Eric Sampson

People sometimes knowingly undermine their own goals—for example, by playing the lottery or borrowing from loan sharks. When they do, are they acting irrationally? The standard answer is yes. But in a recent award-winning paper, Jennifer Morton argues that the norms of practical reasoning an agent is rationally required to follow depend on that agent's resource context—roughly, on how rich or poor they are. If she's right, we must abandon the orthodox view that the same norms of practical rationality apply to everyone. I argue that Morton’s case fails on both empirical and philosophical grounds. What’s at stake? If Morton is right, poverty-relief agencies ought to redesign their incentives so that resource-scarce agents can rationally respond to them. If I’m right, these agents act irrationally in the cases at issue, and we shouldn’t be shy about saying so. Rather than declaring them rational, we should identify the causes of their irrationality and help them succeed by their own lights.

Moorean arguments are a popular and powerful response to radically revisionary philosophical views such as nihilism about motion, time, truth, consciousness, causation, and various kinds of skepticism (e.g., global, external world, other minds, and inductive). They begin with a highly plausible first-order claim—cars move, I ate breakfast before lunch, it’s true that some fish have gills—and conclude that the revisionary thesis is false. The same strategy can be used against nihilism in ethics (error theory). Error theorists have recently recognized Moorean arguments as a serious challenge. Their response is to concede that moral Moorean premises seem highly credible to us while denying that they really are. They do this by offering various debunking explanations for our moral beliefs that appeal to higher-order evidence—evidence that our reasoning has gone wrong. I argue that error theorists are right to emphasize higher-order evidence but wrong about where it leads. Properly assessed, this evidence further undermines arguments for error theory, including its debunking arguments, while strengthening Moorean arguments and the commonsense moral views they support. Along the way, I answer several classic objections to Moorean arguments: that they're objectionably question-begging, depend on the dubious category of “Moorean fact,” and that a person’s credence in a proposition bears no interesting relation to its credibility.

Arguments from disagreement against moral realism begin by calling attention to widespread, fundamental moral disagreement among some group—ordinary people, moral philosophers, idealized agents—and draw a skeptical or anti-realist conclusion. I argue that all such arguments share a structure that makes them vulnerable to a single powerful objection: they self-undermine. In every formulation, at least one premise casts doubt either on itself or another premise. On reflection, this should not be surprising. To derive sweeping metaphysical or epistemological conclusions about morality—for example, that there are no moral facts or that none of our moral beliefs are justified—these arguments require correspondingly strong metaphysical or epistemological premises. But, given the pervasiveness of disagreement in philosophy—especially in metaphysics and epistemology—such premises are almost certain to be the subject of widespread, intractable disagreement: precisely the kind proponents of these arguments claim undermines moral claims. These arguments therefore undermine their own premises. If my argument is sound, it provides realists a single, unified strategy for responding to arguments from disagreement and poses a challenge to any future versions philosophers may advance.

Abstract: Longtermist Effective Altruists (EAs) aim to mitigate the risk of existential catastrophes. In this paper, I have three goals. First, I identify a catastrophic risk that EAs have completely ignored. I call it religious catastrophe: the threat that (as Christians and Muslims have warned for centuries) billions of people stand in danger of going to hell for all eternity. Second, I argue that, even by secular EA lights, religious catastrophe is at least as bad and at least as probable and, therefore, at least as important as many of the standard EA catastrophic risks (e.g., catastrophic climate change, nuclear winter). Third, I present the following dilemma for secular EAs: either adopt religious catastrophe as an EA cause or ignore religious catastrophe but also ignore catastrophic risks whose mitigation has a similar or lower expected value (i.e., most or all of them). Business as usual—ignoring religious catastrophe while championing the typical EA causes—is not an option consistent with longtermist EA principles.

I present a dilemma for the leading anti-realist theory of practical normativity: idealizing reasons subjectivism. According to this view, an agent’s reasons for action are grounded not in her actual pro-attitudes, but in those she would have if fully non-normatively informed and ideally structurally rational. I argue that the view assumes that, for any agent with irrational attitudes, the relevant idealizing process yields a uniquely rational set. This assumption is false, and its failure generates two puzzles for idealizing subjectivism: one about which practical reasons exist and another about how much normative weight they have. Attempts to solve the second puzzle confront idealizing subjectivists with a dilemma. They must hold either that the weights of an agent’s reasons are arbitrarily determined by the attitudes of just one of her many ideal counterparts or that they are determined by some amalgamation of those counterparts’ attitudes that it would be positively irrational for any agent to possess. Both horns are deeply implausible. The dilemma therefore constitutes a powerful but as-yet unnoticed objection to idealizing subjectivism.

We provide a novel defense of the possibility of level-splitting beliefs and use this defense to show that the steadfast response to peer disagreement is not, as it is often claimed to be, unnecessarily dogmatic. To provide this defense, a neglected form of moral disagreement is analysed. Within the context of this particular kind of moral disagreement, a similarly neglected form of level-splitting belief is identified and then defended from critics of the rationality of level-splitting beliefs. The chapter concludes by showing that proponents of the steadfast response to peer disagreement can adopt this form of level-splitting belief in the context of these moral disagreements while exemplifying intellectual humility, rather than dogmatism.

Arguments from disagreement against moral realism begin by calling attention to widespread, fundamental moral disagreement among some group—ordinary people, moral philosophers, idealized agents—and draw a skeptical or anti-realist conclusion. I argue that all such arguments share a structure that makes them vulnerable to a single powerful objection: they self-undermine. In every formulation, at least one premise casts doubt either on itself or another premise. On reflection, this should not be surprising. To derive sweeping metaphysical or epistemological conclusions about morality—for example, that there are no moral facts or that none of our moral beliefs are justified—these arguments require correspondingly strong metaphysical or epistemological premises. But, given the pervasiveness of disagreement in philosophy—especially in metaphysics and epistemology—such premises are almost certain to be the subject of widespread, intractable disagreement: precisely the kind proponents of these arguments claim undermines moral claims. These arguments therefore undermine their own premises. If my argument is sound, it provides realists a single, unified strategy for responding to arguments from disagreement and poses a challenge to any future versions philosophers may advance.

In his recent article entitled ‘Can We Believe the Error Theory?’ Bart Streumer argues that it is impossible (for anyone, anywhere) to believe the error theory. This might sound like a problem for the error theory, but Streumer argues that it is not. He argues that the un-believability of the error theory offers a way for error theorists to respond to several objections commonly made against the view. In this paper, we respond to Streumer’s arguments. In particular, in sections 2-4, we offer several objections to Streumer’s argument for the claim that we cannot believe the error theory. In section 5, we argue that even if Streumer establishes that we cannot believe the error theory, this conclusion is not as helpful for error theorists as he takes it to be.

In his recent book Error Theory: History, Critique, Defence, Jonas Olson attempts to revive the argument from queerness originally made famous by J.L. Mackie. In this paper, we do three things. First, we eliminate four untenable formulations of the argument. Second, we argue that the most plausible formulation is one that depends crucially upon considerations of parsimony. Finally, we evaluate this formulation of the argument. We conclude that it is unproblematic for proponents of moral non-naturalism—the target of the argument from queerness.