Skip to main content

Moral Skepticisms



Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, the fellow portrayed here, is the author of MORAL SKEPTICISMS.

This is not to be confused with an anthology called MORAL SKEPTICISM (singular), edited by Diego Machuca, which I included recently on my list of a dozen forthcoming books on epistemology.

Actually, I confused the two myself, and am now re-writing this entry to straighten that out.

I'm happy to report that Sinnott-Armstrong, at least, is not a moral skeptic.  Happy because, as I trust my readers know, I am a cognitivist in meta-ethics and moral epistemology. I very much believe there is a fact of the matter that one either hits or one misses when one says, for example, "it would be right to switch the track on that trolley." Further, I see cognitivism as central to my Jamesianism, and thus to the mission of this humble blog. So I'm happy to see that Sinnott-Armstrong is an ally on this matter, and that his book is about moral skepticism, not for it.

Sinnott-Armstrong is also known for Morality without God? (2009) and for his participation in a debate with a Christian theologian, William Lane Craig, in 2003. In both the debate and the book Sinnott-Armstrong took the view that morality is not only possible without a God, it is better off without Him.

Sinnott-Armstrong is a coherentist in moral epistemology.  That is, he believes that any one belief about an ethical question is part of a broader network of beliefs, that it finds its value -- its justification -- in its contribution to that broader network.

I understand that Moral Skepticisms adds to these ideas the following: that coherentism doesn't make up a full response to moral skepticism (the skeptic can throw the whole network of views into doubt), but that it is the best we have and we can learn to live with it.

Just some thoughts for the day.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more