This paper concerns what I take to be the primary epistemological motivation for defending moral perception. Offering a plausible account of how we gain moral knowledge is one of the central challenges of metaethics. It seems moral perception might help us meet this challenge. The possibility that we know about the instantiation of moral properties in something like the way we know that there is a bus passing in front of us raises the alluring prospect of subsuming moral epistemology under the (relatively) comfortable umbrella of perceptual or, more broadly, empirical knowledge. The good news on this front is that various combinations of metaethical positions and theories of perception arguably have the potential to vindicate moral perception (though I won’t do much to defend this claim here). The bad news, I’ll argue, is that moral perception would be dependent for its epistemic merit on background knowledge of bridge principles linking moral and non-moral properties. Thus, in order to defend a purely perceptual moral epistemology, one would have to argue that knowledge of those principles is likewise perceptual. I further argue it is not.

The Role of the Holy Will

AbstractIt is well known that Kant uses the notion of the holy will in theGroundworkso as to contrast it with the finite wills of human beings. It is less clear, however, what function this contrast is supposed to perform. I argue that one role of the holy will is to illustrate transcendental idealism’s account of the relation between moral knowledge and moral practice. The position is one intended to negotiate between ostensibly competing traditions. Kant uses the holy will as a way of endorsing the metaphysical picture of the scholastic tradition’s so-called ‘ethics of freedom’, whereby the ideal of moral perfection is conceived as the perfection of one’s power of freedom to the point where one is constitutively incapable of immoral action. This position is married however with the claim that the holy will’s inaccessibility to human cognition motivates a subject-oriented moral epistemology more usually associated with Enlightenment humanism. I conclude by claiming that the nuanced role for the holy will can be understood as part of Kant’s expansion of the value of religious faith [Glaube] to the domain of practical inquiry in general.

Leibniz's Twofold Gap Between Moral Knowledge and Motivation

Moral rationalists and sentimentalists traditionally disagree on at least two counts, namely regarding the source of moral knowledge or moral judgements and regarding the source of moral motivation. I will argue that even though Leibniz's moral epistemology is very much in line with that of mainstream moral rationalists, his account of moral motivation is better characterized as sentimentalist. Just like Hume, Leibniz denies that there is a necessary connection between knowing that something is right and the motivation to act accordingly. Instead, he believes that certain affections are necessary for moral motivation. On my interpretation, then, Leibniz is an externalist about judgements and motivation: he is committed to a gap between the judgement that something is morally right and the motivation to act accordingly. As a matter of fact, I will argue that there are two gaps. The first and less controversial one has to do with the fact that Leibniz reconciles his psychological egoism with ethical altruism through his account of love. The second gap between moral judgements and motivation is a more fundamental one: Leibniz denies that there are any necessary connections between beliefs and motivation, or even more generally, between perceptions and appetitions.

New Voices for Expressive Pragmatism: Bridging the Divide between Pragmatism and Perfectionism

This article explores the theme of moral rationality by examining two distinct philosophical approaches, those of perfectionism and pragmatism broadly construed. It does this by comparing Cora Diamond's reading of J. M. Coetzee's novel The Lives of Animals with an imaginary reading of the same novel tuned to a moral sensibility closer to Deweyan pragmatism. By comparing a real account with an imaginary one, the article intends to press Diamond's perfectionist understanding of problematic moral experience into confrontation with a pragmatist account of the same phenomenon. This reading becomes the starting point for a broader confrontation between two larger philosophical conceptions: perfectionism and pragmatism. By this comparison, the article means to extend a dialogue begun more than a century ago, showing in particular that integrating both perspectives within a common moral epistemology provides new insights into our understanding of moral experience. The general claim is that their differences notwithstanding, perfectionism and pragmatism share a common moral sensibility, although they part ways on some decisive issues that the article makes explicit.

“So Unlucky a Perspective”: The Critique of Moral Sentimentalism in The Man of Feeling

Abstract Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) is commonly described as a typical sentimental novel, yet the work has many aspects that a straightforward sentimentalist interpretation cannot possibly account for. I argue in this paper that The Man of Feeling, far from being a straightforward sentimental novel, encapsulates a profound critique of both moral sentimentalism and the genre of sentimental fiction. This critical stance is established in the first instance, I claim, by the ironic distance to the sentimental material in the novel, which results from the complex, multilevel narrative structure, and is further reinforced by numerous satirical elements in the text. As I demonstrate, reading Mackenzie’s work as an antithesis of the sentimental novel that parodies the sentimentalist moral epistemology underlying this mode of fiction does a much better job at explaining several crucial aspects of the novel than the sentimentalist interpretation.

Butler Interprets Aquinas

AbstractThis essay examines whether the Catholic magisterium's use of Aquinas to condemn homosexual acts is actually Thomistic. Rather than being aligned with the magisterium, Aquinas advances a moral epistemology better illuminated by the work of philosopher Judith Butler. Deploying Butler as a means of immanent critique, I show how magisterial attempts to argue against lesbian and gay sex fail on their own terms. Reading Aquinas alongside Butler shows us why we need not choose between fidelity to Thomistic natural law and affirmation of lesbians and gays.

The Case for the Moral Permissibility of Amnesties: An Argument from Social Moral Epistemology

This paper makes the case for the permissibility of post-conflict amnesties, although not on prudential grounds. It argues that amnesties of a certain scope, targeted to certain categories of perpetrators, and offered in certain contexts are morally permissible because they are an acknowledgment of the difficulty of attributing criminal responsibility in mass violence contexts. Based on this idea, the paper develops the further claim that deciding which amnesties are permissible and which ones are not should be decided on a case-by-case basis. Against what seems to be an increasingly popular assumption of some international actors, just as "blanket" amnesties (i.e. very broad and general amnesties that foreclose criminal prosecution for all kinds of perpetrators and all kinds of wrongdoing) are impermissible, so is an absolutist rejection of all types of amnesties.

From Philosophical Theology to Democratic Theory: Early Postcards from an Intellectual Journey

This paper examines the early intellectual development of John Rawls, paying special attention to the transition from his work in moral epistemology to his work in political philosophy and democratic theory. It appears in the recently published Blackwell Companion to Rawls, which I edited with Jon Mandle.

Debunking evolutionary debunking of ethical realism

What implications, if any, does evolutionary biology have for metaethics? Many believe that our evolutionary background supports a deflationary metaethics, providing a basis at least for debunking ethical realism. Some arguments for this conclusion appeal to claims about the etiology of the mental capacities we employ in ethical judgment, while others appeal to the etiology of the content of our moral beliefs. In both cases the debunkers’ claim is that the causal roles played by evolutionary factors raise deep epistemic problems for realism: if ethical truths are objective or independent of our evaluative attitudes, as realists maintain, then we lose our justification for our ethical beliefs once we become aware of the evolutionary shaping of our ethical capacities or beliefs, which would not have disposed us reliably to track independent ethical truths; realism, they claim, thus saddles us with ethical skepticism. I distinguish and spell out various evolutionary debunking arguments along these lines and argue that they all fail: the capacity etiology argument fails to raise any special or serious problem for realism, and the content etiology arguments all rely on strong explanatory claims about our moral beliefs that are simply not supported by the science unless it is supplemented by philosophical claims that just beg the question against realism from the start. While the various debunking arguments do bring out some interesting commitments of ethical realism, and even raise some good challenges as realists develop positive moral epistemologies, they fall far short of their debunking ambitions.

Sidgwick’s Argument for Utilitarianism and his Moral Epistemology: A Reply to David Phillips

David Phillips’s Sidgwickian Ethics is a penetrating contribution to the scholarly and philosophical understanding of Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics. This note focuses on Phillips’s understanding of (aspects of) Sidgwick’s argument for utilitarianism and the moral epistemology to which he subscribes. In § I, I briefly outline the basic features of the argument that Sidgwick provides for utilitarianism, noting some disagreements with Phillips along the way. In § II, I raise some object...

Expert Moral Intuition and Its Development: A Guide to the Debate

In this article, I provide a guide to some current thinking in empirical moral psychology on the nature of moral intuitions, focusing on the theories of Haidt and Narvaez. Their debate connects to philosophical discussions of virtue theory and the role of emotions in moral epistemology. After identifying difficulties attending the current debate around the relation between intuitions and reasoning, I focus on the question of the development of intuitions. I discuss how intuitions could be shaped into moral expertise, outlining Haidt’s emphasis on innate factors and Narvaez’s account in terms of a social-cognitive model of personality. After a brief discussion of moral relativism, I consider the implications of the account of moral expertise for our understanding of the relation between moral intuitions and reason. I argue that a strong connection can be made if we adopt a broad conception of reason and a narrow conception of expertise.

Faultless Moral Disagreement

AbstractFaultless disagreements are disagreements between two people, neither of whom has made a mistake or is at fault. It has been argued that there are faultless moral disagreements, that they cannot be accommodated by moral realism, and that in order to account for them, a form of relativism must be accepted. I argue that moral realism can accommodate faultless moral disagreement, provided that the phenomena is understood epistemically, and I give a brief defence of the relevant moral epistemology.

Naturalizing Moral Justification: Rethinking the Method of Moral Epistemology

AbstractThe companion piece to this article, “Situating Moral Justification,” challenges the idea that moral epistemology's mission is to establish a single, all‐purpose reasoning strategy for moral justification because no reasoning practice can be expected to deliver authoritative moral conclusions in all social contexts. The present article argues that rethinking the mission of moral epistemology requires rethinking its method as well. Philosophers cannot learn which reasoning practices are suitable to use in particular contexts exclusively by exploring logical relations among concepts. Instead, in order to understand which reasoning practices are capable of justifying moral claims in different types of contexts, we need to study empirically the relationships between reasoning practices and the contexts in which they are used. The article proposes that philosophers investigate case studies of real‐world moral disputes in which people lack shared cultural assumptions and/or are unequal in social power. It motivates and explains the proposed case study method and illustrates the philosophical value of this method through a case study.

Situating Moral Justification: Rethinking the Mission of Moral Epistemology

AbstractThis is the first of two companion articles drawn from a larger project, provisionally entitled Undisciplining Moral Epistemology. The overall goal is to understand how moral claims may be rationally justified in a world characterized by cultural diversity and social inequality. To show why a new approach to moral justification is needed, it is argued that several currently influential philosophical accounts of moral justification lend themselves to rationalizing the moral claims of those with more social power. The present article explains how discourse ethics is flawed just in this way. The article begins by identifying several conditions of adequacy for assessing reasoning practices designed to achieve moral justification and shows that, when used in contexts of cultural diversity and social inequality, discourse ethics fails these conditions. It goes on to argue that the failure of discourse ethics is rooted in its reliance on a broader conception of moral epistemology that is invidiously idealized. It concludes by pointing to the need to rethink both the mission and the method of moral epistemology.