- Ethics, Moral Realism, Evolution of Morality, Skepticism, Practical Reasoning, Philosophy Of Religion, and 75 moreMoral Philosophy, Death, Practical Reasons and Rationality, Natural Theology, Metaphilosophy, Intuition, Relativism, Practical Rationality, Naturalism, Political Philosophy, Consequentialism, Epistemology, Contextualism, Analytic Philosophy, Metaphysics, Truth, Harm Principle, Bioethics, Epistemology of Disagreement, Philosophical Scepticism, Animal Ethics, Epistemic Justification, History of Analytic Philosophy, Sentimentalism, Egalitarianism, Virtue Epistemology, Ethical Theory, Disagreement, Moral Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, Vagueness, A Priori Knowledge, Science and values, Normative Ethics, Gettier Problem, Autonomy, Philosophy of Action, Wittgenstein, Global Justice, Internalism/Externalism, William Ockham, Moral Sentimentalism, Normative Ethics and Metaethics, John Duns Scotus, Anthropocentrism, Expressivism, William of Ockham, Philosophy of the Emotions, Space And Place (Art), Applied Ethics, American Pragmatism, Animal Rights, Diagrammatic Reasoning, John McDowell, Political Realism, Social Epistemology, Duns Scotus, Donald Davidson, Moral anti-realism, Philosophical Methodology, Epistemic Modals, Dualism, Place and Identity, Philosophy of Psychopathology, Rationalism, Later Wittgenstein, Self-Knowledge, Place (Architecture), Philosophy of Psychiatry, Early Modern Philosophy, Meaning of Life, Physicalism, Nihilism, Derek Parfit, and Personal Identityedit
According to robust moral realism, there exist objective, non-natural moral facts. Moral facts of this sort do not fit easily into the world as illuminated by natural science. Further, if such facts exist at all, it is hard to see how we... more
According to robust moral realism, there exist objective, non-natural moral facts. Moral facts of this sort do not fit easily into the world as illuminated by natural science. Further, if such facts exist at all, it is hard to see how we could know of their existence by any familiar means. Yet robust realists are not moral skeptics; they believe that we do know (some of) the moral facts. Thus robust moral realism comes with a number of hard-to-defend ontological and epistemological commitments. Recently, Sharon Street has claimed, in light of these commitments, that robust moral realism requires a kind of faith and “has become a strange form of religion.” I believe that Street is right. I argue at some length that robust moral realism does require faith, and is a religion. However, I further argue that it is an excellent religion. I argue that it has three principal advantages: it is avoids wishful thinking, is guaranteed not to contradict the results of natural science, and is profoundly simple in its ontological commitments. Further, robust moral realism may be rationally defensible on eviden- tialist grounds. Consequently, even if the standard arguments for traditional religions are not compelling, there might still be compelling arguments for robust moral realism.
Research Interests:
A morally objectionable outcome can be overdetermined by the actions of multiple individual agents. In such cases, the outcome is the same regardless of what any individual does or does not do. (For a clear example of such a case, imagine... more
A morally objectionable outcome can be overdetermined by the actions of multiple individual agents. In such cases, the outcome is the same regardless of what any individual does or does not do. (For a clear example of such a case, imagine the execution of an innocent person by a firing squad.) We argue that, in some of these types of cases, (a) there exists a group agent, a moral agent constituted by individual agents; (b) the group agent is guilty of violating a moral obligation; however, (c) none of the individual agents violate any of their moral obligations. We explicate and defend this view, and consider its applications to problems generated by anthropogenic climate
change and electoral politics.
change and electoral politics.
Research Interests:
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... more
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 cause 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 [2007] 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.