Stavros Orfeas Zormpalas

A popular view on moral worth, Anti-Fetishism, states that an action motivated by concern for moral rightness represented as such is not praiseworthy. This can be seen if we appreciate that whether one is a good person does not relate to whether they are a good moral theorist, as good people can misrepresent moral rightness and not be motivated by their mistaken grasp of it. But then what does an action need to be motivated by in order to be praiseworthy? I argue that Anti-Fetishism's key insights give us reasons to reject the positive answers provided to this question by Anti-Fetishists themselves. The source of the Anti-Fetishist insight is much broader than originally thought: whether one is a good person does not relate to whether they are a good theorist in general, as good people can misrepresent many kinds of facts. This makes the question of praiseworthy motivation difficult, and also reveals that certain types of morally relevant descriptive ignorance do not excuse wrongdoing. I suggest a solution: an action is praiseworthy if motivated by a set of representations whose intuitive moral import is unaffected by our potential theoretical mistakes: phenomenal representations of others' lives.

If new evidence brings your metaethical view in conflict with a dearly held first order moral belief, what are you to do? Recent arguments in metaethics incorporate opposing claims about the methodological relationship between metaethical theories and our core first order moral beliefs. This paper starts by presenting intuitive arguments for First Order Privilege (FEP), the claim that we epistemically ought to privilege some of our first order views relative to our metaethical views. However, spelling out the details of FEP proves hard. The difficulties emerge if we see what is wrong with an extreme version of FEP, which claims that none of our first order views should be revisable in light of metaethical considerations. Spelling out what is wrong with this view leads us to a general principle of revisability. Yet, this principle has consequences beyond the extreme version of FEP: It shows that even cases where we should not majorly revise our first order view in light of metaethical evidence are not cases of strict unrevisability. In so far as there is first order epistemic privilege, its story is complicated: it will depend on the details of the evidential situation, and it will not consist in certainty in the relevant first order views, nor in a mere difference in our credences in the first order vs. the metaethical.

Recent work by Matthew Bedke and Max Hayward develops a new attack on metaethical non-naturalists: that they are committed to an immoral state of mind, because they must be willing to change their mind about the moral importance of certain actions given possible evidence about the layout of the non-natural realm. For example, they must be willing to decrease their credence that torturing babies is bad, if they ever get evidence that torturing babies is not in the extension of a non-natural property. The present paper aims to both develop the strongest version of this argument and propose a response to it. The first section argues that the strongest version of this attack does not depend on whether accepting non-naturalism commits one to believing a certain kind of conditional proposition. Rather, it depends on whether accepting non-naturalism commits one to having a certain kind of conditional credences. Moreover, the moral criticism at hand does not hinge on the causal inertness of non-natural properties. And in so far as the argument does not depend on causal inertness, the people threatened by immorality are not just non-naturalists, but metaethicists in general (Sect. 2). This is because the worry hinges instead on particular relationships of epistemic dependence between our metaethical and some of our ethical views. But it is not clear that those relationships obtain; we could adopt metaethical methodologies that preclude morally problematic dependence of relevant first order views on evidence about our metaethical theories (Sect. 3).