Volume 4, Number 1
January 2010
ARTICLE

Moral Intuitions, Reliability and Disagreement

Volume 4, Number 1, January 2010, Pages 1–36
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v4i1.39
PDFPDF

Abstract

There is an ancient, yet still lively, debate in moral epistemology about the epistemic significance of disagreement. One of the important questions in that debate is whether, and to what extent, the prevalence and persistence of disagreement between our moral intuitions causes problems for those who seek to rely on intuitions in order to make moral decisions, issue moral judgments, and craft moral theories. Meanwhile, in general epistemology, there is a relatively young, and very lively, debate about the epistemic significance of disagreement. A central question in that debate concerns peer disagreement: When I am confronted with an epistemic peer with whom I disagree, how should my confidence in my beliefs change (if at all)? The disagreement debate in moral epistemology has not been brought into much contact with the disagreement debate in general epistemology (though McGrath’s “Moral Disagreement and Moral Expertise” is an important exception). A purpose of this paper is to increase the area of contact between these two debates. In section 1, I try to clarify the question I want to ask in this paper—this is the question whether we have any reasons to believe what I shall call “anti-intuitivism.” In section 2, I argue that anti-intuitivism cannot be supported solely by investigating the mechanisms that produce our intuitions. In section 3, I discuss an anti-intuitivist argument from disagreement which relies on the so-called “Equal Weight View.” In section 4, I pause to clarify the notion of epistemic parity and to explain how it ought to be understood in the epistemology of moral intuition. In section 5, I return to the anti-intuitivist argument from disagreement and explain how an apparently-vulnerable premise of that argument may be quite resilient. In section 6, I introduce a novel objection against the Equal Weight View in order to show how I think we can successfully resist the anti-intuitivist argument from disagreement.
Copyright © 2010 David Killoren
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
|

Kant and the Balance of Moral Forces

Santiago Sanchez Borboa

The Moral Closure Argument

Matt Lutz

Evolutionary Debunking, Moral Realism and Moral Knowledge

Russ Shafer-Landau

Self-Evidence and Disagreement in Ethics

Ryan Fanselow

Moral Principles Are Not Moral Laws

Luke Robinson

Reframing Epistemic Partiality: A Case for Acceptance

Laura K. Soter

Causation, Statistical Evidence, and Toxic Torts

Vishnu Sridharan

The Essence of Structural Irrationality: The Impossibility of Attitudinal Success

Julian Fink

Against Being For

James L. D. Brown

Epistemic Trepassing and Expert Witness Testimony

Mark Satta

Planning on a Prior Intention

Facundo M. Alonso

Reply to Mark Lance, Ásta, and Marya Schechtman

Hilde Lindemann

Portico