Abstract
According to moral intuitionism, at least some moral seeming states are justification-conferring. The primary defense of this view currently comes from advocates of the standard account, who take the justification-conferring power of a moral seeming to be determined by its phenomenological credentials alone. However, the standard account is vulnerable to a problem. In brief, the standard account implies that moral knowledge is seriously undermined by those commonplace moral disagreements in which both agents have equally good phenomenological credentials supporting their disputed moral beliefs. However, it is implausible to think that commonplace disagreement seriously undermines moral knowledge, and thus it is implausible to think that the standard account of moral intuitionism is true.
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Notes
It is difficult to know just how often our moral beliefs rest upon moral intuitions. Jonathan Haidt’s (2001) work in this area suggests that many more of our moral beliefs rest upon moral intuitions than we perhaps realize, though my argument does not depend upon this claim.
The notion of evidential support invoked in (iii) and (iv) is intended to be an intuitive one; i.e. \(\hbox {e}_{1}\) provides \(\hbox {p}_{1}\) with epistemic support for S when S’s knowing \(\hbox {e}_{1}\) makes \(\hbox {p}_{1}\) more epistemically likely for S than not knowing \(\hbox {e}_{1}\).
One might think that NEWC needs a confidence condition in order to be a sufficient account of when disagreements lead to defeat, in line with views held by Lackey (2010a, b) and Bergmann (2012). Though I do not have the space to argue this is unnecessary, I will say that I do not think that an agent could be highly justifiably confident in a belief after satisfying the antecedent conditions of NEWC in a dispute about that belief.
My argument against SMI does not hang on this proposal. What matters is that what does the work in justifying some non-inferentially held moral beliefs is introspectively accessible (and thus capable of being disclosed in a disagreement). One might be worried that this recasting too easily allows for obviously false beliefs (such as Dr. Gustoff’s, introduced below) to count as self-evident. Yet if self-evidence is understood in a way compatible with epistemic internalism, then there must be some introspectively accessible feature of a belief that is mistakenly understood to be self-evident that marks it off from one that is genuinely self-evident. If two beliefs have equally good internally-accessible support (as is the case, ex hypothesi for Dr. Gustoff and Dr. Ferguson below), then they are by an internalist’s lights equally well justified—and this is true whether internally-accessible support is cashed out in terms of seemings with certain phenomenology, or something else.
In other works, Audi advocates externalism with regard to knowledge but not justification (1993, p. 334), and Shafer-Landau (2003, pp. 272–275) endorses reliabilism with respect to justification. Unfortunately, Shafer-Landau does not explain how his position regarding reliabilism connects with his views on self-evidence, and thus for the purposes of this paper I will treat him as an ordinary advocate of SMI. Depending upon how Shafer-Landau explains his externalism, however, he may have more resources for handling the problems introduced below.
A doxastic use of ‘intuition’ is not intended to have any substantive import. Others use ‘intuition’ differently.
Wedgwood (2010) discusses cases like these, calling whatever led to Dr. Gustoff’s intuition a ‘moral evil demon’ (2010, p. 220). Whereas Wedgwood is there concerned with analyzing the epistemic consequences of discovering simply that another disagrees with oneself about a proposition (cf. 2010, p. 232), I am here concerned with those disagreements satisfying the antecedent conditions of NEWC. One might doubt that there really are people like Dr. Gustoff. History furnishes us with many examples of evil people and evil cultures. Consider, for example, the way the untouchables were treated in India, or Jewish people in Nazi Germany (including by intellectuals like Heidegger). Evidence suggests that people are naturally prone to be preferentially attracted to beautiful people and naturally prone to let their feelings of disgust influence their moral beliefs, often in improper ways (Kelly 2011, pp. 101–136; Slater et al. 1998). Combined with the unfortunate habit many people have of treating their own preferences as having normative import, it is not surprising why we have real examples of people like Dr. Gustoff.
One might worry that intuitions cannot be disclosed, only reported. Yet, reporting an intuition (e.g. “it seems self-evident to me that p”) is reporting one’s evidence, if SMI is right. Moreover, even though an interlocutor does not have first-person access to the other’s intuition, we often do not have first-person access to another’s evidence in disagreements and must rely upon their testimony of the facts (e.g. in Thermometer), including facts about how things seem. Experience also suggests that the mere report of another’s seeming can provide one strong evidential grounds for assenting to the proposition it supports (e.g. reports of it seeming that there is a rock in one’s shoe, reports that it seems that one should \(\phi \) given by apparent moral experts). Hence, the reports of another’s seemings ordinarily give us reason to take them at their word, trusting that things do appear to them as they have reported. Unless there is good reason to doubt another’s sincerity, or at least to doubt that the phenomenology reported corresponds to what is genuinely felt—as might be the case when talking with an enthusiast—reports of seemings will satisfy conditions (iii) and (iv) in the ways detailed above.
Haidt’s phenomena of “moral dumbfounding” (cf. Haidt 2001, p. 817) seems additional strong evidence that people take many moral beliefs to be at least weakly self-evident, grounded in intuitions. What is weak self-evidence? Conee describes self-evidence as involving a phenomenal experience “as though detecting something in what [the proposition] says that is sufficient for its truth” (2012, p. 429). It seems clear to me that the phenomenal strength, or vivacity, of experiences like this can differ as a matter of degree. When the experience is weak, then one has weak self-evidence, cf. (Audi (2004), p. 53). This is not to say that strong seemings are equivalent to self-evidential seemings, just to say that the experience of appearing to detect something in a proposition, the grasp of which is sufficient to justify the proposition, appears capable of varying by degree in vivacity.
Why not think that some considerations can count as defeaters without counting as justifiers? For instance, I know that I cannot speak German, and this fact defeats my having a duty to speak it in some unusual cases. But suppose I learned German. Knowing the language does not give me a duty or a reason to speak it. Hence, ability facts can count as defeaters for action without counting as justifiers. Why can’t there be a parallel in epistemology? There is at least prima facie reason to be hesitant. My having a duty or a reason to act requires the satisfaction of conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient. The duty to speak German requires circumstances in which speaking German is needed, as well as an ability to do so, among others. My inability counts as a defeater because one necessary condition for duty is unsatisfied, but mere ability is not sufficient a duty. There must also be necessitating circumstances, which is why ability facts can count as defeaters and not justifiers. For there to be an analogy with externalist considerations in epistemology, externalist considerations must be necessary but not individually sufficient conditions for justification. Yet this is not what internalists ordinarily claim, thus Audi writes “what justifies a belief ... is (internally) accessible” (2001, emphasis added). Similarly, an internalist cannot say that justification is overdetermined by a concurrence of internally accessible evidence and something external, for the latter is ruled out as grounds for justification by internalist principles and an overdetermination would imply that when internally accessible evidence is defeated, as it is in Thermometer, the belief is still justified by an undefeated externalist component—which is just to reject epistemic internalism. I thank a blind referee for raising both possible responses on behalf of SMI.
The import of thermometer analogies for disagreement has been argued as limited, cf. (Enoch (2010), pp. 959–965) and White (2012). For a recent defense of the plausibility of this analogy, see Littlejohn (2012). Even if the analogy is weak, I do not intend to rely it alone to support the present objection to SMI.
Advocates of SMI have not wholly ignored etiology. For instance, many require that their epistemological principles apply to ordinary agents, e.g. (Audi (2004), p. 43). However, if this or another etiological property of an agent is a necessary condition for the justification-conferring power of a seeming, then it is hard to see how it fits with the advocate of SMI’s characteristic endorsement of epistemic internalism.
I’m grateful to a blind referee for this suggestion.
Besides the strangeness of not ordinarily being justified in invoking such a commonplace notion as peerage, the ability to justifiably evaluate the credibility of a speaker vis-à-vis one’s own credibility seems central to norms of testimony-acceptance. Thus, I am strongly inclined to accept expert testimony without much investigation, I am partially inclined to accept peer testimony without much investigation, but I am moderately inclined to double-check or place little reliance upon the testimony of one whose epistemic credentials I do not know. If these are reasonable attitudes, then peerage skepticism should incline us to place little reliance on all but recognizably expert testimony.
Might peers be considered those who have equally strong phenomenological credentials for their seemings? I don’t think this is a very plausible solution; among other reasons, it is not uncommon to encounter agents to whom things do not simply seem true or false, but (almost) always appear strongly true or false. These people are often called ‘ideologues’. But this strategy suggests that those who have more measured and moderate seemings will not be full-scale peers with ideologues, which is counterintuitive.
In his (2002) argument against moral intuitionism, among others, Sinnott-Armstrong suggests this strategy faces an additional problem, namely the need to provide arguments for one’s moral beliefs after disagreement undermines the plausibility of the intuitionist’s epistemic foundationalism. Put more simply, seemings are only tentative regress-stoppers, and thus tentative epistemic foundations. I thank a blind referee for pointing out this connection.
I am not arguing that judgment aggregation—based on the seemings of others—in favor of one’s disputed belief might not provide additional evidence in favor of that belief (by perhaps providing evidence in favor of one’s reliability or trustworthiness). The present argument is instead that it is implausible for the advocate of SMI to claim that a belief is better supported by argument than a self-evident seeming.
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Acknowledgments
I am deeply indebted to Patrick Kain, Michael Bergmann, and Terence Cuneo for their insights and feedback. I’d also like to thank Matthias Steup for several useful suggestions and two blind referees for their very good comments. Finally, I’d like to thank my commentator, Brian Hutchinson, as well as my audience for an early version of this paper presented at the 2011 meeting of the Central States Philosophical Association.
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Besong, B. Moral intuitionism and disagreement. Synthese 191, 2767–2789 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0420-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0420-7