ABSTRACT James Wilson was the most influential advocate for the American Constitution to be based on popular sovereignty. But the few attempts to understand Wilson's conception of popular sovereignty do not explain the crucial connection to Thomas Reid's moral philosophy, the reason for this, or its implications. Wilson was concerned with Pufendorf's moral scepticism, which said that man is unable to discern his duties to his fellow man as imposed by natural law. To ensure a peaceful society, therefore, man must be subservient to government. Wilson, recognising that this could foster tyranny in an American government, sought to supplant Pufendorf's system by turning to Reid's moral philosophy. Reid had argued that all men have a God-given moral faculty which gives them access to objective ‘first principles of morals’ that impose duties to God, others, and oneself. Wilson argued that man is superior to government because man must be free of any positive law that may interfere with the discharge of such duties. That Reid's philosophy was the foundation of Wilson's view of popular sovereignty is made clear by a detailed comparison of Reid's and Wilson's works, as well as analysis of two previously unexamined manuscripts of Wilson's.

Public acts of virtue can promote prosocial norms yet are often met with moral scepticism - a phenomenon known as virtue discounting. What psychological processes might underlie people's propensity to both discount others' public virtue and also engage in it themselves? We examine one possible explanation: whether people expect their own public virtuous behaviour to be judged more favourably than others' similar actions. Across four pre-registered studies (N = 2511), we tested for self-serving asymmetries in moral expectations. In three between-subjects experiments, participants either anticipated how others would evaluate their own actions (meta-perceptions) or judged the actions of another person (third-party judgements). Study 1 found no asymmetry in moral goodness. But in Studies 2 and 3, participants expected their own public virtue to be judged as more principled (and more morally good, in Study 2), less reputation-driven, and more trustworthy. Study 3 showed these asymmetries held across multiple perspectives. In contrast, Study 4 used a within-subjects design and found that self-serving asymmetries disappeared when judgements were made side by side. Together, these findings clarify how self-enhancement shapes moral expectations under naturalistic conditions and extend research on moral self-enhancement beyond trait judgements to public virtue and its perceived motivation.

Answering Moral Skepticism, written by Shelly Kagan

Abstract This paper defends the claim that metaethics can be done therapeutically. It does so by first showing how metaethics can fit into recent systemizations of philosophy as therapy. Borrowing from the work of Martha Nussbaum and Eugen Fischer, the paper discusses how metaethics can fulfill the criterion for both a philosophical therapy and a therapeutic philosophy. Then, it argues that there are examples of both robust moral realists and anti-realists doing metaethics as therapy. On the realist side, there is evidence of moral naturalists and non-naturalists doing metaethics for therapeutic ends. Likewise, on the anti-realist side, there are cases of both Pyrrhonian moral skeptics and moral error theorists, in how they answer the “now what?” question, displaying therapeutic motivations for their views. In the process, the concepts of health often implicitly employed by metaethicists are addressed and made explicit. The paper thus suggests that not only has metaethics been done as a kind of therapy, doing metaethics as therapy remains a live option for us today.

Abstract Ethics’ reputation for wide-ranging, interminable disagreement, coupled with conciliationism regarding disagreement, has been leveraged as a basis for moral skepticism. The focus of this essay is on this challenge as it has been applied to philosophical ethics. I call the empirical conjecture underwriting the challenge into question – namely, that disagreement is widespread and roughly balanced within ethics – by describing the results of two studies involving over 400 moral philosophers. The studies reveal widespread agreement, and even consensus, on a range of purportedly contentious moral issues – capital punishment, abortion, eating meat, physician-assisted dying, euthanasia, and many others. The evidence the studies provide suggest that the extent of disagreement within ethics that the conciliationist challenge relies upon likely does not exist.

Profiles of moral sensitivity and their associated factors in nursing students: A latent profile analysis.

In my understanding, it has at least 2 prerequisite on Plato’s educational theory described in book 2. Ancient athens, where moral skepticism was broadly normal and endless war and battle came to fatigue the whole society, was the basis of Plato’s political and philosophical theory. So I tried to investigate Plato’s hypothesis on human beings and the characteristics of societies. The heroic myth of Gyges in book 2 shows the moral condition of Pericles’ Athens. A shepherd who had magical power directly plan to kill a king and steal the monarch. This story has a lot of differency compared to Korean folk-tale and Timor genesis myth. The genesis of war and battle is connected to Plato’s educational theory especially for guardians. Greedy society needs more lands and territories that makes war inevitable in every society. For Plato, it was urgent to educate well-prepared and morally concrete guardians for keeping the society safe and sound. However we can find different understanding on the flux of society and war especially on Tao Te Ching and Bhagavad Gītā. We are recommended in depth philosophical thinking from these literatures which shows different opinions from the Plato’s philosophical basis. Then we can reach more general educational theory.

John Buridan’s (c. 1300–1361) influential discussion on the possibility of knowledge concludes that divine deception does not undermine human knowledge. He holds that natural and moral knowledge need not be absolutely evident, but rather evident in a qualified sense. Buridan’s response to this skeptical challenge is widely regarded as a milestone in the history of skeptical thought. While Buridan’s account of how natural knowledge is possible has attracted considerable scholarly attention, his consideration of how moral knowledge is possible has largely been neglected. In this paper, I argue that Buridan’s innovative approach suggests that correct moral decisions can be reached on the basis of practical wisdom, even under conditions of false or limited information.

This article attempts to determine Adorno’s stance concerning two opposing positions in the relationship between critique and normativity. Although he rejects the demand to account for the normative foundations of critique, his negative dialectics does not fall back on the alternative of skepticism about normativity, of which it is often accused. I illustrate this problem by recovering the skeptical objections advanced by Justin Evans. Next, I turn to the young Hegel’s interpretation of the positive relationship between his speculative dialectics and skepticism to pose the question of what relationship now exists between negative dialectics and skepticism. The answer is outlined based on a reading of Minima Moralia under the interpretative key of the idea of real normative antinomies.

This article is dedicated to the book Reframing Ethics through Dialectics: A New Understanding of the Moral Good by Michael Steinmann, who argues that the dialec tical inconsistency of moral theories, to which he refers to as “failure,” founds the ontological status of moral principles. Individual moral failure, on the other hand, is reduced to an epistemic error. Against the background of Lisa Tessman’s moral skepticism, Søren Kierkegaard’s moral existentialism, and Georg Simmel’s moral psy chologism, the author of this article shows that by overlooking the significance of in dividual moral failure, Steinmann’s “metaethical failure” loses its dialectical meaning.

ABSTRACT Towards the end of her life, Iris Murdoch attempted (but did not succeed) to write a monograph on Heidegger. In this paper, I argue two things. Firstly, Murdoch’s Heidegger study is more than a mere curiosity – that in fact, Murdoch’s interest in Heidegger was bound up with the most fundamental concerns of her thought. Heidegger functioned for Murdoch as the most dangerous representative of the form of moral scepticism her own moral Platonism was always intended as a counter to. A completed book on Heidegger would thus have been a fitting coda to her authorship. Secondly, however, Murdoch was almost bound never to be able to finish her book on Heidegger – as she seems, in fact, to have lacked an adequate response to the specific variant of the scepticism she took Heidegger to represent. I use this finding to present a puzzle for the scholarship.

Abstract In this paper, I discuss two different metaethical challenges based on population ethical impossibility results. According to the anti‐realist challenge, the results pose a serious threat to the existence of objective moral facts. According to the skeptical challenge, the results pose a serious threat to the reliability of our moral intuitions. My aim is to systematically explore and evaluate these challenges. In addition to clarifying the issues, I argue that population ethical impossibility results do not in fact support any anti‐realist or skeptical conclusions.

This paper focuses on “indeterminacy”, “objectivity” and “truth” in the work of Ronald Dworkin. The text is divided into four parts: first, I will expose the general structure of Dworkin’s conception of objectivity in the moral domain (Section 1). Next, I will present the main critiques Dworkin addresses to two of his most important philosophical enemies, namely the “external skeptic” (Section 2.1) and the “internal skeptic” (Section 2.2). I then intend to address Dworkin’s critiques by presenting counterarguments in defense of moral skepticism (Section 3). In order to clarify the debate and its points, I try to illustrate the arguments with examples whenever possible. In the concluding Section (4), I recapitulate the main points of the text.

Abstract Skeptical theism, broadly construed, is an attempt to leverage our limited cognitive powers, in some specified sense, against “evidential” and “explanatory” arguments from evil. Since there are different versions of these kinds of arguments, there are correspondingly different versions of skeptical theism. In this paper, I consider four challenges to three central versions of skeptical theism: (a) the problem of generalized skepticism, (b) the problem of moral skepticism, (c) the problem of unqualified modal skepticism, and (d) the challenge from Bayesian epistemology.

ABSTRACT A common worry about moral conciliationism is that it entails at best uncertainty about many of our moral beliefs and at worst epistemological moral scepticism. Against this worry, I argue that moral conciliationism saves us from epistemological moral scepticism and enables us to be confident in many of our moral beliefs. First, I show that only taking disagreements seriously as a threat to our beliefs allows us to utilise agreements in support of our beliefs (call this symmetry). Next, I argue that utilising moral agreements as an epistemic resource allows moral conciliationism to resist the potentially worrisome reduction in confidence of our moral beliefs. Taking the relevance of moral agreement into account, I argue that it is anti-conciliationism that must meet the challenge of epistemological moral scepticism. For this, I suggest that moral inquiry is best understood as a collective endeavour. If so, then agreement on our moral judgments is required to justify the confidence we have in many of our moral beliefs. However, by symmetry, this appeal is possible only if one accepts the conciliatory attitude towards disagreements. Hence, accepting, rather than rejecting moral conciliationism, is the way out of moral scepticism.

That seems wrong: pedagogically defusing moral relativism and moral skepticism

Skepticism about moral responsibility is one of the most elaborated approaches to this important moral phenomenon in contemporary philosophical literature. In this paper, I use the skeptical approach in general, and specific skeptical arguments in particular, to clarify the connections between the conditions of an appropriate attribution of moral re­sponsibility and the structural elements of this attitude. A distinction is made between moral dogmatism and a critical approach to morality, and a classification is given of the possible outcomes of the latter: skepticism proper, illusionism, and revolutionary ap­proach. The difference between general moral skepticism and skepticism about moral re­sponsibility is defined, and a classification of the types of skepticism about moral respon­sibility is proposed on the basis of which the elements of the structure of attribution of re­sponsibility are questioned. Galen Strawson’s Basic argument, Gideon Rosen’s argument from epistemological regress, and his alethic conception of moral responsibility are ana­lyzed. It is shown that Strawson’s argument unreasonably reduces moral responsibility to a so-called true moral responsibility. It is argued that the epistemic condition of responsi­bility to which the argument from regress is directed can be reduced to a normative con­dition, and thus regress can be avoided. The connection between responsibility and retri­bution, which Rosen postulates, is problematized. It is argued that the control condition binds the moral agent and the agent’s moral factor; the normative condition binds the agent’s moral factor and its moral value. It is argued that the connection between a moral factor and moral value cannot be the object of skepticism about moral responsibility.

COVID-19, Camus, Aquinas, and Me

<i>Listening to Reason in Plato and Aristotle</i>

Abstract Facts about moral disagreement and human evolution have both been said to exclude the possibility of moral knowledge, but the question of how these challenges interact has largely gone unaddressed. The paper aims to present and defend a novel version of the evolutionary “debunking” argument for moral skepticism that appeals to both types of considerations. This argument has several advantages compared to more familiar versions. The standard debunking strategy is to argue that evolutionary accounts of moral beliefs generate skeptical implications because they attribute those beliefs to factors that are unrelated to their truth. That strategy is vulnerable to “third-factor” responses, which invoke first-order moral claims to challenge the assumption that Darwinian factors and the moral truths are really unrelated in that way. In contrast, our version is immune to those responses, as it does not proceed via assumptions about how Darwinian factors relate to the moral facts. Instead, it focuses on what evolutionary accounts of moral beliefs have to say about the fact that people often reach divergent moral beliefs. The argument thereby illustrates how the debunking strategy can join forces with the argument from moral disagreement. The combination of those strategies presents, we think, a challenge that is more formidable than when they are considered separately.