Abstract
This paper responds to the four critiques of my book Experiments in Ethics published in this issue. The main theme I take up is how we should understand the relation between psychology and philosophy. Young and Saxe believe that “bottom line” evaluative judgments don’t depend on facts. I argue for a different view, according to which our evaluative and non-evaluative judgments must cohere in a way that makes it rational, sometimes, to abandon even what looks like a basic evaluative judgment because we have changed our minds about the facts. This leads me to qualify Tiberius’s claim that our moral judgments always derive, in part, from fundamental evaluative “justificatory stopping points,” arguing that even these can themselves be adjusted in the light of scientific understanding. Weinberg and Wang object to my use of Kant’s distinction between the perspective of the senses and the perspective of the understanding, because they identify it with a distinction between scientific and philosophical worlds. I argue that a distinction of perspectives isn’t a distinction between worlds and that, in any case, the distinction is not between science and ethics. Finally, in responding to Machery’s objections to a couple of my proposals, I return to the suggestion that a coherentist epistemology is required to deal with the relations between science and ethics.
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Notes
See, for example, J. L. Austin [3].
The distance between the way we use the word “intentionally” and our concept of intention is one theme of the literature that grows out of Joshua Knobe’s paper [4], which is a significant landmark in the recent turn to experimental philosophy I discuss in the book.
Of course, you’d actually have to do the experiments to find out whether most people carved up the territory as I have (and as, I suspect, many other philosophers naturally would). Then you’d have to decide who was right.
See, e.g., P. M. Churchland [5].
Neil Levy, in comments on the first draft of this paper, urged me to make my views here clearer. I had the good fortune to hear a talk by Arudra Burra, a graduate student here at Princeton, while I was thinking about how to do so, in which he gave a very careful treatment of similar issues about whether lying is pro tanto wrong. He argues it isn’t. (I say more about pro tanto reasons in the section on “Seeing Reason” in Chapter 3 of Experiments in Ethics.) Some might respond that in picking the incest example I made the case too easy for myself, because they think that the bottom-line judgments are more general (causing pain is wrong) or more particular (doing this here and now is wrong). I realize that one will need different arguments to persuade people of different philosophical positions of the need to make factual and normative claims cohere.
For further philosophical exploration of Akan conceptions see Safro Kwame [6].
I say “blood” because the word that’s used is the same as the word for the red stuff that runs in your veins. Obviously, though, this is a conception of blood that will differ from the one held by most readers of this article.
How reasonable it is to regard the view as unlike a scientific one is actually a complex issue: see K. Anthony Appiah “Invisible Entities.” Rev: Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West by Robin Horton Times Literary Supplement (July 2 1993): 7.
Cordelia Fine [9]. I’m grateful to Neil Levy for drawing this article to my attention.
See Thomas F. Pettigrew and Linda R. Tropp [10].
I’m very grateful not only to the six respondents to my book but also to Neil Levy for conceiving of and implementing this symposium; as well as for writing the initial summary and commenting on a first draft of this article.
References
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Appiah, K.A. More Experiments in Ethics. Neuroethics 3, 233–242 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-010-9062-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-010-9062-8