Debunking Arguments

Essay Questions

This section is relevant for answering the following questions:

• long essay question 6, Could discoveries in moral psychology undermine, or support, ethical principles or theories?

• long essay question 7, Do discoveries in moral psychology reveal that ethical arguments should not rely on premises which are not justified inferentially if the aim of the argument is to establish knowledge of its conclusion?

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 intutions 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.

Optional Extra Bit: Response to Rini?

One reason to doubt that Rini’s argument works is that it starts with ‘nearly any’. She has not shown that a debunking argument must always trigger a regress. So maybe there are some debunking arguments that do not trigger a regress?

In pursuing this, it may be helpful to think through Rini’s argument in relation to particular debunking arguments.^[2]

Here is a bad example of a debunking argument:

1. On reflection, many people judge that harmless but disgusting actions (e.g., cleaning a toilet with a national flag) are morally wrong.

2. The difference in judgments between disgusting and non-disgusting actions is driven by the emotion of disgust.

3. The feeling of disgust is not morally relevant to whether an action causes harm or violates rights.

4. Therefore, judgments that condemn harmless actions solely based on disgust responses are unjustified.

You can see that in premise 3, the argument is assuming that only harms and violations of rights are morally relevant (which something many would reject; see Moral Pluralism: Beyond Harm).

My own sense is that Singer’s debunking argument (above) does not have this problem. Spatial distance really is morally irrelevant, and this should actually be uncontroversion (see Singer vs Kamm on Distance). So this is looks like counterexample to Rini’s claim about debunking arguments leading to regress. Except that, as you know (from Singer vs Kamm on Distance), premise 2 of Singer’s argument is false.

Is there a debunking argument, which like Singer’s, does not trigger a regress, and which, like the bad argument on disgust above, is not based on a false preimse about why people make moral judgements?