Replies to Hough, Baumann and Blaauw

The Philosophical Quarterly, 2008

This précis summarizes my book 'Moral Skepticisms', with emphasis on my contrastivist analysis of justified moral belief and my Pyrrhonian moral scepticism based on meta-scepticism about relevance. This complex moral epistemology escapes a common paradox facing moral philosophers. I. A PARADOX Many moral philosophers today live a double life. They teach philosophy classes which study extreme positions, such as moral egoism, nihilism and relativism. Then they walk across campus to serve on ethics committees in hospitals or laboratories. This double life is filled with tensions. Suppose patient Bob tests positive for HIV, but his doctor Alice thinks that she should lie to her patient about the test results, because the bad news would hurt him, and doctors should do whatever is best for their patients. Alice goes to the hospital ethics committee and asks whether it would be morally wrong for her to lie to her patient about the test results. It would be very unusual for any member of the committee to respond that morality is just an illusion, and so nothing is morally wrong. If such moral nihilism were expressed, it would be dismissed quickly with laughter or disdain and without argument. This reaction should be contrasted with that in a philosophy class which has studied moral nihilism, egoism and scepticism for a whole term. Many bright students have defended these positions in discussions. In her final paper, one student, Eve, argues that it is morally wrong for doctors to lie to their patients, but she does not even mention moral nihilism, egoism or scepticism. Eve would and should receive a low grade. A paradox arises when we enter moral epistemology and ask whether the committee's moral belief and the student's moral belief are epistemically justified. The hospital ethics committee seems justified in concluding that

1998

Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 2005

In his insightful and stimulating book Morality Without Foundations: A Defense of Ethical Contextualism, Mark Timmons presents a strong case for embracing contextualism as a vibrant alternative to the two rival accounts that used to dominate moral epistemology in the past, foundationalism and coherentism. His sophisticated version of contextualist moral epistemology (CME) comprises of several intriguing and mind-boggling theses: (i) moral beliefs that lack justification altogether can nevertheless be held in an epistemically responsible way; (ii) such unjustified beliefs can provide justification for other moral beliefs; (iii) the need for a justification of our moral beliefs does not always arise; and, finally, (iv) the potential for such a justification depends on contextual parameters and can therefore never be fixed in advance. Despite its initial appeal, CME, or so I argue, ultimately fails to convince. In the paper I raise several mutually independent objections against Timmon's solution. My main worry is that while contextualism may guarantee us a cheap justification for our moral beliefs, such a justification is ultimately worthless for both theoretical and practical reasons: not only does it sever ties to moral truth that justification was initialy supposed to track, it also fails to resolve (or even point in the direction of resolving) any of our traditional moral disputes. Though, admittedly, none of my objections amounts to a knock-down argument, taken together they cast serious doubt both on certain aspects of Timmons' particular solution and the presumed practical and theoretical need for a contextualist agenda in moral epistemology.

2002

Nondescriptivist Cognitivism vindicates the cognitive value of moral judgements despite their lack of descriptive content. In this paper, I raise a few worries about the proclaimed virtues of this new metaethical framework Firstly, I argue that Nondescriptivist Cognitivism tends to beg the question against descriptivism and, secondly, discuss Horgan and Timmons' case against Michael Smith's metaethical rationalism. Although I sympathise with their main critical claims against the latter, I am less enthusiastic about the arguments that they provide to support them. 1. Smith (1994), p. 173.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2020

This paper sketches a general account of how to respond in an epistemically rational way to moral disagreement. Roughly, the account states that when two parties, A and B, disagree as to whether p, A says p while B says not-p, this is higher-order evidence that A has made a cognitive error on the first-order level of reasoning in coming to believe that p (and likewise for B with respect to not-p). If such higher-order evidence is not defeated, then one rationally ought to reduce one's confidence with respect to the proposition in question. We term this the higher-order evidence account (the HOE account), and present it as superior to what we might call standard conciliationism, which holds that when agents A and B disagree about p, and are (known) epistemic peers, they should both suspend judgement about p or adjust their confidence towards the mean of A and B's prior credences in p. Many have suspected that standard conciliationism is implausible and may have skeptical implications. After presenting the HOE account, we put it to work by applying it to # We have presented this material at workshops in London, Lisbon, and Copenhagen. Thanks to audiences there for helpful comments, in particular Julien Dutant, Alexander Heape and participants in LVU18, Lisbon. 2 a range of cases of moral disagreement, including those that have featured in recent debates assuming standard conciliationism. We show that the HOE account support reasonable, non-skeptical verdicts in a range of cases. Note that this is a paper on moral disagreement, not on the HOE account, thus the account is merely stated here, while defended more fully elsewhere. 1

2020

According to the argument from moral disagreement, the existence of widespread or persistent moral disagreement is best explained by, and thus supports the view that there are no objective moral truths. One of the most common charges against this argument is that it “overgeneralizes”: it implausibly forces its proponents to also deny the existence of objective truths about certain matters of physics, history, philosophy, etc. (“companions in guilt” objections) or even about the argument’s own conclusion or its own soundness (“self-defeat” objections). My aim in this paper is to provide a detailed clarification and assessment of this overgeneralization charge. Various (mostly empirical) issues relevant to assessing the above objections have so far not been sufficiently investigated. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to believe that realists have exaggerated the significance of their overgeneralization charge. Both its companions in guilt and its self-defeat versions likely fail.

Forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, 10

Metaethical absolutism is the view that moral concepts have non-relative satisfaction conditions that are constant across judges and their particular beliefs, attitudes, and cultural embedding. If it is correct, there is an important sense in which parties of moral disputes are concerned to get the same things right, such that their disputes can be settled by the facts. If it is not correct, as various forms of relativism and non-cognitivism imply, such coordination of concerns will be limited. The most influential support for absolutism comes from an argument with two related premises. According to the first premise, moral thinking and moral discourse display a number of features that are characteristically found in paradigmatically absolutist domains, and only partly in uncontroversially non-absolutist domains. According to the second, the best way of making sense of these features is to assume that absolutism is correct. This paper defends the prospect of a non-ad hoc, non-absolutist, explanation of these "absolutist" features, thus calling into question the second premise. But instead of attempting to directly explain why the moral domain displays these features, it attends to how they are partially displayed by paradigmatically non-absolutists judgments about taste and likelihood. Based on this, it proposes independently motivated general accounts of attributions of agreement, disagreement, correctness and incorrectness that can explain both why absolutist domains display all "absolutist" features and why these non-absolutist domains display some. Based on these accounts, it provides preliminary reasons to think that these features of moral discourse can be given a non-absolutist explanation.

One of the most recent trends in epistemology is contrastivism. It can be characterized as the thesis that knowledge is a ternary relation between a subject, a proposition known and a contrast proposition. According to contrastivism, knowledge attributions have the form "S knows that p, rather than q". In this paper I raise several problems for contrastivism: it lacks plausibility for many cases of knowledge, is too relaxed concerning the third relatum, and overlooks a further relativity of the knowledge relation.

1996

Moral knowledge?: new readings in moral epistemology! edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Mark Timmons. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-19-508989-8 (pbk.

Julia Annas has affirmed that the kind of modern moral skepticism which denies the existence of objective moral values rests upon a contrast between morality and some other system of beliefs about the world which is not called into doubt. Richard Bett, on the other hand, has argued that the existence of such a contrast is not a necessary condition for espousing that kind of moral skepticism. My purpose in this paper is to show that Bett fails to make a good case against Annas’s thesis. To accomplish this, it will be helpful to consider the Pyrrhonean attitude towards morality as expounded in Sextus Empiricus’s work.