Normative Externalism

Normative Externalism argues that it is not important that people live up to their own principles. What matters, in both ethics and epistemology, is that they live up to the correct principles: that they do the right thing, and that they believe rationally. This stance, that what matters are the correct principles, not one’s own principles, has implications across ethics and epistemology. In ethics, it undermines the ideas that moral uncertainty should be treated just like factual uncertainty, that moral ignorance frequently excuses moral wrongdoing, and that hypocrisy is a vice. In epistemology, it suggests we need new treatments of higher-order evidence, and of peer disagreement, and of circular reasoning, and the book suggests new approaches to each of these problems. Although the debates in ethics and in epistemology are often conducted separately, putting them in one place helps bring out themes common to both. One is that the view that one should live up to one’s own principles starts to look less attractive when you look at people with terrible principles, or at cases when doing so would lead to riskier or more aggressive action than the correct principles. Another is that asking people to live up to their principles leads to regresses in cases where it is hard to know how to live up to one’s principles.