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Debunking Arguments

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Essay Questions

This section is relevant for answering the following questions:

Notes

Debunking Arguments aim to show that our moral judgements are not sensitive to moral truth.

Here is a sample debunking argument based on Singer (Singer, 1972):

  1. On reflection, many people judge that not acting in Near Alone is worse than not Acting in Far Alone.

  2. The difference in judgements is due to the difference in distance between the agent and the victim.

  3. The difference in distance is not morally relevant.

  4. Therefore, at least one of the judgements about Near Alone or Far Alone is wrong.

We have seen that premise 2 is actually wrong (in Singer vs Kamm on Distance; see Nagel & Waldmann (2013)). But for the sake of illustration, I want to pretend that premise 2 is true. (I just want to illustrate the form of a debunking argument without introducing a new example.)

In general, a debunking argument aims to undermine one or more moral intuitions by identifying a factor that influences those moral intuitions but is not morally relevant.

Note that this debunking argument depends a premise about which factors are morally relevant (namely premise 3). This is a feature of many debunking arguments:

‘To say that a particular psychological process does not track moral truth is to say that the process generates judgments which are not subjunctively sensitive to certain moral properties. We cannot say this without making some moral judgments ourselves’ (Rini, 2016, p. 682, my emphasis; see further Rini, 2017, p. 1443[1]).

It follows that whether discoveries about moral psychology can change our moral beliefs depends on questions that have to be resolved by doing ethics.

Rini argues that this leads to a regress:

‘nearly any attempt to debunk a particular moral judgment on grounds of its psychological cause risks triggering a regress, because a debunking argument must involve moral evaluation of the psychological cause—and this evaluation is itself then subject to psychological investigation and moral evaluation, and so on’ (Rini, 2016, p. 676). (See also Horne & Livengood (2017, p. §3) on ordering effects and scepticism.)

Is Rini’s objection successful? In the rest of the course I will assume it is. I will therefore consider an alternative kind of argument, one that does not face Rini’s objection. But if you can show that Rini’s objection fails, that would be a useful contribution.

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).
Far Alone : ‘I alone know that in a distant part of a foreign country that I am visiting, many children are drowning, and I alone can save one of them. To save the one, all I must do is put the 500 dollars I carry in my pocket into a machine that then triggers (via electric current) rescue machinery that will certainly scoop him out’ (Kamm, 2008, p. 348)
moral intuition : According to this lecturer, a person’s intuitions are the claims they take to be true independently of whether those claims are justified inferentially. And a person’s moral intuitions are simply those of their intuitions that concern ethical matters.
According to Sinnott-Armstrong, Young, & Cushman (2010, p. 256), moral intuitions are ‘strong, stable, immediate moral beliefs.’
Audi (2015) distinguishes various notions of intuition including episodic intuitions. These ‘episodic intuitions’ are supposed to be analogous to perceivings: they are ‘intellectual seemings ... of the truth of a proposition.’
Near Alone : ‘I am walking past a pond in a foreign country that I am visiting. I alone see many children drowning in it, and I alone can save one of them. To save the one, I must put the 500 dollars I have in my pocket into a machine that then triggers (via electric current) rescue machinery that will certainly scoop him out’ (Kamm, 2008, p. 348)

References

Audi, R. (2015). Intuition and Its Place in Ethics. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 1(1), 57–77. http://0-dx.doi.org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1017/apa.2014.29
Darwin, C., Bonner, J. T., & May, R. M. (2008). The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. In Princeton University Press eBook-Package Archive 1927-1999 (With a New introduction by J. T. Bonner and R. M. May). De Gruyter: Princeton University Press.
Horne, Z., & Livengood, J. (2017). Ordering effects, updating effects, and the specter of global skepticism. Synthese, 194(4), 1189–1218. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0985-9
Kahane, G. (2014). Evolution and Impartiality. Ethics, 124(2), 327–341. https://doi.org/10.1086/673433
Kamm, F. M. (2008). Intricate ethics: Rights, responsibilities, and permissible harm. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Königs, P. (2020). Experimental ethics, intuitions, and morally irrelevant factors. Philosophical Studies, 177(9), 2605–2623.
Nagel, J., & Waldmann, M. R. (2013). Deconfounding distance effects in judgments of moral obligation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 39(1), 237.
Nagel, T. (1997). The last word. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rini, R. A. (2016). Debunking debunking: A regress challenge for psychological threats to moral judgment. Philosophical Studies, 173(3), 675–697. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0513-2
Rini, R. A. (2017). Why moral psychology is disturbing. Philosophical Studies, 174(6), 1439–1458. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0766-4
Singer, P. (1972). Famine, Affluence, and Morality. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1(3), 229–243.
Singer, P. (2005). Ethics and Intuitions. The Journal of Ethics, 9(3), 331–352. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-005-3508-y
Sinnott-Armstrong, W., Young, L., & Cushman, F. (2010). Moral intuitions. In J. M. Doris, M. P. R. Group, & others (Eds.), The moral psychology handbook (pp. 246–272). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Street, S. (2006). A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 127(1), 109–166.

Endnotes

  1. In this passage, Rini cites T. Nagel (1997, p. 105) in support of the view that discoveries about moral psychology cannot ‘change our moral beliefs’. Note that the paragraph she cites from ends with a much weaker claim opposing ‘any blanket attempt to displace, defuse, or subjectivize‘ moral concerns. Further, Nagel’s essay starts with the observation that moral reasoning ‘is easily subject to distortion by morally irrelevant factors ... as well as outright error’ (T. Nagel, 1997, p. 101). So while one of Nagel’s assertions supports Rini’s interpretation, it is unclear to me that Rini is right about Nagel’s considered position. But I could easily be wrong. ↩︎