Abstract
Pessimists think that there is something wrong with relying on deference for one’s moral beliefs—at least if one is morally mature. Call this no deference. They also tend to think that what explains our aversion to cases of moral deference is the fact that they involve deference about moral claims. Call this moral explanation. Recently, both no deference and moral explanation have come under attack. Against no deference, some philosophers offer purported counterexamples involving moral advice. I argue that proponents of this objection face a trilemma depending on how they spell out the details of their counterexamples. Against moral explanation, some philosophers offer debunking explanations of our aversion to moral deference. They present cases of non-moral deference that are troubling and argue that the feature that explains our aversion to this non-moral deference also explains our aversion to moral deference. I argue that none of these explanations (nor their conjunction) can explain all troubling cases of moral deference and that they face objections of their own. I conclude that we should be optimistic about the prospects of moral deference pessimism.
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Notes
Hills (2009), 94.
I will use “moral testimony” and “moral deference” interchangeably. I think there is an important difference between the two, but it does not matter for our purposes here. For a discussion of this distinction, see: Lewis (manuscript). I will also use “relying on” and “deferring” interchangeably.
The term “pessimist” was introduced in the moral testimony literature by Hopkins (2007).
no deference is a broader version of a claim that Sliwa (2012) calls no testimony (176).
To be clear, one can endorse no deference without also endorsing moral explanation—and vice versa.
For criticisms of particular pessimistic accounts, see: Sliwa (2012), Lackey (2013), Groll and Decker (2014), Enoch (2014), Howell (2014), Fletcher (2016), Mogensen (2017), Hazlett (2017), Lord (2018), and McShane (2018). For criticism of pessimism in general, see: Sliwa (2012), Groll and Decker (2014), Enoch (2014), and Davia and Palmira (2015).
Sliwa (2012): 177.
Sliwa (2012), 178.
This case is based on one in Wiland (2014) (172). He also thinks that deference in cases like these, in which pro tanto moral reasons must be weighed against each other, are not intuitively troubling (172).
This seems to be what Wiland (2014) has in mind.
I think this is the best interpretation of Sliwa (2012).
One can treat another’s moral advice as another piece of evidence in at least two ways. First, one can treat it alongside one’s first-order evidence. This is how I imagine many pessimists think about how people use moral advice. Second, one can treat moral advice as second-order (i.e., evidence about one’s evidence or the evidence generally available) and then weigh that second-order evidence alongside one’s own judgment of what the evidence says. Importantly, in neither case does one base one’s moral belief solely on what another person says or believes.
This is how McShane (2018) interprets Wedding (262). Moral Advice as Practical Moral Deference and Moral Advice as Moral Weight Deference will often overlap. The difference is that the former is deference about how to act (and/or what proposition to accept as opposed to believe) and the latter can answer both “How to act?” and “What to believe?”
For example, McGrath (2011) writes, “[T]here seems to be something odd or peculiar about my genuinely believing that capital punishment is wrong simply on the basis of your testimony, in a way that there is nothing similarly odd or peculiar about my believing that we should turn left simply on the basis of your testimony… (113).”
While it is true that Hills (2009) thinks that deference interferes with one exercising and developing one’s ability to make accurate moral judgments, this is not her main worry about moral deference. Moreover, it is a concern with continual or perpetual moral deference (120). Herein, however, I’ve mainly been concerned with what is bad about individual instances of moral deference.
Hills (2009), 119.
Of course, one could challenge whether deference is incompatible with some specific target epistemic state or whether these states are necessary for certain moral achievements, but that would be to challenge specific accounts of pessimism and not the very idea of pessimism.
Mogensen (2017) makes a similar point (264).
Debunking explanations are especially important for proponents of the strong version of the Moral Advice Objection, because they endorse the claim that there is no relevant difference between moral deference and moral advice. Pessimists can respond by accepting the “no relevant difference” premise and then argue that our intuitive aversion to moral deference is evidence that there is something wrong with moral deference. They can then conclude that since there’s no relevant difference between moral deference and moral advice, it must also be wrong to rely on moral advice.
In order to block this parallel argument, proponents of the Moral Advice Objection need to argue that our intuition that there is something wrong with moral deference is less reliable or trustworthy than our intuition that there is nothing wrong with moral advice. Thus, showing that moral explanation is false would allow them to defend their own view.
Sliwa (2012), 186.
Sliwa (2012), 185.
Groll and Decker also note that it is always off-putting to deference about something that is “constitutive knowledge” of some role that one occupies. Constitutive knowledge for a particular role is the knowledge that a person must have to competently perform the role. For example, it is off-putting for a surgeon to defer about how to perform a surgery. These cases are not analogous to the kinds of moral cases pessimists are interested in. Notice that it would off-putting for a professional surgeon to ask her colleague how to perform a common surgery. But many moral questions are hard and it is not expected of people to know the answer.
Hills (2009), 120. This doesn’t mean that they know everything there is to know about morality, but it does mean that they have only (or perhaps mostly) true beliefs about basic moral truths.
For example, Hills (2009), 120.
I’m considering these principles pre-theoretically, i.e., I mean that their truth values are neither obvious nor controversial if one remains neutral about which fundamental moral principle is true or if any fundamental moral principles are true. Moreover, I’m thinking of them as claims about what we have pro tanto—as opposed to all-things-considered—moral reason to do.
I owe this example to Robert Cowan.
Of course, it may be true that these principles are somewhat obvious to those who have considered them in depth. But this isn’t the kind of obviousness that Sliwa is referring to. One does not need to think about whether one is required to save the drowning child for more than a nanosecond to be sure that one is indeed required to do this.
Another problem with this debunking explanation is that it is not clear that deferring about controversial non-moral claims is just as fishy or fishy in the same way as deferring about controversial moral claims. For example, my deferring to a physicist that string theory is true seems odd, but it’s not troubling in the way that deferring about moral claims is.
I owe this objection to Mark van Roojen.
Note this objection relies on the claim that so-called environmental luck undermines knowledge. While this is the current orthodoxy, it is not without its detractors. For example, see: Hetherington (1998) and Turri (2012). Moreover, recent empirical research suggests that the folk do not think that environmental luck undermines knowledge (e.g., see: Colaço et al. (2014) and Turri (2017)).
In cases like Track Record, the deferrer seems to meet two epistemic conditions that Zagzebski (2012) thinks are individually sufficient for being epistemically justified in relying on another for one’s moral beliefs. First, he is justified in believing that he will be more likely to form a true belief and avoid a false belief if he defers to another’s say-so than if he comes to the belief on his own. Second, he is justified in believing that his deferential belief is more likely to survive his future critical reflection on the matter than it would be if he had come to the belief on his own. I think meeting both of Zagzebski’s conditions makes it clearer that Andy gains knowledge in Track Record. Nonetheless, his deference is still off-putting (161).
Example, see: McGrath (2009). McGrath proposes the following explanation:
Socratic Proposal: Moral deference is in principle no more problematic than deference in other domains. But in practice, there are formidable epistemological difficulties that arise when one attempts to recognize or identify someone with superior moral judgment; moreover, we (perhaps implicitly) recognize that this is the case (334).
I owe this point to Errol Lord. This point does not commit me to either non-reductionism or reductionism about the epistemology of testimony. According to non-reductionism: A is justified in accepting B’s testimony so long as there are no undefeated good reasons to not accept B’s testimony. What I said is compatible with A being justified in accepting B’s testimony that p only if A has reason to accept B’s testimony that p that is independent of the fact that B asserted that p. Perhaps A is only justified if some other person, C, vouches for B’s testimony. The key point is that A shouldn’t be required to be able to properly assess an expert’s sophisticated track-record before being justified in accepting her testimony.
Howell (2014), 394.
If moral philosophers are not the right kind of moral expert to defer to, there are also moral exemplars, e.g., the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and so on. We get evidence that they are moral experts because they are praised by people whose judgment we trust, they are invited to speak at universities, they publish books, appear on television, and so on.
The New York Times Magazine even has a column called “The Ethicist” in which a professional philosopher (Kwame Anthony Appiah) responds to readers’ moral quandaries.
The possibility of this explanation is gestured at in Coady (1992), 72.
This explanation is offered by Davia and Palmira (2015). They rely on Kelly (2005)’s account of epistemic peers, according to which two or more people are epistemic peers regarding some question iff: “(i) they are equals with respect to their familiarity with the evidence and arguments which bear on that question, and (ii) they are equals with respect to general epistemic virtues such as intelligence, thoughtfulness, and freedom from bias (175).”
It should be noted that only McGrath explicitly requires that the deferrer not be biased in some way. So this objection only gains traction against a pessimist who accepts McGrath’s criteria.
Davia and Palmira (2015) seem to make this inference.
Coady (1992) notes that our skepticism about moral testimony might be based on the belief that there are no moral experts in the sense that all mature moral agents are epistemic peers and there just are not moral experts for us—although there might be for children (72).
For a discussion of the connection between our aversion to moral testimony and the plausibility of there being moral experts, see: Coady (1992), 72–75.
Enoch (2014) notes this, but not in response to a criticism of pessimism (233, fn. 9).
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Grace Boey, Robert Cowan, Adina Covaci, Julia Driver, Alison Hills, Sarah McGrath, Mallory Medeiros, Paulina Sliwa, Mark van Roojen, and Michael Vazquez. Thanks also to the participants, organizers, and teachers of CEU’s 2018 Summer School in Moral Epistemology. A special thanks to Errol Lord for comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Lewis, M. A defense of the very idea of moral deference pessimism. Philos Stud 177, 2323–2340 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01312-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01312-1