scholarly journals Moral Understanding and Cooperative Testimony

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Boyd
Keyword(s):  
Moral Worth ◽  
Moral Understanding ◽  
Moral Testimony

AbstractIt is has been argued that there is a problem with moral testimony: testimony is deferential, and basing judgments and actions on deferentially acquired knowledge prevents them from having moral worth. What morality perhaps requires of us, then, is that we understand why a proposition is true, but this is something that cannot be acquired through testimony. I argue here that testimony can be both deferential as well as cooperative, and that one can acquire moral understanding through cooperative testimony. The problem of moral testimony is thus not a problem with testimony generally, but a problem of deferential testimony specifically.

scholarly journals Moral Advice and Joint Agency

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Wiland
Keyword(s):  
Moral Worth ◽  
Moral Understanding ◽  
Moral Testimony ◽  
Joint Agency ◽  
Right Reason ◽  
The Right ◽  
Do The Right Thing ◽  
Moral Advice

There are many alleged problems with trusting another person’s moral testimony, perhaps the most prominent of which is that it fails to deliver moral understanding. Without moral understanding, one cannot do the right thing for the right reason, and so acting on trusted moral testimony lacks moral worth. This chapter, however, argues that moral advice differs from moral testimony, differs from it in a way that enables a defender of moral advice to parry this worry about moral worth. The basic idea is that an advisor and an advisee can together constitute a joint agent, and that this joint agent’s action can indeed have moral worth. So while the advisee himself might not do the right thing for the right reason (this because all alone he lacks the right reason), and while the advisor herself might not do the right thing for the right reason (this because all alone she does not do the right thing), they together do the right thing for the right reason.

Advising Duos and Joint Agency

2021 ◽  
pp. 130-166
Author(s):  
Eric Wiland
Keyword(s):  
Moral Worth ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Understanding ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Joint Agency ◽  
Moral Advice

This final chapter aims to show that the actions of those who trust moral advice can have moral worth. Some adviser-advisee duos are joint agents. The activity of this joint agent displays moral understanding, autonomy, and all the other goods had by individual moral agents. To show this, this chapter argues 1) that highly informal duos can exhibit joint agency, 2) that joint agents can be constituted by individuals whose contributions are highly idiosyncratic, 3) that a commander and a commandee can exhibit joint agency, 4) that an adviser and an advisee can likewise exhibit joint agency, and finally 5) that their actions can be morally evaluated and have moral worth. This chapter ends with a conclusion about the value of studying plural agency.

A Special Case

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-152
Author(s):  
Mona Simion
Keyword(s):  
Moral Understanding ◽  
Moral Testimony ◽  
Functionalist Account ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Special Case

This chapter is concerned with moral assertion. In recent years, much attention has been given to the epistemic credentials of belief based on moral testimony. Some people think pure moral deference is wrong, others disagree. It comes as a surprise, however, that while the epistemic responsibilities of the receiver of moral testimony have been closely scrutinized, little discussion has focused on the epistemic duties of the speaker. This chapter defends a functionalist account of the normativity of moral assertion. According to this view, in virtue of its function of reliably generating moral understanding in the audience, a moral assertion that p needs be knowledgeable and accompanied by a contextually appropriate explanation why p.

Moral Testimony and the Value of Moral Understanding

2021 ◽  
pp. 48-72
Author(s):  
Eric Wiland
Keyword(s):  
Complete Understanding ◽  
Moral Understanding ◽  
Moral Testimony ◽  
Epistemic Gap

This chapter addresses a distinct worry about accepting moral testimony: if you cannot gain moral understanding by means of moral testimony, it is better to believe moral truths for nontestimonial reasons than for testimonial reasons. There are two distinct sorts of reasons trusting moral testimony might be unable to deliver moral understanding. The first turns on the thought that it is intrinsically bad to lack moral understanding, and so if moral testimony cannot deliver moral understanding, then forming one’s moral views on the basis of testimony is problematic. The second reason for concern relies on the thought that a lack of moral understanding is fundamentally a practical worry: those who lack moral understanding cannot act as well as those who do understand. This chapter addresses the worry about moral understanding on multiple fronts. It argues that one can indeed get moral understanding from moral testimony: when you are unsure whether some action would be wrong, but are aware of the relevant considerations, testimony whether the action would be wrong can fill this epistemic gap, putting you in a position to have quite a bit of moral understanding. Next, this chapter questions whether any residual unavailable moral understanding is as important as pessimists about moral testimony typically make it out to be. The partial understanding that moral testimony affords is nearly as valuable as complete understanding is. Moreover, even if there is something virtuous about understanding morality entirely on one’s own, there might also be something virtuous about being epistemically dependent upon the moral testimony of others, a topic explored in the next two chapters.

Moral Testimony and Moral Understanding

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
McShane Paddy Jane
Keyword(s):  
Moral Agency ◽  
Sufficient Reason ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Understanding ◽  
Moral Testimony ◽  
The Ideal

In this paper I argue against the charge that dependence on moral testimony is at odds with good moral agency, and moral specifically with the ideal of having moral understanding and using it to make moral judgments. My argument has four main strands. First, I contend that one of the grounds that is often adduced for the value of moral understanding—namely, that it is important for justifying ourselves to others—does not offer an adequate basis for criticizing dependence on moral testimony. Second, I show how dependence on moral testimony is not incompatible with moral understanding. Third, I argue that, in fact, dependence on moral testimony can be an important avenue for achieving moral understanding. Fourth, and finally, I contend that moral understanding is not always an ideal we have sufficient reason to seek. If my arguments are successful, they provide new resources for a defense of dependence on moral testimony.

Toward a New Moral Understanding of the Tudor Conquest of Ireland

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
William Palmer
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Moral Understanding ◽  
Main Factors ◽  
Extreme Violence ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Moral Behaviors

The English conquest of Ireland during the sixteenth century was accompanied by extreme violence. Historians remain divided on the motivations behind this violence. This article argues that the English violence in Ireland may be attributed to four main factors: the fear of foreign Catholic intervention through Ireland; the methods by which Irish rebels chose to fight; decisions made by English officials in London to not fund English forces in Ireland at a reasonable level while demanding that English officials in Ireland keep Ireland under control; and the creation of a system by which many of those who made the plans never had to see the suffering they inflicted. The troops who carried out the plans had to choose between their own survival and moral behaviors that placed their survival at risk.

Formal Independence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Kosch
Keyword(s):  
Moral Evil ◽  
Moral Worth ◽  
Material Condition

Chapter 4 explains Fichte’s conception of formal independence or conscientiousness, which has two aspects (a ‘formal’ and a ‘material’ aspect, the latter not to be confused with material independence). Fichte’s account is compared with Kant’s, and the two are shown to be in more agreement than has previously been thought. The independence of the material condition on moral worth from this formal one is shown to be entailed by Fichte’s account of the role of conscience (rather than, as is often thought, being inconsistent with it). Finally, Fichte’s account of moral evil is explained and its consistency with his account of conscience examined.

Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 6

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Moral Testimony ◽  
Quality Of Will ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Standing To Blame

This is the sixth volume of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. The papers were drawn from the fourth biennial New Orleans Workshop in Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR), held November 2–4, 2017. The essays cover a wide range of topics relevant to agency and responsibility: the threat of neuroscience to free will; the relevance of resentment and guilt to responsibility; how control and self-control pertain to moral agency, oppression, and poverty; responsibility for joint agency; the role and conditions of shame in theories of attributability; how one might take responsibility without blameworthy quality of will; what it means to have standing to blame others; the relevance of moral testimony to moral responsibility; how to build a theory of attributabiity that captures all the relevant cases; and how thinking about blame better enables us to dissolve a dispute in moral philosophy between actualists and possibilists.

Plato on Education as the Development of Reason

1998 ◽  
pp. 255-260
Author(s):  
Samuel Scolnicov
Keyword(s):  
End Of Life ◽  
Moral Luck ◽  
Educational Innovation ◽  
Moral Worth ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Whole Person ◽  
Real Objects

Socrates' great educational innovation was in ascribing moral worth to the intellectual activity reflectively directed at one's own life. His concept of eudaimonia was so different from the ordinary that talking about it took on sometimes a paradoxical air, as in Apology 30b3. For him, reason is not a tool for attaining goals independently thought worthwhile; rather, rationality itself, expressed in the giving of reasons and the avoidance of contradictions, confers value to goals and opinions. Persons are reasonable, but obviously not the empirical human being. But education is aimed at the empirical man or woman and inevitably employs psychological means. How then is it possible that the result of education should grow out of the depths of each individual and be nevertheless valid for all individuals? In the Symposium, Plato gives Aristophanes the crucial move. Each of us is only half the whole person and we are moved by our desire for what we lack. In this context, to claim that the soul is immortal is to claim-at least-that the soul has a non-empirical dimension, that its real objects are not the objects of desire as such, and that a person's sensible life is not the true basis for the evaluation of his or her eudaimonia. However, in the soul which is not free from contradictions there is no advantage to right but unexamined options. There is in the life of the naïve just an insecurity which is not merely pragmatic. Even if a person never falters to the end of life, this is no more than moral luck. One is still guilty on the level of the logos, and liable to blame and punishment not for what one does, but for what one could have done.

scholarly journals Psychopaths and Symmetry: A Reply to Nelkin

Philosophia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Talbert
Keyword(s):  
Moral Competence ◽  
Moral Understanding ◽  
Symmetry Argument ◽  
Moral Blame

AbstractAn agent is morally competent if she can respond to moral considerations. There is a debate about whether agents are open to moral blame only if they are morally competent, and Dana Nelkin’s “Psychopaths, Incorrigible Racists, and the Faces of Responsibility” is an important contribution to this debate. Like others involved in this dispute, Nelkin takes the case of the psychopath to be instructive. This is because psychopaths are similar to responsible agents insofar as they act deliberately and on judgments about reasons, and yet psychopaths lack moral competence. Nelkin argues that, because of their moral incompetence, vices such as cruelty are not attributable to psychopaths. It follows that psychopaths are not open to moral blame since their behavior is only seemingly vicious. I have three aims in this reply to Nelkin. First, I respond to her claim that psychopaths are not capable of cruelty. Second, I respond to the related proposal—embedded in Nelkin’s “symmetry argument”—that a “pro-social psychopath” would not be capable of kindness. My responses to these claims are unified: even if the psychopath is not capable of “cruelty,” and the pro-social psychopath is not capable of “kindness,” the actions of these agents can have a significance for us that properly engages our blaming and praising practices. Finally, I argue that Nelkin’s strategy for showing that moral competence is required for cruelty supports a stronger conclusion than she anticipates: it supports the conclusion that blameworthiness requires not just moral competence, but actual moral understanding.

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