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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

We have been exploring whether a loose reconstruction of an argument (as outlined in Greene contra Ethics (Railgun Remix)) 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.

It does.

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Glossary

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

Bell, J. L. (2019). The Axiom of Choice. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
Dąbrowska, E. (2010). Naive v. Expert intuitions: An empirical study of acceptability judgments. The Linguistic Review, 27(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1515/tlir.2010.001
Gibson, E., & Fedorenko, E. (2010). Weak quantitative standards in linguistics research. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(6), 233–234. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2010.03.005
Goldstein, S. (2017). Bohmian Mechanics. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
Kozhevnikov, M., & Hegarty, M. (2001). Impetus beliefs as default heuristics: Dissociation between explicit and implicit knowledge about motion. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8(3), 439–453. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196179
Lewis, D. K. (1983). Philosophical papers. Vol. 1. New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Priest, G., Berto, F., & Weber, Z. (2018). Dialetheism. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
Railton, P. (2014). The Affective Dog and Its Rational Tale: Intuition and Attunement. Ethics, 124(4), 813–859. https://doi.org/10.1086/675876
Rawls, J. (1999). A Theory of Justice (Revised edition). Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Wasow, T., & Arnold, J. (2005). Intuitions in linguistic argumentation. Lingua, 115(11), 1481–1496. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2004.07.001

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). ↩︎