Tamás Paár

We argue against the view that one should suspend belief in the existence of moral responsibility. We start with a simple argument based on the claim that the existence of obligations entails the existence of moral responsibility. If this is true, then agnosticism about moral responsibility is incoherent. However, this simple argument is insufficient. It can be repaired by focusing on agents who rationally believe in a particular conception of obligation (the “Responsibility First View”). On that conception, non-moral obligations that are not appropriately related to moral obligations can be freely ignored and the property of being morally responsible is identical to the property of fulfilling all necessary conditions for bearing moral obligations. Those agents who rationally hold RFV can still rationally believe in moral responsibility even if they lack direct evidence for the existence of moral responsibility.

The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize the precepts of the natural law and, in particular, their metaphysical and epistemic relationship to human nature, rationality, theology, tradition and practices. My account of the natural law is based on Alasdair MacIntyre’s approach, however, since his claims regarding the dependence or independence of the natural law from the notions listed above might often seem ambiguous, I engage in a reconstruction both of how it is most plausible to read MacIntyre’s claims concerning this topic, and how it is most plausible to conceive the natural law. MacIntyre basically argues that we can conceive the precepts of the natural law as the precepts of rational enquiry that we need to pursue in order to overcome the one-sidedness of our beliefs. I take this line of argument for his account of the natural law successful and ask the question what place the established norms have. As MacIntyre argues that all standpoints imply at least an implicit, even if not explicit, adherence to the authority of the natural law in virtue of their claim to truth, I argue that regardless of the exact content of our practices and beliefs regarding human nature, traditions and religion, we could know the basic requirements of the natural law. This is true even if the natural law itself is metaphysically dependent on human nature or on God. However, certain practices and beliefs can either shed more light or obscure the precepts of the natural law, hence it is important to learn from various traditions, religions, practices in a shared enquiry whose norms aspire to follow the actual precepts of the natural law as closely as possible. Supported by the ÚNKP-19- ÚNKP-19-3-III-PPKE-24 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology.

Those who I call meta-skeptics in my paper argue that one should suspend judgment about every philosophical question. Most often they use the argument from disagreement to show that the suspension of our philosophical beliefs is our epistemic obligation. In the present paper I argue against the main motivation for this view and show that since even the meta-skeptics’ stance is a contested philosophical one, their argument cannot succeed without refuting itself. Various meta-skeptics proposed counterobjections to this self-refutation objection. I consider here Jason Brennan’s quite simple and Bryan Frances’s more sophisticated counter-objections. Their proposals are even more interesting because they differ from the typical points of meta-skeptics: Brennan argues for outsider skepticism, that is non-philosophers should suspend judgment about philosophical issues, and Frances relies on the notion of epistemic superior instead of epistemic peer. I consider their points in two ways: whether their counter-objections can help regular meta-skepticism and whether their skepticism can stand on its own. In my replies to these proposals I show why both are problematic in each of these two ways. Brennan says that widespread disagreement is a sign of philosophy’s unreliability. Yet, he can only address the charge that his point is a philosophical one and not the objection that there can be disagreement about it. And since there is good reason to think that even his position is subject to disagreement, it is self-undermining. Furthermore, Brennan does not give any reason why any first-order philosophical theory must lack the virtues that his argument displays. Frances argues that even if the argument from disagreement is self-refuting and meta-skeptics have to suspend judgment about it, they might still remain skeptics after all. In my reply I show how Frances’s defense of his position still relies on principles that could be the objects of further arguments from disagreement.