Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Peter Baron, paraphrasing J.L. Mackie, offers an argument against the intuitionism that W.D. Ross and G.E. Moore (and I) share, in meta-ethics or (what is it seems to me the same) moral epistemology.  The Baron/Mackie argument runs thus: 1. Objective moral values and the faculties that intuitionists posit to detect them are strikingly queer, or as Mackie put it, "utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else." 2. We should not believe in such a queer concept without very strong evidence. Lemma: We should not believe in objective moral values or a moral sense without very strong evidence. 3. There is little or no evidence in favor of these queer things. Conclusion: We should not believe in them. Notice that the article proceeds as two syllogisms, with the conclusion of the first serving as one of the premises of the second.  The whole thing seems to me to be a bit of evidential gerrymandering. It is strikingly odd, even queer, that bright highly-tra...

Robert Audi is a contemporary exponent of intuitionism within the field of moral epistemology. That is, his answer to the question "how do we know what is right" involves an appeal to a quasi-sensory and non-inferential recognition one might call intuition for lack of a better term. His 2013 book MORAL PERCEPTION is one of those that puts this view forward. My understanding is that Audi specifically thinks of duties and their breach as the objects of this intuition. We intuit things like "lying is prima facie wrong." We neither infer it nor are we making a statement of subjective preference when we say such a thing. We intuit it and we are sensing something objectively true when we do so. I think there is something both importantly right and importantly wrong in this. I think that it is appropriate to ground moral judgments in intuitions, but those intuitions are of the goodness of events, not the rightness of actions. Intuitionism, that is, works better wit...

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 i...