Abstract
Some have attempted to explain why it appears that action based on deferential moral belief lacks moral worth by appealing to claims about an attitude that is difficult to acquire through testimony, which theorists have called “moral understanding”. I argue that this state is at least partly non-cognitive. I begin by employing case-driven judgments to undermine the assumption that I argue is responsible for the strangeness of deferential moral belief: the assumption that if an agent knows that some fact gives them a moral reason to act in some way, then they’re in a position to act that way for the moral reason given by that fact. I then argue that cases from non-moral epistemology concerning properly-based belief give us independent reason to reject this assumption and conclude by sketching a Davidson-inspired account of normative reasons that explains why acting for moral reasons requires the right non-cognitive state, which is worth calling a kind of moral understanding.
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Notes
This thesis might seem, on its face, immediately unacceptable. “Understanding” surely denotes a cognitive state. So moral understanding simply could not be partly non-cognitive. But all this worry shows is that “moral understanding” is a bad name for a partly non-cognitive phenomenon.
Indeed, there’s no deep reason to expect that the state that plays (1), (2), and (3) is factive. Arguments for this claim depend on linguistic properties of the verb to understand. I am suggesting that, perhaps, the state investigated in this debate, which has been called ‘moral understanding’, may not be understanding in the strictest sense, for I find linguistic argument for reductionism about understanding, in the strict sense, compelling.
Alternatively, we could say that a belief is strictly based on testimony just in case all the motivating (or as Scanlon calls them, optative) reasons responsible for the belief are only facts of the form ⌜A testified that r⌝, for some informant A and proposition or fact r. I take no stand on which view is correct.
See, e.g., Sliwa (2016, 2017) and Lawler ( forthcoming; 2018).
I’m drawing particularly on Schroeder (2007, Ch.2)‘s understanding of background conditions.
Hills’s full-blooded analysis involves six conditions, each of which the agent must satisfy to some extent — see Hills (2009, 103). For reasons of space, I offer an abridged characterization.
I’m taking “evidence” as shorthand for normative reasons for belief of the right kind. For more on the claim that the possession relation agents and reasons is cognitive, see, inter alia, Dancy (2000), Lord (2008, 2014), and Schroeder (2007, 2011). Lord’s more recent work (2017, 2018) complicates the claim that the possession relation is cognitive.
Lord and Sylvan do not claim to have invented this style of case. They attribute similar cases to Goldman, Swain, Millar, Turri, and Armstrong, inter alia.
Davidson’s view is more accurately described as the view that reasons are pairs of beliefs and pro-attitudes. For simplicity, I’m glossing pro-attitudes as “desires”.
Howard (n.d).
Thanks to Mark Schroeder, Ralph Wedgwood, Steve Finlay, John Hawthorne, Nate Charlow, Alexander Dietz, Joe Horton, Jon Wright, Max Asher Lewis, Alison Hills, and Errol Lord.
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Howard, N.R. Sentimentalism about Moral Understanding. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 21, 1065–1078 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9946-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9946-y