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381The reliability of moral intuitions: A challenge from neuroscienceAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (3). 2008.A recent study of moral intuitions, performed by Joshua Greene and a group of researchers at Princeton University, has recently received a lot of attention. Greene and his collaborators designed a set of experiments in which subjects were undergoing brain scanning as they were asked to respond to various practical dilemmas. They found that contemplation of some of these cases (cases where the subjects had to imagine that they must use some direct form of violence) elicited greater activity in ce…Read more
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316Coherence and disagreementPhilosophical Studies 65 (3). 1992.A traditional objection to coherentism is that there may be incompatible though equally coherent sets of beliefs. The purpose of the paper is to assess this objection. It is argued that the better a belief "p" coheres with the system of a person, the less likely it is that the negation of the belief coheres equally well with someone else's system, or even that there is someone else who believes the negation of "p". The arguments are based on two plausible assumptions about coherence, and some mo…Read more
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204Debunking and DisagreementNoûs 51 (4): 754-774. 2017.The fact that debunkers can turn to the argument from disagreement for help is ofcourse not a surprise. After all, both types of challenge basically pursue the same,skeptical conclusion. What I have tried to show, however, is that they are related in amore intimate way.
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156Moral DisagreementCambridge University Press. 2006.Folke Tersman explores what we can learn about the nature of moral thinking by examining moral disagreement. He explains how diversity of opinion on moral issues undermines the idea that moral convictions can be objectively valued. Arguments on moral thinking are often criticized for not being able to explain why there is a contrast between ethics and other areas in which there is disagreement, but where one does not give up the idea of an objective truth, as in the natural sciences. Tersman sho…Read more
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148A New Route from Moral Disagreement to Moral SkepticismJournal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (2): 189-207. 2019.Moral disagreement is sometimes thought to pose problems for moral realism because it shows that we cannot achieve knowledge of the moral facts the realists posit. In particular, it is "fundamental" moral disagreement—that is, disagreement that is not due to distorting factors such as ignorance of relevant nonmoral facts, bad reasoning skills, or the like—that is supposed to generate skeptical implications. In this paper, we show that this version of the disagreement challenge is flawed as it st…Read more
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136Recent work on reflective equilibrium and method in ethicsPhilosophy Compass 13 (6). 2018.The idea of reflective equilibrium remains the most popular approach to questions about method in ethics, despite the masses of criticism it has been faced with over the years. Is this due to the availability of compelling responses to the criticisms or rather to factors that are independent of its reasonableness? The aim of this paper is to provide support for the first answer. I particularly focus on the recent discussion. Some recent objections are related to general arguments against the pos…Read more
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131Disagreement: Ethics and ElsewhereErkenntnis 79 (S1): 55-72. 2014.According to a traditional argument against moral realism, the existence of objective moral facts is hard to reconcile with the existence of radical disagreement over moral issues. An increasingly popular response to this argument is to insist that it generalizes too easily. Thus, it has been argued that if one rejects moral realism on the basis of disagreement then one is committed to similar views about epistemology and meta-ethics itself, since the disagreements that arise in those areas are …Read more
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119Crispin Wright on moral disagreementPhilosophical Quarterly 48 (192): 359-365. 1998.Crispin Wright holds that moral realism is implausible since it is not a priori that every moral disagreement involves cognitive shortcomings. I develop two responses to this argument. First, a realist may argue that it holds for at least one of the parties to any disagreement that he holds false background beliefs (moral or otherwise) or that his verdict to the disputed judgment fails to cohere with his system. Second, he may argue that if none of the verdicts involves shortcomings, the appropr…Read more
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109Quine on EthicsTheoria 64 (1): 84-98. 1998.W.V. Quine has expressed a fairly conventional form of non-cognitivism in those of his writings that concern the status of moral judgments. For instance, in Quine (1981), he argues that ethics, as compared with science, is ‘methodologically infirm’. The reason is that while science is responsive to observation, and therefore ‘retains some title to a correspondence theory of truth’ (p. 63), ethics lacks such responsiveness. This in turn leads Quine to contrast moral judgments with judgments that …Read more
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97Non-Cognitivism and InconsistencySouthern Journal of Philosophy 33 (3): 361-372. 1995.This is acknowledged by moral realists and non-cognitivists alike, but, for obvious reasons, they relate differently to this resemblance. For realists, it provides arguments, and for non-cognitivists, it provides potential trouble. Realists claim that the various points of resemblance between moral and factual discourse indicate that moral discourse simply is a kind of factual discourse.1 However, in recent years a number of interesting attempts have been made in trying to show that the realist …Read more
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89Hope for the Evolutionary Debunker: How Evolutionary Debunking Arguments and Arguments from Moral Disagreement Can Join ForcesEthical Theory and Moral Practice 1-17. 2022.Facts about moral disagreement and human evolution have both been said to exclude the possibility of moral knowledge, but the question of how these challenges interact has largely gone unaddressed. The paper aims to present and defend a novel version of the evolutionary “debunking” argument for moral skepticism that appeals to both types of considerations. This argument has several advantages compared to more familiar versions. The standard debunking strategy is to argue that evolutionary accoun…Read more
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67The Case for a Mixed Verdict on Ethics and EpistemologyPhilosophical Topics 38 (2): 181-204. 2010.An increasingly popular strategy among critics of ethical anti-realism is to stress that the traditional arguments for that position work just as well in the case of other areas. For example, on the basis of that claim, it has recently been claimed that ethical expressivists are committed to being expressivists also about epistemic judgments (including the judgment that it is rational to believe in ethical expressivism). This in turn is supposed to seriously undermine their position. The purpose…Read more
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65Intuitional DisagreementSouthern Journal of Philosophy 50 (4): 639-659. 2012.Some think that recent empirical research has shown that peoples' moral intuitions vary in a way that is hard to reconcile with the supposition that they are even modestly reliable. This is in turn supposed to generate skeptical conclusions regarding the claims and theories advanced by ethicists because of the crucial role intuitions have in the arguments offered in support of those claims. I begin by trying to articulate the most compelling version of this challenge. On that version, the main p…Read more
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65Moral Realism and the Argument from SkepticismInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 10 (3-4): 283-303. 2020.A long-standing family of worries about moral realism focuses on its implications for moral epistemology. The underlying concern is that if moral truths have the nature that realists believe, it is hard to see how we could know what they are. This objection may be called the “argument from skepticism” against moral realism. Realists have primarily responded to this argument by presenting accounts of how we could acquire knowledge of moral truths that are consistent with realist assumptions about…Read more
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62Utilitarianism and the Idea of Reflective EquilibriumSouthern Journal of Philosophy 29 (3): 395-406. 1991.
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50From Scepticism to Anti‐RealismDialectica 73 (3): 411-427. 2019.A common anti-realist strategy is to argue that moral realism (or at least the non-naturalist form of it) should be abandoned because it cannot adequately make room for moral knowledge and justified moral belief, for example in view of an evolutionary account of the origins of moral beliefs or of the existence of radical moral disagreement. Why is that (alleged) fact supposed to undermine realism? I examine and discuss three possible answers to this question. According to the answer that I think…Read more
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50However, Davidson is not only skeptical towards the view that sensory stimulation provides the basis for meaning. He has also raised some doubts about the idea that such phenomena provide the basis for knowledge. For example, he rejects the idea that the acceptance of an observation sentence could somehow be justified by the stimulations that normally cause it. This in turn leads him to doubt the thesis that observation sentences have a privileged epistemological status; a thesis that is central…Read more
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43DAVIDSON, DONALD: Problems of Rationality Oxford: Clarendon, 2004, pp. xx + 280. ISBN 0-19-823754-Theoria 72 (3): 233-239. 2006.
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42On What Matters, Volume III, by Derek Parfit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, xiv + 468 pp. ISBN 9780198778608. hb. £25.00 (review)European Journal of Philosophy 26 (1): 668-672. 2018.
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34A World without Values: Essays on John Mackie’s Moral Error Theory, edited by Richard Joyce and Simon KirchinInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 5 (4): 333-337. 2015._ Source: _Page Count 5
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29The Benacerraf challenge is a well-known objection to Platonism in mathematics. Its proponent argues that, if mathematical entities are, as Platonists claim, mind-independent, causally inert, and existent beyond space and time, then we are led to a skeptical stance according to which it is not possible to explain how it is that we have cognitive access to the mathematical realm or how it is that our mathematical beliefs are reliable. It has been argued that a similar objection could be leveled a…Read more
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28Disagreement, MoralIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.
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21A World without Values: Essays on John Mackie’s Moral Error Theory (review)International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 5 (4). 2015._ Source: _Page Count 5