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Conclusion: Guesses Aren’t Evidence

Discoveries in moral psychology reveal that not-justified-inferentially premises about particular moral scenarios cannot be used in ethical arguments insofar as the arguments aim to establish knowledge of their conclusions.

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Notes

The target for the whole lecture is Kagan’s view:

‘When I have an intuition it seems to me that something is the case, and so I am defeasibly justified in believing that things are as they appear to me to be. That fact [...] opens the door to the possibility of moral knowledge.’ (Kagan, 2023, p. 167)

We started with a quick overview of potential objections to Kagan’s view in Debunking Arguments:

None of these arguments depend on discoveries in moral psychology. But it is possible to use some discoveries in moral psychology to provide a different kind of debunking argument.

We have been exploring whether a loose reconstruction of an argument (as outlined in Greene contra Ethics) succeeds in establishing that not-justified-inferentially premises about particular moral scenarios cannot be used in ethical arguments insofar as the arguments aim to establish knowledge of their conclusions.

Glossary

debunking argument : A debunking argument aims to use facts about why people make a certain judgement together with facts about which factors are morally relevant in order to undermine the case for accepting it. Königs (2020, p. 2607) provides a useful outline of the logic of these arguments (which he calls ‘arguments from moral irrelevance’): ‘when we have different intuitions about similar moral cases, we take this to indicate that there is a moral difference between these cases. This is because we take our intuitions to have responded to a morally relevant difference. But if it turns out that our case-specific intuitions are responding to a factor that lacks moral significance, we no longer have reason to trust our case-specific intuitions suggesting that there really is a moral difference. This is the basic logic behind arguments from moral irrelevance’ (Königs, 2020, p. 2607).
not-justified-inferentially : A claim (or premise, or principle) is not-justified-inferentially if it is not justified in virtue of being inferred from some other claim (or premise, or principle).
Claims made on the basis of perception (That jumper is red, say) are typically not-justified-inferentially.
Why not just say ‘noninferentially justified’? Because that can be read as implying that the claim is justified, noninferentially. Whereas ‘not-justified-inferentially’ does not imply this. Any claim which is not justified at all is thereby not-justified-inferentially.

References

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Kagan, S. (2023). Answering Moral Skepticism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Königs, P. (2020). Experimental ethics, intuitions, and morally irrelevant factors. Philosophical Studies, 177(9), 2605–2623.
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Endnotes

  1. ‘If, by any means whatsoever, it is possible to determine the slit through which the particle passes, the interference pattern will be destroyed’ (Goldstein, 2017). ↩︎