The myth of the moral faculty: Response to Kirkby

David Kirkby argues that I have misrepresented Marc Hauser's conception of a moral faculty, in a way that invalidates my chief arguments against the existence and necessity of such a faculty. The core of Kirkby's challenge is that what Hauser lists as necessary conditions for the moral faculty to do its work are not themselves components of that faculty. I argue that there is no useful way to distinguish necessary conditions of moral judgments from the alleged moral faculty itself, and that even if we could do this, we would be left with an empty non-explanation of the supposed moral faculty that amounts to nothing more than the claim that we have a faculty that generates judgments of right versus wrong.     

The epistemology of evolutionary debunking

Fifteen years ago, Sharon Street and Richard Joyce advanced evolutionary debunking arguments against moral realism, which purported to show that the evolutionary history of our moral beliefs makes moral realism untenable. These arguments have since given rise to a flurry of objections; the epistemic principles Street and Joyce relied upon, in particular, have come in for a number of serious challenges. My goal in this paper is to develop a new account of evolutionary debunking which avoids the pitfalls Street and Joyce encountered and responds to the most pressing objections they faced. I begin by presenting a striking thought experiment to serve as an analogy for the evolution of morality; I then show why calibrationist views of higher-order evidence are crucial to the evolutionary debunking project; I outline a new rationale for why finding out that morality was selected to promote cooperation suggests that our moral judgments are unreliable; and I explain why evolutionary debunking arguments do not depend on our having a dedicated faculty for moral cognition. All things considered, I argue, evolutionary debunking arguments against moral realism are on relatively secure footing – provided, at least, that we accept a calibrationist account of higher-order evidence.

     

Evolutionary debunking arguments and the reliability of moral cognition

Recent debate in metaethics over evolutionary debunking arguments against morality has shown a tendency to abstract away from relevant empirical detail. Here, I engage the debate about Darwinian debunking of morality with relevant empirical issues. I present four conditions that must be met in order for it to be reasonable to expect an evolved cognitive faculty to be reliable: the environment, information, error, and tracking conditions. I then argue that these conditions are not met in the case of our evolved faculty for moral judgement.     

“Our Fellow Creatures”

This paper defends “moral individualism” against various arguments that have been intended to show that membership in the human species or participation in our distinctively human form of life is a sufficient basis for a moral status higher than that of any animal. Among the arguments criticized are the “nature-of-the-kind argument,” which claims that it is the nature of all human beings to have certain higher psychological capacities, even if, contingently, some human beings lack them, and various versions of the idea that there is a special form of life that all human beings share but of which no animal can be a full participant. The paper concludes that none of these arguments succeeds in demonstrating that there are moral reasons to permit animals to be treated less well than members of our own species whose psychological capacities and potential are no higher than those of the animals.     

Pragmatic Encroachment and Moral Encroachment

Subject‐sensitive invariantism posits surprising connections between a person's knowledge and features of her environment that are not paradigmatically epistemic features. But which features of a person's environment have this distinctive connection to knowledge? Traditional defenses of subject‐sensitive invariantism emphasize features that matter to the subject of the knowledge‐attribution. Call this pragmatic encroachment. A more radical thesis usually goes ignored: knowledge is sensitive to moral facts, whether or not those moral facts matter to the subject. Call this moral encroachment. This article argues that, insofar as there are good arguments for pragmatic encroachment, there are also good arguments for moral encroachment.     

Two (Weak) Cheers for Markets in Votes

This paper offers the first moral defense of markets in votes in a democratic electoral system based on majority rule where there are no moral restrictions on how votes can be cast. In Part 1 I outline the type of vote buying that I defend in this paper, and defend my methodological assumption. In Part 2 I criticize Freiman’s arguments for legalizing vote buying (arguments that do not address its morality). In Part 3 I outline and reply to some responses that could be made to my criticisms of Freiman’s arguments. In Part 4 I draw from the flaws in Freiman’s arguments to argue that vote buying is morally permissible and defend these arguments against objections.     

How Morality Can Be Absent from Moral Arguments

What is a moral argument? A straightforward answer is that a moral argument is an argument dealing with moral issues, such as the permissibility of killing in certain circumstances. I call this the thin sense of ‘moral argument’. Arguments that we find in normative and applied ethics are almost invariably moral in this sense. However, they often fail to be moral in other respects. In this article, I discuss four ways in which morality can be absent from moral arguments in the thin sense. If these arguments suffer from an absence of morality in at least one of these ways, they are not moral arguments in what I will call the thick sense of ‘moral argument’. Because only moral arguments in the thick sense could possibly qualify as proper responses to moral problems, the absence of morality in thin arguments means that these arguments will fail to give us a reason to do whatever they claim that we ought to do, even if we see no independent reason to question the truth of the premises or the logical validity of the argument.     

Feinberg on the Criterion of Moral Personhood

In a very influential paper, Abortion, Joel Feinberg offers a series of arguments against four popular proposals for the criterion of moral personhood and defends a fifth proposal. In this paper, I demonstrate that two widely-accepted arguments employed by Feinberg against the modified species criterion and the strict potentiality criterion, respectively, are unsound. Moreover, I argue that there is a general feature of his inquiry into the criteria for moral personhood which undermines his efforts to argue convincingly either in favour of his own candidate or against other candidates.     

Good Moral Judgment and Decision‐Making Without Deliberation

It is widely accepted in psychology and cognitive science that there are two “systems” in the mind: one system (System 1) is characterized as quick, intuitive, perceptive, and perhaps more primitive, while the other (System 2) is described as slower, more deliberative, and responsible for our higher‐order cognition. I use the term “reflectivism” to capture the view that conscious reflection—in the “System 2” sense—is a necessary feature of good moral judgment and decision‐making. This is not to suggest that System 2 must operate alone in forming our moral decisions, but that it plays a normatively ineliminable role. In this paper, I discuss arguments that have been offered in defense of reflectivism. These arguments fit into two broad categories; let us think of them as two sides of a coin. On the first side are arguments about the efficaciousness of conscious reasoning—for example, without conscious deliberation we will make bad moral judgments and decisions. On the other side of the coin are arguments about the centrality of conscious deliberation to normative actions—for example, without conscious deliberation we are no more agential than animals or automatons. Despite their attractiveness, I argue that these arguments do not successfully establish that reflection is a necessary component of good moral judgment and decision‐making. If I am right, the idea that good moral judgment and decision‐making can result from entirely automatic and subconscious processes gains traction. My goal in this paper is to show that reflectivism fails to include the full range of cases of moral decision‐making and that a theory of automaticity may do a better job. I briefly discuss at the end of the paper how an account of successful automatic moral judgment and decision‐making might begin to take shape.     

Kamm and Miller on Rights’ Compatibility

In their recent books, National Responsibility and Global Justice (2007) and Intricate Ethics (2007), David Miller and Frances Kamm give two similar arguments aimed at preventing their favoured accounts of the moral justification of rights from justifying an excess of demanding assistance rights. Both arguments appeal to the fact that a proliferation of assistance rights would conflict with other rights. In this paper, I show that these arguments fail. As Miller recognises in a footnote, the failure of such arguments appears to support an alternative holistic approach to the moral justification of rights. But I will show that, without significant further argument that Miller and Kamm do not provide, this holistic approach offers no better support for Miller’s and Kamm’s claim that there are few demanding assistance rights.     

厌恶与道德判断的关系

来自问卷调查和认知神经科学的证据表明,厌恶与道德判断可能存在密切关系,但是研究者对两者之间的关系是一般性的还是特异性的尚无定论。有若干证据表明厌恶影响一般的道德判断,也有研究认为厌恶主要影响人们对纯洁领域的道德判断。未来研究需要明确界定厌恶的类别,区分厌恶与道德厌恶两种不同的构念,从疾病防御的角度理解厌恶的进化根源,以及测量厌恶启动之后人们对不同道德冒犯的内隐态度。     

Pyrrhonism in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes

The importance of Pyrrhonism to Hobbes's political philosophy is much greater than has been recognized. He seems to have used Pyrrhonist arguments to support a doctrine of moral relativity, but he was not a sceptic in the Pyrrhonist sense. These arguments helped him to develop his teaching that there is no absolute good or evil; to minimise the purchase of natural law in the state of nature and its restrictions on the right of nature; virtually to collapse natural law into civil law; and to make the sovereign the political, moral and theological epicenter of his political system.     

Moral error theory,explanatory dispensability and the limits of guilt

Philosophical Studies - Recently, companions in guilt strategies have garnered significant philosophical attention as a response to arguments for moral error theory, the view that there are no...     

Organ sales and moral distress

abstract The possibility that organ sales by living adults might be made legal is morally distressing to many of us. However, powerful arguments have been provided recently supporting legalisation (I consider two of those arguments: the Consequentialist Argument and the Autonomy Argument). Is our instinctive reaction against a market of organs irrational then? The aim of this paper is not to prove that legalization would be immoral, all things considered, but rather to show, first, that there are some kinds of arguments, offered in favour of legalisation, that are, in an important sense, illegitimate, and second, that even if legalisation might not be wrong all things considered, there are good reasons for our negative moral intuitions. Moreover, identifying these reasons will help highlight some features of moral decisions in non‐ideal situations, which in turn might be relevant to some other moral or policy choices.     

Evolutionary debunking: Can moral realists explain the reliability of our moral judgments?

Evolutionary debunking arguments, notably Sharon Street’s Darwinian Dilemma (2006), allege that moral realists need to explain the reliability of our moral judgments, given their evolutionary sources. David Copp (2008) and David Enoch (2010) take up the challenge. I argue on empirical grounds that realists have not met the challenge and moreover cannot do so. The outcome is that there are empirically-motivated reasons for thinking moral realists cannot explain moral reliability, given our current empirical understanding.     

Justifying a presumption of restraint in animal biotechnology research

Articulating the public's widespread unease about animal biotechnology has not been easy, and the first attempts have not been able to provide an effective tool for navigating the moral permissibility of this research. Because these moral intuitions have been difficult to cash out, they have been belittled as representing nothing more than fear or confusion. But there are sound philosophical reasons supporting the public's opposition to animal biotechnology and these arguments justify a default position of resistance I call the Presumption of Restraint. The Presumption of Restraint constitutes a justificatory process that sets out the criteria for permitting or rejecting individual biotechnology projects. This Presumption of Restraint can be overridden by compelling arguments that speak to a project's moral and scientific merit. This strategy creates a middle-of-the-road stance that can embrace particular projects, while rejecting others. The Presumption of Restraint can also serve as a model for assessing moral permissibility in other areas of technological innovation.     

Old Wine in New Bottles

Evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) purport to show that robust moral realism, the metaethical view that there are non-natural and mind-independent moral properties and facts that we can know about, is incompatible with evolutionary explanations of morality. One of the most prominent evolutionary debunking arguments is advanced by Sharon Street, who argues that if moral realism were true, then objective moral knowledge is unlikely because realist moral properties are evolutionary irrelevant and moral beliefs about those properties would not be selected for. However, no evolutionary, causal explanation plays an essential role in reaching the argument’s epistemological conclusion. Street’s argument depends on the Benacerraf-Field challenge, which is the challenge to explain the reliability of our moral beliefs about causally inert moral properties. The Benacerraf-Field challenge relies on metaphysically necessary facts about realist moral properties, rather than on contingent Darwinian facts about the origin of our moral beliefs. Attempting to include an essential causal empirical premise yet avoiding recourse to the Benacerraf-Field problem yields an argument that is either self-defeating or of limited scope. Ultimately, evolutionary, causal explanations of our moral beliefs and their consequences do not present the strongest case against robust moral realism. Rather, the question is whether knowledge of casually-inert, mind-intendent properties is plausible at all.     

Mathematics,Morality, and Self‐Effacement

I argue that certain species of belief, such as mathematical, logical, and normative beliefs, are insulated from a form of Harman‐style debunking argument whereas moral beliefs, the primary target of such arguments, are not. Harman‐style arguments have been misunderstood as attempts to directly undermine our moral beliefs. They are rather best given as burden‐shifting arguments, concluding that we need additional reasons to maintain our moral beliefs. If we understand them this way, then we can see why moral beliefs are vulnerable to such arguments while mathematical, logical, and normative beliefs are not—the very construction of Harman‐style skeptical arguments requires the truth of significant fragments of our mathematical, logical, and normative beliefs, but requires no such thing of our moral beliefs. Given this property, Harman‐style skeptical arguments against logical, mathematical, and normative beliefs are self‐effacing; doubting these beliefs on the basis of such arguments results in the loss of our reasons for doubt. But we can cleanly doubt the truth of morality.