The metaethical dilemma of epistemic democracy

Epistemic democracy aims to show, often by appeal to the Condorcet Jury Theorem, that democracy has a high chance of reaching correct decisions. It has been argued that epistemic democracy is compatible with various metaethical accounts, such as moral realism, conventionalism and majoritarianism. This paper casts doubt on that thesis and reveals the following metaethical dilemma: if we adopt moral realism, it is doubtful that voters are, on average, more than 0.5 likely to track moral facts and identify the correct alternative. By contrast, if we adopt conventionalism or majoritarianism, we cannot expect that voters are both competent and sincere. Either way, the conditions for the application of Condorcet’s theorem are not met.

Prospects for Moral Success Theory

<p>In this thesis, I will argue that the existence of moral facts does not rely on the existence of a reason for action, and that moral facts can be made sense of in other ways. My thesis is both a reply to a type of moral error theory that has been advanced by Richard Joyce and John Mackie, and an account of the truthmakers of moral judgments. The argument for error theory that I respond to is roughly as follows: moral judgments are judgments about external practical reasons. But external reasons do not exist, and so no moral judgment is ever true. In the first part of my thesis, I will argue in favour of the latter premise of the error theorist’s argument, but against the former: external reasons do not exist, but moral judgments are not committed to them. In the second half of my thesis I build up a positive account of what moral judgments involve. If moral judgments are not judgments about reasons, then what are moral judgments about? I develop the widely supported idea that moral judgments are judgments that are based on welfarist considerations, and attempt to give this idea a more precise formulation than what has been previously offered. From this account, I go on to develop an account of the truthmakers of moral judgments. The account I end up with is an ideal observer theory that I believe makes sense of a broad range of intuitions about morality. My hope is that this thesis will be of interest to others who feel the pull of moral error theory, but would prefer to see moral success theory vindicated.</p>

Prospects for Moral Success Theory

<p>In this thesis, I will argue that the existence of moral facts does not rely on the existence of a reason for action, and that moral facts can be made sense of in other ways. My thesis is both a reply to a type of moral error theory that has been advanced by Richard Joyce and John Mackie, and an account of the truthmakers of moral judgments. The argument for error theory that I respond to is roughly as follows: moral judgments are judgments about external practical reasons. But external reasons do not exist, and so no moral judgment is ever true. In the first part of my thesis, I will argue in favour of the latter premise of the error theorist’s argument, but against the former: external reasons do not exist, but moral judgments are not committed to them. In the second half of my thesis I build up a positive account of what moral judgments involve. If moral judgments are not judgments about reasons, then what are moral judgments about? I develop the widely supported idea that moral judgments are judgments that are based on welfarist considerations, and attempt to give this idea a more precise formulation than what has been previously offered. From this account, I go on to develop an account of the truthmakers of moral judgments. The account I end up with is an ideal observer theory that I believe makes sense of a broad range of intuitions about morality. My hope is that this thesis will be of interest to others who feel the pull of moral error theory, but would prefer to see moral success theory vindicated.</p>

On Emad Atiq’s Inclusive Anti-positivism

In this discussion of Emad Atiq's article "There are No Easy Counterexamples to Legal Anti-Positivism" I pose three challenges to his construction of an Inclusive Anti-positivism. I firstly argue that, contra Atiq, the moral facts that both ground IAP and allow it to satisfy the extensional challenge are sometimes reducible to social facts. In Section II, I briefly discuss internal- and external-to-practice appraisals of legal norms. Finally, in Section III, I touch upon the divergent explanations of legal normativity IAP and positivism offer.

Two versions of the evolutionary debunking arguments and their challenges to moral realism

This paper assesses some challenges posed by evolutionary debunking arguments in Joyce’s function and Street’s contingency versions to moral realism, understood as the metaethical theory according to which there are moral facts that are absolute, universal and context-independent. Some argue that Copp’s society centred realism is untenable given that it cannot support counterfactuals. Shafer-Landau and Huemer’s arguments are also subject to debunking because they cannot persuasively show that human morality is unaffected by evolutionary forces. In Huemer’s view, moral progress is proof of moral facts. It requires moral realism due to progress being context-dependent. From an evolutionary point of view, there are no previous standards and ideals concerning the direction of progress. Finally, a possible answer to the function version of the evolutionary debunking arguments is the possibility that the nature of human language (including moral language) is such that, in essence, it cannot be convincingly divided in language about facts and language about value.

The Modal Status of Moral Principles

Conventional wisdom holds that pure moral principles hold of metaphysical necessity, from which it follows that it is metaphysically impossible for the moral facts to vary independently of the descriptive facts. Moral contingentists deny this, holding that the moral laws are in some cases like the laws of nature: metaphysically contingent, but necessary in a weaker sense. The present chapter makes a preliminary case for moral contingentism and defends the view against recent objections due to Lange (2018) and Dreier (2019).

The Ontic Cosmic Coincidence Problem for Non-Naturalism about Morality

The combination of non-naturalism and standard morality generates an ontic cosmic coincidence problem different from the epistemic and semantic coincidence problems already facing non-naturalism. In the normative realm, morality has a very special status. In turn morality gives a central role to persons both as agents and patients. Only some humans are persons; even very intelligent creatures such as chimpanzees and dolphins are not regarded as persons. The existence of humans, however, is highly contingent. The coincidence is that precisely the kind of very distinctive creatures needed for moral principles to apply just happen to exist. It is a coincidence because for non-naturalists moral principles do not explain events in the natural world and natural facts do not explain moral principles: the non-natural moral facts cannot explain why there are humans, and the existence of humans, or facts about their nature, cannot explain why the moral principles focus on persons.

Varieties of Theism and Explanations of Moral Realism

Does theism make a difference to whether there are moral facts? In this paper I suggest that, despite how much uptake this question gets in philosophical literature, it is not well formed. “Theism” leaves too indeterminate what God is like for us to discern what difference God’s existence would make to moral facts. Arguments like the explanans-driven argument for theistic moral realism and the explanationist argument for naturalist moral realism both require extra substantive assumptions about God in order to be valid and compelling. Specifically, the arguments must take a stand on whether God is personal or a-personal, and how this affects God’s relation to the natural world.

Practical Expressivism

Morality is a human institution that can be adequately understood as a naturalistically explicable coordination device, whereby human beings work towards, sustain, and refine mutually beneficial patterns of action and reaction. This morality owes nothing to an ethical reality that exists outside of human inclination: moral judgements and argument do not (attempt to) discover, describe or cognize a robust realm of moral facts or properties. Rather, such judgements express affective or practical states of mind, similar to preferences, desires, policies, or plans. Practical Expressivism argues that the locating of this expression within the wider coordinating practice of morality provides an attractive explanation and partial vindication of the forms and assumptions of this uniquely human institution. This book therefore defends a version of expressivism about morality, and one that embraces the ‘quasi-realist’ project of showing how an expressivist understanding of morality is consistent with the judgements of that practice being potentially disagreed with, logically regimented, and mind-independently true. In doing so it provides domesticating accounts of disagreement, logic, truth, and mind-independence, and shows how expressivism is compatible with truth-conditional semantics. The version of expressivism defended is ‘practical’ both insofar as it emphasizes the importance of the practical, coordinating, role of moral practice in pursuing the quasi-realist project, and insofar as it generates recipes and strategies that expressivists can repeatedly deploy to explain the forms and assumptions of our moral practice.

Widespread Non-Factualism

Chapter 9 briefly explains how we could go about arguing for neo-positivist views of several different metaphysical questions. The chapter focuses mostly on cases in which neo-positivists endorse non-factualist views of the central controversial subquestions—e.g., questions about Aristotelean properties, tropes, coincident objects, essential properties, non-natural moral facts, and certain kinds of facts about grounding and Lewis-Sider-style joints in reality. But the chapter also briefly addresses some cases in which neo-positivists endorse scientistic views, rather than non-factualist views, of the central controversial subquestions—e.g., questions about libertarian free will, non-Humean causation, Lewisian possible worlds, and immaterial Cartesian souls.