Abstract
In previous work, I defend the following disparity between moral and epistemic facts: whereas moral facts are irreducibly normative, epistemic facts—facts such as that someone is epistemically justified in believing something—are reducible to facts from some other domain (such as facts about probabilities). This moral-epistemic disparity is significant because it undercuts an important kind of argument for robust moral realism. My defense of epistemic reductionism and of the moral-epistemic disparity has been criticized by Richard Rowland (2013) and Terence Cuneo and Christos Kyriacou (2018). This paper aims to rebut these criticisms and, more generally, to clarify and strengthen the case for epistemic reductionism and the moral-epistemic disparity.
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Notes
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For brief explanations of these advantages, see Heathwood (2013).
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Furthermore, they are not themselves natural properties. This addition is required to distinguish non-naturalism from non-reductive naturalism.
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A terminological note: in what follows, since it won’t matter, I won’t fuss over the differences between natural and descriptive properties, and I will also sometimes use the expression “non-moral property” for the same thing. I also won’t fuss over the difference between reductionism and naturalism.
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To emphasise again: it is not my claim that this biconditional in fact has no counterexamples. Nor am I claiming that it is in no need of clarification or refinement. For example, does “likely to be true” here mean merely a likelihood of greater than 0.5, or does it mean something greater than that, or perhaps something both greater than that and vague? For another example, might we want to include something to the effect that the belief must be based on the evidence? Or perhaps we are talking here about propositional rather than doxastic justification, so that appeals to the basing relation are not needed? Also, what is it for something to be a part of a person’s evidence (this will we discuss briefly below (Sect. 4.2)). These are all important issues, but since my project is the metaepistemological one, I don’t want to—and don’t much need to—get bogged down in the controversies of first-order epistemology.
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I don’t respond to every one of Cuneo and Kyriacou’s concerns in the main text. One of these concerns is that even if I am right that epistemic reasonability is reducible, this does not show that all epistemic notions are reducible. This is a fair point. My reductive analysis of reasonable belief is only a first step towards showing that the entire epistemic realm can be explained naturalistically. But epistemic reasonability (in other words, epistemic justification) is, it is fair to say, the central normative notion in epistemology. Cuneo and Kyriacou also object that my positon commits non-naturalists in metaethics to the view “that there are not one but two types of reason properties: one that is wholly descriptive and one that is not” (Cuneo and Kyriacou 2018). This is true. But I just think that it is a straightforward consequence of the fact that epistemic facts are naturalistically reducible while moral facts are not, a position that, I have been arguing, we have good reason to accept.
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And if it really is some epistemologist’s view that, in the example, you have, as a part of your evidence, the information that you are looking at a trumpe l’oeil mural, then I take it that the epistemologist should say that it is in fact not reasonable for you to believe that there is a table before you. After all, you had decisive evidence to the contrary.
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Cf. Thomas Kelly’s remarks about “theoriz[ing] in the opposite direction”: “to the extent that one has independent intuitions about what an individual would be justified in believing in a given scenario, such intuitions will shape one’s views about what evidence must be available to an individual so situated—and therefore, one’s views about the more general theoretical issue about what evidence is, or what sorts of things can and cannot qualify as evidence” (Kelly 2014, sec. 1).
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This argument assumes that the “ought” in evidence that a subject ought to take into account is an epistemic “ought.” If this were some other kind of “ought,” such as a moral “ought,” the strategy described above would not succeed (at least given, what I believe, that moral notions are not reducible to descriptive notions). In general, if the moral and the epistemic are in this way entangled, in that whether a belief is reasonable depends on moral factors, my argument for moral-epistemic disparity would fail. For a recent argument for this kind of moral-epistemic entanglement, see Case (forthcoming).
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The idea that an ideal observer analysis will fall prey to the Open Question Argument if and only if it is understood reductively is recognised by advocates of the Open Question Argument in ethics, such as, for example, Michael Huemer: “I think that there are two ways of understanding this sort of theory [the ideal observer theory], one that makes it non-reductionist and immune to the Open Question Argument, and another that makes it reductionist but vulnerable to the Open Question Argument” (Huemer 2005, 68).
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I should emphasise that Cuneo and Kyriacou don’t mean the argument that I discuss in this section to stand on its own. It is part of a larger line of argument, which includes the part that I address in the next section.
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Heathwood, C. (2018). Epistemic Reductionism and the Moral-Epistemic Disparity. In: Kyriacou, C., McKenna, R. (eds) Metaepistemology. Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93369-6_3
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