Abstract
Foundationalism in moral epistemology is a core tenet of ethical intuitionism. According to foundationalism, some moral beliefs (such as Ross’ list of prima facie duties) can be known without inferential justification; instead, all that is required is a proper understanding of the beliefs in question. In an influential criticism against this view, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has argued that certain psychological facts undermine the reliability of moral intuitions. He claims that foundationalists would have to show that non-inferentially justified beliefs are not subject to those defeaters, but this would already constitute a form of inference and hence undermine the possibility of noninferential justification. The goal of my paper is to defend foundationalism against Sinnott-Armstrong’s criticism. After presenting his challenge, I first argue that the most promising objection to it fails. This objection makes the case that defeater-defeaters are not part of the justification, but merely preserve the justification which the original claim provides. I object to this argument by distinguishing between weak and robust defeaters; only weak defeaters, I argue, fall outside the scope of justification, and it is an open question whether Sinnott-Armstrong’s defeaters fall into that category. This leads the way to my own criticism of Sinnott-Armstrong’s challenge: foundationalists in moral epistemology are entitled to the use of defeater-defeaters as part of the justification for moral beliefs as long as those defeater-defeaters themselves do not entail moral claims. Therefore, Sinnott-Armstrong’s challenge does not undermine foundationalism.
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Notes
Besides foundationalism in epistemology, a second core claim of ethical intuitionism is non-naturalist realism (an exception is A. C. Ewing, who holds the first and third core claim of intuitionism, but rejects in his later work moral realism). Third, many but not all intuitionists defend ethical pluralism. While classical intuitionism is usually understood as the combination of these three claims, they can be held independently.
Audi (2004: 48f.); see also Audi (1999: 206) and (2008). For Ross’s conception of self-evidence, see Ross (1930: 20 fn. 1 and 29f). Other defenders of foundationalist moral epistemology include Shafer-Landau (2003: 247) and Stratton-Lake (2002: 18–23). It has been argued, e.g. by Huemer (2005: 106) , that intuitions are intellectual seemings, not self-evident beliefs. In what follows, I will limit my discussion to self-evidence accounts since this is the explicit target of Sinnott-Armstrong’s challenge to intuitionism.
See Sinnott-Armstrong (2006b: 74–77). The problem of course extends beyond morality, but the focus of this paper is on the case of moral beliefs.
Insofar as any ethical theory needs to account for the epistemic justification of moral beliefs, the problem raised by Sinnott-Armstrong is not limited to intuitionism: if an epistemic regress, circular forms of justification and foundationalism are the only options for solving this task, the claim that foundationalism lacks plausibility limits the options for all ethical theories. This is, however, especially problematic for intuitionism, because intuitionism—as traditionally understood—is tied to foundationalism.
There is a popular strand of criticism that I will leave aside for now but will return to in the last section. It targets Sinnott-Armstrong’s empirical assumption, making the case that the psychological defeaters as he presents them provide insufficient grounds for undermining the justification of non-inferentially held moral beliefs.
Pollock (1987: 484); see also Pollock and Crutz (1986: 37). Ballantyne and Thurow adopt Pollock’s understanding of the term (See Ballantyne and Thurow (2013: 412f)). Note that Pollock uses the term “prima facie” in a way that differs from intuitionists like Ross. For Pollock, it means “defeasible” insofar as “further information can make us withdraw” support for the claim that P is a reason for Q. For Ross, a prima facie duty is a consideration that would be the duty all things considered (or ‘duty proper’), if it was the only relevant consideration. In the presence of other considerations, it can be outweighed, even though it remains a reason. See Ross (1930: 19f).
Ballantyne and Thurow’s description downplays the credibility of the source of the defeater more than most typical descriptions of the same example. In Plantinga (2000: 359), it is the shop superintendent who brings forward the defeater, and in Evans and Smith (2013: 359) , it is the factory owner. If my own account (see below) is correct, the way the defeater is characterized matters for the intuition Ballantyne and Thurow are trying to elicit, and it is not an accident that they characterize the source of the defeater in the way they do.
These two criteria are not meant to be exhaustive, as I have a more limited goal: to demonstrate that two factors—the trustworthiness of the source and the intrinsic plausibility of the defeater—play a role (an important one) in determining how credible a defeater is. Other factors, such as the question of how many of my firmly held beliefs would be affected if the defeater were true or whether the defeater holds true in many nearby possible worlds, might have to be added for a complete account of the distinction between robust and weak defeaters.
It is also possible for defeaters to be weak in the sense that they only slightly affect the likelihood of the reason in favor of the belief being true, rather than aiming at undermining it completely. As an example, in case 1, the defeater could state that only once per month or even only once per year, the factory is illuminated by red lights. This counts as a defeater, but as one that, if true, would not significantly undermine the justification in favor of seeing a red widget. Here, I am only concerned with defeaters that are not weak in terms of their content but rather aim at dealing a full blow to the reason in favor of the belief.
It is of course possible that some defeaters fall into the middle of the spectrum. Here, I only want to argue that there are clear cases of weak and robust defeaters.
If, however, this is a fact that is well-known both to Alice and to her interlocuter, then there is no point in including the defeater-defeater as part of the justification.
Some philosophers such as William Alston have drawn a distinction between the concept of being justified in believing p (i.e. the state of being justified in a belief) and the concept of justifying p (i.e. the activity of justifying a belief), arguing that it is important to keep them apart for the following reason: “The crucial difference between them is that while to justify a belief is to marshal considerations in its support, in order for one to be justified in believing that p it is not necessary that one have done anything by way of an argument for p or for one’s epistemic situation vis-à-vis p. Unless one is justified in many beliefs without arguing for them, there is precious little one can justifiably believe” (Alston 1991: 71). For intuitionists like Ross on the other hand, the state of being justified in believing prima facie duties seems tied to the process by which we come to believe them; it is doubtful whether agents who have not undergone this process would also count as justified. This process can take various forms, for example, careful reflection on the meaning of a prima facie duty or the observation of various instantiations of the breach of this duty (‘intuitive induction’). From this, we come to the conclusion that part of the meaning of, say, promise breaking is that it is prima facie wrong (see Ross (1930: 34–39)). However, this does not lead to the consequence that there would be “preciously little one can justifiably believe”: first, Ross’ focus is not on the totality of beliefs; this leaves it open how justification works for other kinds of beliefs. Second, given the centrality of basic moral beliefs and their place in life, most competent agents will naturally go through the process of intuitive induction (and at least some will reflect on their normative commitments as they mature). Hence, even regarding the subgroup of basic moral beliefs, most agents will count as justified on Ross’ theory. For the stronger claim that, in most cases, “being justified” should not be separated from the activity of justification, see Almeder (1999: 92). I thank two anonymous referees for raising this issue.
To count as a defeater, there is no need for it to actually be raised for each situation where it applies. It is sufficient that an intellectually sophisticated adult should, upon reflection, be aware that it could be raised. This includes all sorts of conspiracy theories, far-fetched skeptical scenarios and countless other defeaters.
There are other ways to criticize Sinnott-Armstrong’s argument which I will, however, leave aside. For example, one could distinguish between concrete beliefs about particular situations and general beliefs about principles and make the case that only concrete beliefs are susceptible to psychological defeaters. This would leave general beliefs such as the prima facie duty of benevolence untarnished by Sinnott-Armstrong’s attack. Since the category into which a moral belief falls is clear from the start, there is no need for inferential confirmation. This line of argument can be traced to Ross, who argues that we can ascribe certainty only to abstract principles and that our judgments in concrete cases are “more or less probable opinions” (1930: 31.). A similar move is described by MacIntyre when he discusses how Calvinists in the seventeenth century were worried that fallible human beings could not know with certainty that God exists. The solution was to distinguish between concrete judgments regarding everyday objects and a privileged group of judgments about abstract matters. In virtue of being abstract, the latter group of judgments was considered less fallible (MacIntyre 1988: 241–259). I thank […] for raising this issue. Yet another reply to Sinnott-Armstrong can be found in van Roojen (2014), who argues that some moral beliefs could be justified in virtue of their non-inferential plausibility in addition to coherentist considerations.
See, for example, Naddelhoffer and Feltz (2008), who identify additional cognitive biases to which moral judgments are subject and who argue that this strengthens Sinnott-Armstrong’s case.
I thank an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify this issue.
At the same time, it is the case that epistemic duties can be derived from defeater-defeaters: if it is correct, it follows among other things that I should no longer believe that the defeater undermines the original belief.
The problem that foundationalist (or “basic”) beliefs seem to be undermined by defeaters is also discussed by Alvin Plantinga in connection with religious claims. Similar to Ross, Plantinga does not believe that a rejection of those defeaters that has an inferential structure undermines the claim that those beliefs are “not accepted on the basis of other propositions” (Plantinga 2000: 174). For his discussion of defeaters, see Plantinga (2000: part iv).
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Acknowledgments
For helpful discussions and comments on earlier drafts of the paper, I would like to thank Bernd Goebel, Christoph Halbig, Josh May, Sebastian Muders, Stefan Riedener, Eva Schmidt and Felix Timmermann.
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Schwind, P. Do Psychological Defeaters Undermine Foundationalism in Moral Epistemology? - a Critique of Sinnott-Armstrong’s Argument against Ethical Intuitionism. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 22, 941–952 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-019-10023-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-019-10023-9