Abstract
Sarah McGrath argues that moral perception has an advantage over its rivals in its ability to explain ordinary moral knowledge. I disagree. After clarifying what the moral perceptualist is and is not committed to, I argue that rival views are both more numerous and more plausible than McGrath suggests: specifically, I argue that (a) inferentialism can be defended against McGrath’s objections; (b) if her arguments against inferentialism succeed, we should accept a different rival that she neglects, intuitionism; and (c), reductive epistemologists can appeal to non-naturalist commitments to avoid McGrath’s counterexamples.
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Notes
See McGrath (2018). All parenthetical page references in the main text are to this manuscript unless specified otherwise.
See McGrath (2018, footnote 16), and references therein.
Strohminger (2015, especially at p. 321) (‘I am not claiming that sensory experiences themselves ever have modal contents. … Arguably, perceptual knowledge is possible even when the content known is not represented in sensory experience’).
Ibid., p. 365: citing Miller (perceptual knowledge ‘arises immediately from current perception, that is, without inference from prior assumptions’).
See, e.g., Fodor (1983), and for very helpful discussion see Firestone and Scholl (2016). This etiological point is distinct from the epistemological claim [raised, most pertinently here, by Faraci (2015)], that moral knowledge by perception must rest on non-perceptual moral knowledge, so perceptualism cannot explain how we have moral knowledge at all.
I have changed McGrath’s numbering of these premises for the sake of clarity.
See, for instance, Väyrynen (2008).
In particular, by Huemer (2001 pp. 55–57, 2007, pp. 39–41). Huemer is explicitly concerned with the more narrow and defensive argument that objections to intuitionism that depend on intuitions are self-defeating. But he suggests a more general and interesting point in that context when he writes, for instance, that ‘I have argued that if [intuitionism] is false, we have no justified beliefs even if we have available justification for various propositions’, p. 45. This is the upshot of the schematic argument above.
Why is that? Briefly, because our grammatical knowledge about, say, subject/verb agreement, seems to depend entirely on our a posteriori knowledge of contingent rules.
See, e.g., Huemer (2007, p. 32).
See, e.g., Johnston (2004) and Lord (forthcoming).
This was McGrath’s central response in personal correspondence.
Id. The dialectic in Setiya’s chapter is actually more complex: he concludes that intuitionism either gets the wrong results about disagreement or is committed to an implausible form of egoism; either way, he concludes, it turns out to be false.
See Christensen (2011, especially at p. 15).
Independence is formulated by Vavova (2014, p. 309) as follows: ‘In evaluating the epistemic credentials of another’s expressed belief that p, in order to determine how (or whether) to modify my own belief about p, I shouldn’t rely on my initial belief that [not] p, nor on the reasoning behind that belief’. (The negation in the square brackets has been added to amend a typographical error in the text.)
Depending on how these claims are construed, the claim about supervenience could be redundant: it is widely thought that if the fact that p is grounded in the fact that q, then q entails p. [See especially ‘the entailment principle’ in Rosen (2010, p. 118.)].
Setiya (2012, p. 49).
See Setiya (2012, pp. 64–5); see also McGrath (17–18).
Setiya (2012, pp. 65 ff). The relevant principle governing accidental reliability, K, explicitly applies to knowledge (p. 96), but extends to doxastic justification since doxastic justification depends on the capacity for knowledge (ch. 4). I am grateful to Kieran Setiya for clarifying and confirming these details in personal correspondence.
Ibid., p. 63.
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Wodak, D. Moral perception, inference, and intuition. Philos Stud 176, 1495–1512 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01250-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01250-y