Stephen Maitzen

In a dense and fascinating article of some ten years ago, Toomas Karmo adds his voice to the chorus of philosophers who deny the possibility of soundly deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is.’ According to Karmo, no derivation containing an ethical conclusion and only non-ethical premises can possibly be sound, where ‘sound’ describes a deductively valid derivation all of whose premises are true. He also suggests that the only valid derivations of ‘ought’ from ‘is’ will be trivial ones. His argument has, to my knowledge, gone unrebutted; on the contrary, it has won recent endorsements, some philosophers evidently believing that he has finally put to rest the issue of the logical autonomy of ethics. Against that trend, I intend to rebut his argument, both by falsifying the taxonomy on which his argument relies and by offering a nontrivial and potentially sound ‘is’-‘ought’ derivation of my own.

Skeptical theism claims that the probability of a perfect God’s existence isn’t at all reduced by our failure to see how such a God could allow the horrific suffering that occurs in our world. Given our finite grasp of the realm of value, skeptical theists argue, it shouldn’t surprise us that we fail to see the reasons that justify God in allowing such suffering, and thus our failure to see those reasons is no evidence against God’s existence or perfection. Critics object that skeptical theism implies a degree of moral skepticism that even skeptical theists will find objectionable and that it undermines moral obligations that even skeptical theists will want to preserve. I discuss a version of the first objection and defend a version of the second.

Unfortunately, the book's weaknesses outweigh its strengths. Chief among the weaknesses is its spotty attention to relevant and important literature, both historical and contemporary. Even though Helm writes at length about assent, and even though he discusses Augustine, he completely ignores John Henry Newman, whose Grammar of Assent deserves at least a mention. Helm devotes more than a chapter to the relation between belief and the will and another chapter to fideism, yet he never mentions Louis Pojman's arguments in Religious Belief and the Will, an analytic-philosophical treatment of exactly those issues. He attacks evidentialism without confronting the most important defenses of that view, such as those offered in Feldman and Conee's "Evidentialism." He asserts the possibility of self-contradictory beliefs without considering the reasons offered by possible-worlds theorists and others for denying that a self-contradictory proposition can be a relatum in the belief relation. He simply asserts that "[n]o obligations follow logically from facts", without any indication that such a claim is both highly controversial and the focus of an enormous, decades-old literature.

The Knower Paradox has had a brief but eventful history, and principles of epistemic closure (which say that a subject automatically knows any proposition she knows to be materially implied, or logically entailed, by a proposition she already knows) have been the subject of tremendous debate in epistemic logic and epistemology more generally, especially because the fate of standard arguments for and against skepticism seems to turn on the fate of closure. As far as I can tell, however, no one working in either area has emphasized the result I emphasize in this paper: the Knower Paradox just falsifies even the most widely accepted general principles of epistemic closure. After establishing that result, I discuss five of its more important consequences.

Why is there anything, rather than nothing at all? This question often serves as a debating tactic used by theists to attack naturalism. Many people apparently regard the question—couched in such stark, general terms—as too profound for natural science to answer. It is unanswerable by science, I argue, not because it’s profound or because science is superficial but because the question, as it stands, is ill-posed and hence has no answer in the first place. In any form in which it is well-posed, it has an answer that naturalism can in principle provide. The question therefore gives the foes of naturalism none of the ammunition that many on both sides of the debate think it does

Often the first issue addressed by a theory of justified belief is the aim, goal, purpose, or objective of epistemic justification. What, in short, is the point of epistemic justification? Or, to put it a bit differently, why value justification: why is it worth having or pursuing? Prominent epistemologists, including both externalists and internalists, have proposed the following answer: the ultimate aim of epistemic justification is to maximize true belief and minimize false belief. This answer specifies what I’ll call the “nominal aim,” an aim that gets endorsed by a number of well-known accounts of justification. William Alston, an externalist with certain internalist scruples, is among the most explicit champions of the nominal aim

According to the much-discussed argument from divine hiddenness, God's existence is disconfirmed by the fact that not everyone believes in God. The argument has provoked an impressive range of theistic replies, but none has overcome the challenge posed by the unevendistribution of theistic belief around the world, a phenomenon for which naturalistic explanations seem more promising. The confound any explanation of why non-belief is always blameworthy or of why God allows blameless non-belief. They also cast doubt on the existence of a sensusdivinitatis: the awareness of God that Reformed epistemologists claim is innate in all normal human beings. Finally, the demographics make the argument from divine hiddenness in some ways a better atheological argument than the more familiar argument from evil

Some of the most enduring skeptical arguments invoke stories of deception -- the evil demon, convincing dreams, an envatted brain, the Matrix -- in order to show that we have no first-order knowledge of the external world. I confront such arguments with a dilemma: either (1) they establish no more than the logical possibility of error, in which case they fail to threaten fallible knowledge, the only kind of knowledge of the external world most of us think we have anyway; or (2) they defeat themselves because they must grant us empirical knowledge or justified beliefs of the very kind they must also entirely deny us. Either way they pose no significant threat.