All the Monkeys Aren't in the Zoo: Evolutionary Ethics and the Possibility of Moral Knowledge

2000 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 245-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Stingl
Keyword(s):  
Mental Representations ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Error Theory ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Evolutionary Ethics ◽  
Evolutionary Perspective ◽  
Naturalized Epistemology ◽  
Human Psychology ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
Moral Content

The error theory of moral judgment says that moral judgments, though often believed to be objectively true, never are. The tendency to believe in the objectivity of our moral beliefs, like the beliefs themselves, is rooted in objective features of human psychology, and not in objective features of the natural world that might exist apart from human psychology. In naturalized epistemology, it is tempting to take this view as the default hypothesis. It appears to make the fewest assumptions in accounting for the fact that humans not only make moral judgments, but believe them to be, at least some of the time, objectively true. In this paper I argue that from an evolutionary perspective, the error theory is not the most parsimonious alternative. It is simpler to suppose that mental representations with moral content arose as direct cognitive and motivational responses to independent moral facts.

scholarly journals Précis of Moral Error Theory: History, Critique, Defence

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 397-402
Author(s):  
Jonas Olson
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Error Theory ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
Moral Error Theory ◽  
Ontological Question ◽  
Moral Error ◽  
Contemporary Perspective ◽  
Moral Facts

Moral error theorists and moral realists agree about several disputed metaethical issues. They typically agree that ordinary moral judgments are beliefs and that ordinary moral utterances purport to refer to moral facts. But they disagree on the crucial ontological question of whether there are any moral facts. Moral error theorists hold that there are not and that, as a consequence, ordinary moral beliefs are systematically mistaken and ordinary moral judgments uniformly untrue. Perhaps because of its kinship with moral realism, moral error theory is often considered the most notorious of moral scepticisms. While the view has been widely discussed, it has had relatively few defenders. Moral Error Theory: History, Critique, Defence (henceforth met) examines the view from a historical as well as a contemporary perspective, and purports to respond to some of its most prominent challenges. This précis is a brief summary of the book’s content.

scholarly journals Against Empathy Bias: The Moral Value of Equitable Empathy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoe Fowler ◽  
Kyle Fiore Law ◽  
Brendan Gaesser
Keyword(s):  
Moral Life ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Mechanical Turk ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
Amazon's Mechanical Turk ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Theoretical Insight ◽  
Insight Into

Empathy has long been considered central in living a moral life. However, mounting evidence has shown that empathy is often biased towards (i.e., felt more strongly for) close and similar others, igniting a debate over whether empathy is inherently morally flawed and should be abandoned in efforts to strive towards greater equity. This debate has focused on whether empathy limits the scope of our morality, with little consideration of whether it may be our moral beliefs limiting our empathy. Across two studies conducted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N= 604), we investigate moral judgments of biased and equitable feelings of empathy. We observed a moral preference for empathy towards socially close over distant others. However, feeling equal empathy for all is seen as the most morally and socially valuable. These findings provide new theoretical insight into the relationship between empathy and morality with implications for navigating towards a more egalitarian future.

Moral epistemology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Wedgwood
Keyword(s):  
Reflective Equilibrium ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Moral Epistemology ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Thinking ◽  
Moral Intuitions ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
Factual Proposition ◽  
The Way

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. So moral epistemology is the study of what would be involved in knowing, or being justified in believing, moral propositions. Some discussions of moral epistemology interpret the category of ‘moral propositions’ broadly, to encompass all propositions that can be expressed with terms like ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘ought’. Other discussions have focused on a narrower category of moral propositions – such as propositions about what rights people have, or about what we owe to each other. According to so-called noncognitivists, one cannot strictly speaking know (or be justified in believing) a moral proposition in the same sense in which one can know (or be justified in believing) an ordinary factual proposition. Other philosophers defend a cognitivist position, according to which it is possible to know or be justified in believing moral propositions in the very same sense as factual propositions. If one does know any moral propositions, they must presumably be true; and the way in which one knows those moral truths must provide access to them. This has led to a debate about whether one could ever know moral truths if a realist conception of these truths – according to which moral truths are not in any interesting sense of our making – were correct. Many philosophers agree that one way of obtaining justified moral beliefs involves seeking ‘reflective equilibrium’ – that is, roughly, considering theories, and adjusting one’s judgments to make them as systematic and coherent as possible. According to some philosophers, however, seeking reflective equilibrium is not enough: justified moral beliefs need to be supported by moral ‘intuitions’. Some hold that such moral intuitions are a priori, akin to our intuitions of the self-evident truths of mathematics. Others hold that these intuitions are closely related to emotions or sentiments; some theorists claim that empirical studies of moral psychology strongly support this ‘sentimentalist’ interpretation. Finally, moral thinking seems different from other areas of thought in two respects. First, there is particularly widespread disagreement about moral questions; and one rarely responds to such moral disagreement by retreating to a state of uncertainty as one does on other questions. Secondly, one rarely defers to other people’s moral judgments in the way in which one defers to experts about ordinary factual questions. These two puzzling features of moral thinking seem to demand explanation – which is a further problem that moral epistemology has to solve.

scholarly journals I Might be Fundamentally Mistaken

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ridge
Keyword(s):  
Moral Belief ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
First Person ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Realist Theory ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Moral Content ◽  
Simon Blackburn ◽  
Moral Error ◽  
Influential Paper

Quasi-realism aspires to preserve the intelligibility of the realist-sounding moral judgments of ordinary people. These judgments include ones of the form, “I believe that p, but I might be mistaken,” where “p” is some moral content. The orthodox quasi-realist strategy (famously developed by Simon Blackburn) is to understand these in terms of the agent’s worrying that some improving change would lead one to aban-don the relevant moral belief. However, it is unclear whether this strate-gy generalizes to cases in which the agent takes their error to be funda-mental in a sense articulated by Andy Egan. In an influential paper, Egan argues that it does not. Egan suggests that Blackburn’s approach is the only game in town for the quasi-realist when it comes to making sense of judgment of fallibility, and therefore concludes that Blackburn’s ina-bility to handle worries about fundamental moral error refutes quasi-realism tout court. Egan’s challenge has generated considerable discus-sion. However, in my view, we have not yet gotten to the heart of the matter. I argue that what is still needed is a fully general, quasi-realist-friendly theory of the nature of first-person judgments of fallibility, such that these judgments are demonstrably consistent with judging that the belief is stable in Egan’s sense. In this article, I develop and defend a fully general quasi-realist theory of such judgments, which meets this demand. With this theory in hand, I argue that Egan’s challenge can be met. Moreover, my discussion of how the challenge is best met provides an elegant diagnosis of where Egan’s argument against goes wrong. On my account, Egan’s argument equivocates at a key point between a “could” and a “would.”

Does Neuroscience Undermine Morality?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Henne ◽  
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Moral Theory ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Beliefs

In Chapter 4, the authors explore whether neuroscience undermines morality. The authors distinguish, analyze, and assess the main arguments for neuroscientific skepticism about morality and argue that neuroscience does not undermine all of our moral judgments, focusing the majority of their attention on one argument in particular—the idea that neuroscience and psychology might undermine moral knowledge by showing that our moral beliefs result from unreliable processes. They argue that the background arguments needed to bolster the main premise fail to adequately support it. They conclude that the overall issue of neuroscience undermining morality is unsettled, but, they contend, we can reach some tentative and qualified conclusions. Neuroscience is, then, not a general underminer, but can play a constructive role in moral theory, although not by itself. In order to make progress, neuroscience and normative moral theory must work together.

From Psychology to Morality

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Deigh
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Human Psychology ◽  
Modern Thought

The essays in this collection belong to the tradition of naturalism in ethics. Its program is to explain moral thought and action as wholly natural phenomena, that is, to explain such thought and action without recourse to either a reality separate from that of the natural world or volitional powers that operate independently of natural forces. Naturalism’s greatest exponent in ancient thought was Aristotle. In modern thought Hume and Freud stand out as the most influential contributors to the tradition. All three thinkers made the study of human psychology fundamental to their work in ethics. All three built their theories on studies of human desires and emotions and assigned to reason the role of guiding the actions that spring from our desires and emotions toward ends that promise self-fulfillment and away from ends that are self-destructive. The collection’s essays draw inspiration from their ideas and are arranged to follow the lead of Aristotle’s and Hume’s ethics. The first three survey and examine general theories of emotion and motivation. The next two focus on emotions that are central to human sociability. Turning to distinctively cognitive powers necessary for moral thought and action, the sixth and seventh essays discuss the role of empathy in moral judgment and defend Bernard Williams’s controversial account of practical reason. The final five essays use the studies in moral psychology of the previous essays to treat questions in ethics and social philosophy. The treatment of these questions exemplifies the implementation of a naturalist program in these disciplines.

But I Could Be Wrong

2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Sher
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Deliberation ◽  
Moral Beliefs

My aim in this essay is to explore the implications of the fact that even our most deeply held moral beliefs have been profoundly affected by our upbringing and experience—that if any of us had had a sufficiently different upbringing and set of experiences, he almost certainly would now have a very different set of moral beliefs and very different habits of moral judgment. This fact, together with the associated proliferation of incompatible moral doctrines, is sometimes invoked in support of liberal policies of toleration and restraint, but the relevance of these considerations to individual moral deliberation has received less attention. In Sections II through V, I shall argue that this combination of contingency and controversy poses a serious challenge to the authority of our moral judgments. In Section VI, I shall explore a promising way of responding to this challenge.

scholarly journals Morality and Epistemic Judgement

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Cowie
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Error Theory ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Error Theory ◽  
Moral Error ◽  
Argument From Analogy

Moral judgments attempt to describe a reality that does not exist. As a consequence those judgments – and those of us who make them – are systematically mistaken. This is the moral error theory. One of the most interesting and important reasons for rejecting it is that its truth would entail a highly implausible error theory of epistemic judgments. These are judgments about what one ought to believe given one’s evidence. This is the argument from analogy. The aim of this book is to systematise and assess it. It is argued that it fails. The analogy between moral judgment and epistemic judgment is misconceived. The moral error theory could yet be true.

Evolution and error theory

2010 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-194
Author(s):  
John Mizzoni
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Error Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Perspective ◽  
Commonsense Morality

Error theorists argue that there is a fundamental mistake, an error of some kind, at the heart of commonsense morality. They have drawn on evolutionary theory to support some of their claims. This article looks at four different models of evolution and assesses what implications can be drawn from them concerning commonsense morality and the claims of the error theorists Mackie, Ruse and Joyce. The author first spells out the main points of error theory, then discusses how recent proponents of error theory have attempted to join error theory about ethics with an evolutionary perspective. Finally, to assess their claims, the author examines what the models of evolution put forward by Darwin, Dawkins, Gould and Haught imply about error theory in ethics.

Common Sense and First Principles in Sidgwick's Methods

1994 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
David O. Brink
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
First Principles ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
First Principle ◽  
Moral Intuitions ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
The One ◽  
Considered Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Convictions

What role, if any, should our moral intuitions play in moral epistemology? We make, or are prepared to make, moral judgments about a variety of actual and hypothetical situations. Some of these moral judgments are more informed, reflective, and stable than others (call these our considered moral judgments); some we make more confidently than others; and some, though not all, are judgments about which there is substantial consensus. What bearing do our moral judgments have on philosophical ethics and the search for first principles in ethics? Should these judgments constrain, or be constrained by, philosophical theorizing about morality? On the one hand, we might expect first principles to conform to our moral intuitions or at least to our considered moral judgments. After all, we begin the reflection that may lead to first principles from particular moral convictions. And some of our moral intuitions (e.g., that genocide is wrong) are more fixed and compelling than any putative first principle. If so, we might expect common moral beliefs to have an important evidential role in the construction and assessment of first principles. On the other hand, common moral beliefs often rest on poor information, reflect bias, or are otherwise mistaken. We often appeal to moral principles to justify our particular moral convictions or to resolve our disagreements. Insofar as this is true, we may expect first principles to provide a foundation on the basis of which to test common moral beliefs and, where necessary, form new moral convictions.

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