Abstract
In his ‘Outline for a decision procedure for ethics’ John Rawls says that the principal aims of ethics is the formulation of justifiable principles which may be used in cases wherein there are conflicting interests to determine which one of them should be given preference. The main reason to accept these principles as justifiable is that they explicate the considered judgements, the mature convictions of competent moral men as they have been worked out under the most favourable conditions (Rawls, Philos Rev 60:187, 1951). Although the competent moral judge in Rawls’ ‘Outline’ doesn’t need to have more qualities than the average intelligent morally maturated person (the ‘ordinary moral person’), he also shows some similarity with an expert. The competent moral judge has, according to Rawls, to know the peculiar facts of the situation in which he has to express his opinion. Ordinary moral persons are continuously confronted by complex moral problems of which they don’t know sufficient details for making a well-considered judgement. It seems that in such situations some level of expertise is needed for forming a well-considered judgement. My aim in this article is to examine whether (1) there are moral experts and (2) whether the quality of a reflective equilibrium can be strengthened by requiring that the well-considered judgements come from moral experts
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Notes
- 1.
For an overview of the critics see Van der Burg and Van Willigenburg (1998: 7f).
- 2.
Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1991) distinguish between five stages in the acquisition of expertise: novice, advanced beginner, competence, proficiency, expertise.
- 3.
Narvaez and Lapsley use the adjective ‘ethical’ but I prefer the adjective ‘moral.’ They do not discuss whether ethical (moral) expertise is domain specific.
- 4.
- 5.
In some circles it is thought that the practitioners within a moral domain are also the moral experts. In this view, physicians as practitioners in a particular domain of medicine are also the moral experts in that domain. I do not agree. Not all physicians have sufficient moral sensitivity and knowledge of relevant concepts, policies and protocols to qualify as moral experts. Neither is it required for moral experts in the domain of medicine to have all the medical knowledge that physicians possess (Musschenga 2010a).
- 6.
- 7.
I do not think that this claim conflicts with Rawls’ view. Rawls’ aim in ToJ is to find principles of justice that could serve as a moral basis for designing the basic structure of society. I doubt that there are moral experts in that domain, whose well-considered judgments Rawls could have given a special place.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
In his response to Clark’s article (Clark 2000), Churchland recognizes the role of discursive moral rules. At the same time he underlines that our internal representations and cognitive activities are not just hidden, silent versions of external statements, arguments, dialogues and chains of reasoning that appear in our overt speech and print (Churchland 2000: 294).
- 11.
See also Musschenga (2009).
- 12.
See Van der Steen and Musschenga (1992) on the trade-off between different methodological criteria in science and ethics.
- 13.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Nicole van Voorst Vader, Robert Heeger and Markus Christen for their comments on earlier versions.
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Musschenga, B. (2014). Moral Expertise – The Role of Expert Judgments and Expert Intuitions in the Construction of (Local) Ethical Theories. In: Christen, M., van Schaik, C., Fischer, J., Huppenbauer, M., Tanner, C. (eds) Empirically Informed Ethics: Morality between Facts and Norms. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 32. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01369-5_11
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