Epistemic Problems of Moral Testimony

2021 ◽  
pp. 28-47
Author(s):  
Eric Wiland
Keyword(s):  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Moral Testimony

This chapter discusses various arguments emphasizing epistemic problems with accepting moral testimony. It is often thought that there are various barriers that prevent a hearer from acquiring knowledge of moral truths on another person’s testimony. This chapter argues that none of these barriers are insurmountable. Although there indeed are various pitfalls to accepting testimony, none are peculiar to accepting moral testimony. In particular, it is possible to identify people who already have moral knowledge even if you yourself lack this knowledge. To do this, you need a theory of error—that is, some grasp of why another person might be better positioned to know moral truths than you yourself are. Armed with such a theory, it becomes possible to acquire moral knowledge through testimony.

Observation and Experience

2019 ◽  
pp. 106-150
Author(s):  
Sarah McGrath
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Moral Community ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Moral Testimony ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Claims

This chapter explores how experience and observation contribute to moral knowledge. It defends the view that experience and observation can contribute to moral knowledge in any of the ways in which they contribute to our ordinary, non-moral knowledge of the world around us, including by empirically confirming and disconfirming moral claims. I argue that moral testimony has important implications for the possibility of confirming moral views by non-moral observations. I also argue that membership in a moral community, which puts one in a position to compare the moral opinions of others with one’s own, can contribute to moral knowledge not only by affording evidence for or against one’s opinions, but also by providing feedback that can serve to calibrate one’s capacity for judgment so that future exercises of that judgment are more likely to deliver knowledge. The chapter concludes with a discussion of a priori moral knowledge.

Epistemic Injustice and Epistemic Solidarity

2021 ◽  
pp. 90-115
Author(s):  
Eric Wiland
Keyword(s):  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Epistemic Injustice ◽  
Moral Good ◽  
Moral Testimony ◽  
Epistemic Justice ◽  
Do So ◽  
What Matters

This chapter contains two more arguments against pessimism about moral testimony. First, it argues that epistemic justice sometimes requires you to accept moral testimony, despite the fact that doing so seems to clash with autonomy. Both good and bad experiences teach a person what matters, and how much things matter. Those who systematically suffer have moral knowledge that others tend to lack, and whose testimony is routinely dismissed. Epistemic justice demands that we trust their moral testimony. Second, this chapter argues that prioritizing individual autonomy is in tension with another plausible claim: that epistemic solidarity is an important good. When you accept moral testimony, you and the speaker may thereby benefit from the epistemic solidarity that the two of you now stand together in, and that this epistemic solidarity is a moral good, a good you would forego by declining moral testimony on the grounds that to do so would compromise your own autonomy.

Guided by Voices

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Wiland
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Epistemic Injustice ◽  
Moral Testimony

Guided by Voices defends both moral testimony and advice against a wide variety of common worries. It instead argues that it is often wise both to believe what other people tell you about what’s right and wrong, and to trust their advice. Deferring to others about moral matters is a way of gaining moral knowledge and understanding. Accepting testimony about morality can remedy epistemic injustice and forge epistemic solidarity. Best of all, taking advice is a way of forming a joint agent with your adviser, one whose activity is just as good as that of individual agents. Arguing against the presumption that moral reasoning is ideally done alone, Guided by Voices is the first book-length treatment of moral testimony and advice.

Moral Testimony Goes Only So Far

2019 ◽  
pp. 165-185
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Harman
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Moral Epistemology ◽  
Moral Belief ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Total Evidence ◽  
Moral Testimony ◽  
Moral Ignorance

This paper argues for answers to two questions, and then identifies a tension between the two answers. First, regarding the implications of moral ignorance for moral responsibility: “Do false moral views exculpate?” Does believing that one is acting morally permissibly render one blameless? It does not. Second, in moral epistemology: “Can moral testimony provide moral knowledge?” It can (even granting some worries about moral deference). The tension: If moral testimony can provide moral knowledge, then surely it can provide justified false moral belief. But surely there is no blameworthiness in a case in which a person acts on a justified false moral belief. So surely some false moral views do exculpate. This tension can be resolved by adoption of the view that moral testimony cannot provide justified false moral belief; this view relies on the fact that whether a belief is justified is sensitive to an agent’s total evidence.

Cautiously optimistic rationalism may not be cautious enough

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin F. Landy
Keyword(s):  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Moral Judgments

Abstract May expresses optimism about the source, content, and consequences of moral judgments. However, even if we are optimistic about their source (i.e., reasoning), some pessimism is warranted about their content, and therefore their consequences. Good reasoners can attain moral knowledge, but evidence suggests that most people are not good reasoners, which implies that most people do not attain moral knowledge.

Moral accounts and membership categorization in primary care medical interviews

2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Dillon
Keyword(s):  
Primary Care ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Health Behaviours ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Membership Categorization ◽  
Medical Interviews

Although the link between health and morality has been well established, few studies have examined how issues of morality emerge and are addressed in primary care medical encounters. This paper addresses the need to examine morality as it is (re)constructed in everyday health care interactions. A Membership Categorisation Analysis of 96 medical interviews reveals how patients orient to particular membership categories and distance themselves from others as a means of accounting (Buttny 1993; Scott and Lyman 1968) for morally questionable health behaviours. More specifically, this paper examines how patients use membership categorisations in order to achieve specific social identity(ies) (Schubert et al. 2009) through two primary strategies: defensive detailing and prioritizing alternative membership categories. Thus, this analysis tracks the emergence of cultural and moral knowledge about social life as it takes place in primary care medical encounters.

Die Wirklichkeit des Sittlichen

2008 ◽  
Vol 2008 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Kersting
Keyword(s):  
Social Environment ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Discourse Ethics ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Moral Principle ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Kantian Ethics ◽  
Hermeneutic Approach ◽  
The Given ◽  
Moral Convictions

Within the Kantian ethics consciousness of the moral principle is a fact of reason which cannot be grounded in any antecedent data, empirical or rational. Hegel however argues that the fact of reason is necessarily embedded in the fact of „Sittlichkeit“, that a pure reason is an empty and chimerical construction, that moral knowledge is unavoidably rootet in the contingent moral convictions of the given cultural and social environment. This essay defends Hegel’s critique of Kant’s moral philosophy and – by generalizing Hegel’s hermeneutic approach – sketches the outlines of an explicatory concept of ethics which contradicts the scientistic understanding of moral philosophy characteristic for Kant, the utilitarianism and the supporters of discourse ethics likewise.

THE SNAKE AND THE ROUNDABOUT: ETHICAL PARTICULARISM AND THE PATTERNS OF NORMATIVE INDUCTIONA SERPENTE E A ROTUNDA: PARTICULARISMO ÉTICO E OS PADRÕES DA INDUÇÃO NORMATIVA

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (16) ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederic R. Kellogg (George Washington University)
Keyword(s):  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Epistemic Status ◽  
Ethical Choice ◽  
Propositional Form

Using two examples of ethical choice, Philippa Foot’s snake and the traffic roundabout, this paper offers an account of normative induction that characterizes particularism and generalism as stages of normative inquiry, rather than rival accounts of moral knowledge and motivation. Ethical particularism holds that the evaluative cannot be “cashed out” in propositional form, and that it is descriptively “shapeless.” Drawing on examples from law, this paper claims that, while individual normative inquiry may be viewed as encountering a shapeless particularist context of seem-ingly unlimited nonmoral properties, normativity is driven by repe-tition of similar situations toward shared practices and descriptive predication. Rather than retention of epistemic status by defeated reasons, this illustrates retirement of relevant properties and ac-companying reasons, transformation of the reasons environment, and a pluralist normative ontology.

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