Abstract
Several authors have discussed and defended what is sometimes called the Asymmetry Thesis in social epistemology: that while reliance on testimony is essentially incontrovertible in epistemology, it is uniquely problematic for moral knowledge. This conclusion results, I argue, from considering the wrong sort of moral testimony: namely, ‘third-personal’ rather than ‘first-personal’ testimony. First-personal moral testimony is an inescapable part of the constitution of legitimate moral norms, and its role cannot be deflated as a form of mere information to be taken up in private deliberation. The consequences of this argument for forms of hypothetical contractualism, in particular, are profound.
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Notes
Thus my intent here is to say something about what it takes to produce moral justification or knowledge and so is moral-epistemic, in that sense. For a recent and, at some points, overlapping argument that is nevertheless focused instead on the moral—rather than moral-epistemic—reasons for accepting testimony, see Wiland 2017. Although Wiland’s argument concerns why it is good to trust others, his use of Miranda Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice provides a bridge of sorts between his (I think, excellent) argument and mine here, inasmuch as Fricker’s critique of testimonial injustice, for instance, has both moral and moral-epistemic dimensions: that is, because testimonial exclusion inflicts a moral harm on the one whose status as knower is denied, and it impedes the social pursuit of truth.
Sarah McGrath (2011) poses a compelling challenge for moral realists on this basis, for whom the apparent absence of accepted, (third-personal) moral expertise should be troubling: if there are indeed independent moral facts analogous to natural facts; and if those facts are—as they seem to be—elusive or non-obvious, like the facts of physics, say; then it would seem reasonable to expect that some people will be better at knowing them and so will be more morally knowledgeable than others. Conversely, if there is no moral expertise, or if such expertise is unusually controversial, then the burden of explanation falls to the realist to explain what is, from that point of view, an apparently counter-intuitive situation.
Groll and Decker, who employ the “normal” versus “nonnormal” distinction described above, use various analogies in their effort to elucidate it, including the “normal” logical knowledge involved in avoiding fallacies. But this risks equivocation: identifying logical fallacies is not a case of conforming to statistically common or expected patterns of reasoning. To the contrary, many fallacies, including those arguably linked with cognitive heuristics, are overwhelmingly common. While “normal” moral knowledge seems to indicate something about statistically widespread expectations, normal logical knowledge does not.
Although Silwa does not use the language of “normal moral knowledge,” then, the point is substantively the same: we are disturbed by “moral ignorance” in those cases where there is a generalized expectation of knowledge.
Silwa is less convinced on this point: she sees Hills’ Eleanor—the vegetarian convert—as troubling for a quite different reason: the ethics of meat-eating is one of those hard questions about which there is considerable controversy among reasonable people; deferring to someone else’s judgment in such a case, when one can have no good reason to think that person especially likely to be correct (since it is ex hypothesi unclear who is correct) is a kind of abdication of one’s responsibilities as a moral agent (Silwa 2012: 189).
McGrath (2009) describes such epistemic testimony as “impure” and denies that it is really a form of moral testimony at all.
My thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for this journal, from whom I have borrowed this way of putting the point. For a more detailed, internal critique of Scanlon’s attempt to reject or trivialize our reliance on actual discourse, see Borman 2015.
The decision in the latter case, The State of Washington v. Wanrow (1977), was overturned precisely for the failure to perceive the difference.
As one reviewer observed, this may also be true of the potential perpetrators of violations of consent, which is much the point of the doctrine of explicit sexual consent. For an excellent discussion that goes well beyond consent-agreements in sexual ethics, see Kukla 2019.
The question of numbers is at least arguably relevant where the principle concerns macroallocation—the distribution of health resources to areas of the health system—as I have stipulated here, since any principle of macroallocation is likely to treat some individual cases in a less than optimal fashion, while insisting on the consideration of every case individually is tantamount to a refusal to have any policy at all (see Veatch 1993). In matters of microallocation, on the other hand, such as deciding which individual should receive a donor organ, it is enough to raise the question of the relevance of testimony that a single affected individual disputes the justice of a principle, like the “fair innings”, when invoked as a criterion.
The exact relationship between the nature and role of thick concepts in moral understanding, on the one hand, and our dependence upon moral testimony, on the other, will depend on a number of controversial details in one’s account of the first, including, among others, issues in the philosophy of language and meaning. If the thickness of many moral concepts is a function of their embeddedness in culturally-specific, substantive worldviews, for example, then our reliance upon testimony may be especially clear when moral questions cross the boundaries of such worldviews. Such details aside, it seems plausible to argue for our dependence upon moral testimony directly from an account of thick ethical concepts; doing so would complement, but ultimately falls outside the scope, of the approach taken here.
See also the discussion in Koggel 1998: 94ff. In fact, Moller Okin anticipates, to some extent, the kind of argument I am making here when she notes that there are good reasons to think gender morally relevant and so not properly excluded by the veil of ignorance, since the differences in the path of moral development between men and women in societies like ours results in different moral points of view (Moller Okin 1987: 68–70).
I should perhaps say something about my use of “we” in the closing sections here. Both the way I use the pronoun and my final examples will have suggested that this “we” refers to the privileged party in the relevant case: to men learning from women, to the able-bodied learning from the disabled, to dominant racial or ethnic groups learning from the marginalized. These are the easiest examples, but the underlying argument holds with complete generality across divergent points of view and experiences, irrespective of relative privilege, as should be demonstrated by the earlier examples which do not have this character.
Hypothetical contractualists like Scanlon appeal to the device of “trusteeship” in cases where affected parties cannot articulate their own interests. But there are not good reasons to suppose that any given reasoner should be a reliable trustee for a specific form of life, experience, etc., with which they in fact have no familiarity. To the contrary, we have every empirical reason to suspect the opposite. To take just one example: as Adrienne Asch (1999) reports, “Shown a film about the lives of families with Down syndrome, nurses and genetic counsellors—but not parents [of children with Downs]—described the film as unrealistic and too positive a portrayal of family life”. These are ill-qualified trustees, as most unaffected persons are. My argument thus suggests that there are “first-personal” adjacent reasons to insist upon experiential qualifications for the exercise of moral trusteeship, even when this cannot amount to fully first-personal testimony, as is likely with some cases of disability.
My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this journal for the additional example. This possibility again shows quite clearly why moral deliberation must involve actual discourse with others, pace Scanlon et al.
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Borman, D.A. First-Personal Moral Testimony: a Defence. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 23, 163–179 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-019-10052-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-019-10052-4