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  1. Iris Murdoch, privacy, and the limits of moral testimony.Cathy Mason - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (3):1125-1134.
    Recent discussions of moral testimony have focused on the acceptability of forming beliefs on the basis of moral testimony, but there has been little acknowledgement of the limits to testimony's capacity to convey moral knowledge. In this paper I outline one such limit, drawing on Iris Murdoch's conception of private moral concepts. Such concepts, I suggest, plausibly play an important role in moral thought, and yet moral knowledge expressed in them cannot be testimonially acquired.
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  • Moral Worth and Moral Knowledge.Paulina Sliwa - 2015 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (2):393-418.
    To have moral worth an action not only needs to conform to the correct normative theory ; it also needs to be motivated in the right way. I argue that morally worthy actions are motivated by the rightness of the action; they are motivated by an agent's concern for doing what's right and her knowledge that her action is morally right. Call this the Rightness Condition. On the Rightness Condition moral motivation involves both a conative and a cognitive element—in particular, (...)
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  • Moral Testimony: A Re-Conceived Understanding Explanation.Laura Frances Callahan - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 68 (272):437-459.
    Why is there a felt asymmetry between cases in which agents defer to testifiers for certain moral beliefs, and cases in which agents defer on many other matters? One explanation influential in the literature is that having understanding of a proposition is both in tension with acquiring belief in the proposition by deferring to another's testimony and distinctively important when it comes to moral propositions, as compared with what we might think of as many ‘garden variety’ facts. My project in (...)
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  • Trust in the Normative Domain.Stephen Wright - 2018 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (2):187-204.
    Pessimists about trust in the normative domain believe that forming normative beliefs on the basis of trusting others is problematic, forming normative beliefs in other ways is not so problematic and forming non-normative beliefs on the basis of trust is not so problematic. Whilst there is substantial disagreement over the best way of accounting for pessimist ideas about trust, it is widely accepted that the intuitively problematic character of forming normative beliefs on the basis of trust cannot be explained in (...)
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  • Fichte on Conscience.Owen Ware - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (2):376-394.
    There is no question that Fichte's theory of conscience is central to his system of ethics. Yet his descriptions of its role in practical deliberation appear inconsistent, if not contradictory. Many scholars have claimed that for Fichte conscience plays a material role by providing the content of our moral obligations—the Material Function View. Some have denied this, however, claiming that conscience only plays a formal role by testing our moral convictions in any given case—the Formal Function View. My aim in (...)
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  • A Problem for Moral Naturalism: Outsourcing Moral Judgments.Rafael Vogelmann - 2017 - Manuscrito 40 (3):1-27.
    ABSTRACT Moral Naturalism is the view that moral judgments aim at describing moral facts and that these are ordinary garden-variety natural facts. Moral Naturalism has trouble accounting for the intuition that we cannot outsource moral judgments, i.e., we cannot ground a moral conviction that p on the fact that a reliable moral adviser holds that p. There have been, however, several attempts to explain this intuition away or to discredit the intuition pumps that bring it forward. I argue that moral (...)
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  • Moral Testimony, Knowledge and Understanding.Kumar Viswanathan - 2021 - Philosophical Investigations 45 (3):297-319.
    Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 297-319, July 2022.
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  • Political testimony.Han van Wietmarschen - 2019 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 18 (1):23-45.
    I argue that reliance on political testimony conflicts with two democratic values: the value of mutual justifiability and the value of equality of opportunity for political influence. Reliance on political testimony is characterized by a reliance on the assertions of others directly on a political question the citizen is asked to answer as part of a formal democratic decision procedure. Reliance on expert testimony generally, even in the context of political decision-making, does not similarly conflict with democratic values. As a (...)
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  • Xunzi on Moral Expertise.Justin Tiwald - 2012 - Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 11 (3):275-293.
    This paper is about two proposals endorsed by Xunzi. The first is that there is such a thing as a moral expert, whose moral advice we should adopt even when we cannot appreciate for ourselves the considerations in favor of it. The second is that certain political authorities should be treated as moral experts. I identify three fundamental questions about moral expertise that contemporary philosophy has yet to address in depth, explicate Xunzi’s answers to them, and then give an account (...)
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  • Deference and delegation: What is the difference?Gopal Sreenivasan - 2020 - Zeitschrift Für Ethik Und Moralphilosophie 3 (2):345-352.
    Delegating a policy question to a panel of experts is similar in some ways to deferring to an expert about the right answer to some personal decision, but also crucially distinct from it. Most importantly, delegation is compatible with understanding why the expert’s decision is correct or incorrect, whereas deference excludes such understanding. As a matter of administrative logic, however, delegating agents cannot be required to understand whether the policy questions they delegate are decided correctly. This has important implications for (...)
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  • Testimony of Oppression and the Limits of Empathy.Katharina Anna Sodoma - 2024 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (2):185-202.
    Testimony of oppression is testimony that something constitutes or contributes to a form of oppression, such as, for example, “The stranger’s comment was sexist.” Testimony of oppression that is given by members of the relevant oppressed group has the potential to play an important role in fostering a shared understanding of oppression. Yet, it is frequently dismissed out of hand. Against the background of a recent debate on moral testimony, this paper discusses the following question: How should privileged hearers approach (...)
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  • In defense of moral testimony.Paulina Sliwa - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 158 (2):175-195.
    In defense of moral testimony Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-21 DOI 10.1007/s11098-012-9887-6 Authors Paulina Sliwa, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116.
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  • The Explanation Proffering Norm of Moral Assertion.Mona Simion - 2018 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (3):477-488.
    In recent years, much attention has been given to the epistemic credentials of belief based on moral testimony. Some people think pure moral deference is wrong, others disagree. It comes as a surprise, however, that while the epistemic responsibilities of the receiver of moral testimony have been closely scrutinized, little to no discussion has focused on the epistemic duties of the speaker. This paper aims to supply this lack: it defends a function-first account of the normativity of moral assertion. According (...)
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  • Co-deliberation, Joint Decision, and Testimony about Reasons: Reply to Tobias Steinig. Experts, Teachers and Their Epistemic Roles in Normative and Non-normative Domains, in: Analyse & Kritik 34, 251 – 274. [REVIEW]François Schroeter & Karen Jones - 2014 - Analyse & Kritik 36 (1):209-216.
    We defend the claim that there can be testimonial transfer of reasons against Steinig’s recent objections. In addition, we argue that the literature on testimony about moral reasons misunderstands what is at stake in the possibility of second-hand orientation towards moral reasons. A moral community faces two different but related tasks: one theoretical (working out what things are of genuine value and how to rank goods and ends) and one practical (engaging in joint action and social coordination). In between, simultaneously (...)
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  • Acquaintance and evidence in appearance language.Rachel Etta Rudolph - 2023 - Linguistics and Philosophy 46:1-29.
    Assertions about appearances license inferences about the speaker's perceptual experience. For instance, if I assert, 'Tom looks like he's cooking', you will infer both that I am visually acquainted with Tom (what I call the "individual acquaintance inference"), and that I am visually acquainted with evidence that Tom is cooking (what I call the "evidential acquaintance inference"). By contrast, if I assert, 'It looks like Tom is cooking', only the latter inference is licensed. I develop an account of the acquaintance (...)
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  • The epistemology of moral disagreement.Richard Rowland - 2017 - Philosophy Compass 12 (2):1-16.
    This article is about the implications of a conciliatory view about the epistemology of peer disagreement for our moral beliefs. Many have endorsed a conciliatory view about the epistemology of peer disagreement according to which if we find ourselves in a disagreement about some matter with another whom we should judge to be our epistemic peer on that matter, we must revise our judgment about that matter. This article focuses on three issues about the implications of conciliationism for our moral (...)
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  • Aesthetic Testimony.Jon Robson - 2012 - Philosophy Compass 7 (1):1-10.
    It is frequently claimed that we can learn very little, if anything, about the aesthetic character of an artwork on the basis of testimony. Such disparaging assessments of the epistemic value of aesthetic testimony contrast markedly with our acceptance of testimony as an important source of knowledge in many other areas. There have, however, been a number of challenges to this orthodoxy of late; from those who seek to deny that such a contrast exists as well as attempts by those (...)
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  • Aesthetic Testimony and the Norms of Belief Formation.Jon Robson - 2013 - European Journal of Philosophy 23 (3):750-763.
    Unusability pessimism has recently emerged as an appealing new option for pessimists about aesthetic testimony—those who deny the legitimacy of forming aesthetic beliefs on the basis of testimony. Unusability pessimists argue that we should reject the traditional pessimistic stance that knowledge of aesthetic matters is unavailable via testimony in favour of the view that while such knowledge is available to us, it is unusable. This unusability stems from the fact that accepting such testimony would violate an important non-epistemic norm of (...)
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  • A social epistemology of aesthetics: belief polarization, echo chambers and aesthetic judgement.Jon Robson - 2014 - Synthese 191 (11):2513-2528.
    How do we form aesthetic judgements? And how should we do so? According to a very prominent tradition in aesthetics it would be wrong to form our aesthetic judgements about a particular object on the basis of anything other than first-hand acquaintance with the object itself (or some very close surrogate) and, in particular, it would be wrong to form such judgements merely on the basis of testimony. Further this tradition presupposes that our actual practice of forming aesthetic judgements typically (...)
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  • How to Identify Moral Experts.Amber Riaz - 2020 - The Journal of Ethics 25 (1):123-136.
    Many philosophers think that we can identify, e.g., a weather expert by checking if she has a track record of making accurate weather predictions but that there isn’t an analogous way for laypeople to verify the judgement of a putative moral expert. The weather is an independent check for weather expertise but there is no independent check for moral expertise, and the only way for laypeople to identify moral experts is to engage in first-order moral reasoning of one’s own. But (...)
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  • How to Identify Moral Experts.Amber Riaz - 2020 - The Journal of Ethics 25 (1):123-136.
    Many philosophers think that we can identify, e.g., a weather expert by checking if she has a track record of making accurate weather predictions but that there isn’t an analogous way for laypeople to verify the judgement of a putative moral expert. The weather is an independent check for weather expertise but there is no independent check for moral expertise, and the only way for laypeople to identify moral experts is to engage in first-order moral reasoning of one’s own. But (...)
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  • Moral Reasons for Moral Beliefs: A Puzzle for Moral Testimony Pessimism.Andrew Reisner & Joseph Van Weelden - 2015 - Logos and Episteme 6 (4):429-448.
    According to moral testimony pessimists, the testimony of moral experts does not provide non-experts with normative reasons for belief. Moral testimony optimists hold that it does. We first aim to show that moral testimony optimism is, to the extent such things may be shown, the more natural view about moral testimony. Speaking roughly, the supposed discontinuity between the norms of moral beliefs and the norms of non-moral beliefs, on careful reflection, lacks the intuitive advantage that it is sometimes supposed to (...)
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  • The Puzzle of Philosophical Testimony.Chris Ranalli - 2020 - European Journal of Philosophy 28 (1):142-163.
    An epistemologist tells you that knowledge is more than justified true belief. You trust them and thus come to believe this on the basis of their testimony. Did you thereby come to know that this view is correct? Intuitively, there is something intellectually wrong with forming philosophical beliefs on the basis of testimony, and yet it's hard to see why philosophy should be significantly epistemically different from other areas of inquiry in a way that would fully prohibit belief by testimony. (...)
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  • Knowledge of things and aesthetic testimony.Chris Ranalli - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Many philosophers believe that aesthetic testimony can provide aesthetic knowledge. This leaves us with the question: why does getting aesthetic knowledge by experience – by seeing a painting up close, or witnessing a performance first-hand – nevertheless seem superior to aesthetic testimony? I argue that it is due to differences in their epistemic value; in the diversity of epistemic goods each one provides. Aesthetic experience, or the experience of art or other aesthetic objects, affords multiple, distinctive epistemic goods whereas aesthetic (...)
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  • Frauds, Posers And Sheep: A Virtue Theoretic Solution To The Acquaintance Debate.Madeleine Ransom - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (2):417-434.
    The acquaintance debate in aesthetics has been traditionally divided between pessimists, who argue that testimony does not provide others with aesthetic knowledge of artworks, and optimists, who hold that acquaintance with an artwork is not a necessary precondition for acquiring aesthetic knowledge. In this paper I propose a reconciliationist solution to the acquaintance debate: while aesthetic knowledge can be had via testimony, aesthetic judgment requires acquaintance with the artwork. I develop this solution by situating it within a virtue aesthetics framework (...)
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  • Normative Uncertainty and the Dependence Problem.Abelard Podgorski - 2020 - Mind 129 (513):43-70.
    In this paper, I enter the debate between those who hold that our normative uncertainty matters for what we ought to do, and those who hold that only our descriptive uncertainty matters. I argue that existing views in both camps have unacceptable implications in cases where our descriptive beliefs depend on our normative beliefs. I go on to propose a fix which is available only to those who hold that normative uncertainty matters, ultimately leaving the challenge as a threat to (...)
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  • Autonomy, understanding, and moral disagreement.C. Thi Nguyen - 2010 - Philosophical Topics 38 (2):111-129.
    Should the existence of moral disagreement reduce one’s confidence in one’s moral judgments? Many have claimed that it should not. They claim that we should be morally self-sufficient: that one’s moral judgment and moral confidence ought to be determined entirely one’s own reasoning. Others’ moral beliefs ought not impact one’s own in any way. I claim that moral self-sufficiency is wrong. Moral self-sufficiency ignores the degree to which moral judgment is a fallible cognitive process like all the rest. In this (...)
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  • Moral Enhancement Is Irrational.Stephen Napier - 2023 - Acta Analytica 38 (4):653-665.
    Debates on moral enhancement focus legitimate attention on the questions of whether it is possible and/or what could count as a moral enhancement given deep ethical disagreement. I argue here that moral enhancements might not even be rational to consider—from the perspective of the agent. At issue is the assessment of whether the enhancement is truly reliable. Since we assess reliable belief forming processes by their outputs, whether they are true, an agent who is entertaining a putative moral enhancement faces (...)
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  • The possibility of fitting love: irreplaceability and selectivity.Hichem Naar - 2021 - Synthese 198 (2):985-1010.
    The question whether there are reasons for loving particular individuals, and what such reasons might be, has been subject to scrutiny in recent years. On one view, reasons for loving particular individuals are some of their qualities. A problem with crude versions of this view, however, is that they both construe individuals as replaceable in a problematic way and fail to do justice to the selectivity of love. On another view, by contrast, reasons for loving particular individuals have to do (...)
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  • Doing One’s Reasonable Best: What Moral Responsibility Requires.Martin Montminy - 2016 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (1):55--73.
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  • Moral Testimony Pessimism and the Uncertain Value of Authenticity.Andreas L. Mogensen - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (2):261-284.
    Many philosophers believe that there exist distinctive obstacles to relying on moral testimony. In this paper, I criticize previous attempts to identify these obstacles and offer a new theory. I argue that the problems associated with moral deference can't be explained in terms of the value of moral understanding, nor in terms of aretaic considerations related to subjective integration. Instead, our uneasiness with moral testimony is best explained by our attachment to an ideal of authenticity that places special demands on (...)
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  • The non-remedial value of dependence on moral testimony.Paddy Jane McShane - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (3):629-647.
    In this paper I defend dependence on moral testimony. I show how going defenses of dependence on moral testimony have portrayed it as second-best by centering on how and why it is an important means to overcoming our defects. I argue that once we consider the pervasiveness of moral testimony in the context of intimate relationships, we can see that the value of dependence on moral testimony goes beyond this: it is not only our flaws and limitations that justify our (...)
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  • Moral Testimony and Moral Understanding.McShane Paddy Jane - 2018 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 15 (3):245-271.
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  • Against epistemic pessimism about moral testimony.Paddy Jane McShane - 2021 - Episteme 18 (2):200-223.
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  • The puzzle of pure moral deference.Sarah McGrath - 2009 - Philosophical Perspectives 23 (1):321-344.
    Case B. You tell me that eating meat is immoral. Although I believe that, left to my own devices, I would not think this, no matter how long I reflected, I adopt your attitude as my own. It is not that I believe that you are better informed about potentially relevant non-moral facts (e.g., about the conditions under which livestock is kept, or about the typical effects of eliminating meat from one’s diet). On the contrary, I know that I have (...)
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  • I—Hallvard Lillehammer: Moral Testimony, Moral Virtue, and the Value of Autonomy.Hallvard Lillehammer - 2014 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 88 (1):111-127.
    According to some, taking moral testimony is a potentially decent way to exercise one's moral agency. According to others, it amounts to a failure to live up to minimal standards of moral worth. What's the issue? Is it conceptual or empirical? Is it epistemological or moral? Is there a ‘puzzle’ of moral testimony; or are there many, or none? I argue that there is no distinctive puzzle of moral testimony. The question of its legitimacy is as much a moral or (...)
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  • The Norm of Moral Assertion: A Reply to Simion.Max Lewis - 2019 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (4):1043-1049.
    Mona Simion has recently argued for a function-first norm of moral assertion. According to function-first accounts, the norm of any kind of assertion is determined by the function of that kind of assertion. She argues that, on the assumption that moral understanding is the goal of moral inquiry, the function of moral assertion is reliably generating moral understanding in others and that the norm of moral assertion should fall out of that function. In particular, she thinks the norm should be (...)
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  • The New Puzzle of Moral Deference.Max Lewis - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (4):460-476.
    Philosophers think that there is something fishy about moral deference. The most common explanation of this fishiness is that moral deference doesn’t yield the epistemic states necessary for certain moral achievements. First, I argue that this explanation overgeneralizes. It entails that using many intuitively kosher belief-formation methods should be off-putting. Second, I argue that moral deference is sometimes superior to these other methods because it puts one in a better position to gain the relevant moral achievements.
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  • Moral Deference, Moral Assertion, and Pragmatics.Max Lewis - 2020 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (1):5-22.
    In this paper, I offer a novel defense of moderate pessimism about moral deference, i.e., the view that we have pro tanto reason to avoid moral deference. I argue that moral deference fails to give us the epistemic credentials to satisfy plausible norms of moral assertion. I then argue that moral assertions made solely on the basis of deferential moral beliefs violate a plausible epistemic and moral norm against withholding information that one knows, has evidence, or ought to believe will (...)
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  • A defense of the very idea of moral deference pessimism.Max Lewis - 2020 - Philosophical Studies (8):2323-2340.
    Pessimists think that there is something wrong with relying on deference for one’s moral beliefs—at least if one is morally mature. Call this no deference. They also tend to think that what explains our aversion to cases of moral deference is the fact that they involve deference about moral claims. Call this moral explanation. Recently, both no deference and moral explanation have come under attack. Against no deference, some philosophers offer purported counterexamples involving moral advice. I argue that proponents of (...)
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  • Conciliating to Avoid Moral Scepticism.Nick Küspert - 2023 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 31 (3):279-300.
    A common worry about moral conciliationism is that it entails at best uncertainty about many of our moral beliefs and at worst epistemological moral scepticism. Against this worry, I argue that moral conciliationism saves us from epistemological moral scepticism and enables us to be confident in many of our moral beliefs. First, I show that only taking disagreements seriously as a threat to our beliefs allows us to utilise agreements in support of our beliefs (call this symmetry). Next, I argue (...)
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  • Deference and Ideals of Practical Agency.Jonathan Knutzen - 2021 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (1):17-32.
    This paper develops a moderate pessimist account of moral deference. I argue that while some pessimist explanations of the puzzle of moral deference have been misguided in matters of detail, they nevertheless share an important insight, namely that there is a justified moral agency ideal grounded in pro tanto reasons against moral deference. This thought is unpacked in terms of a set of values associated with the practice of morality. I conclude by suggesting that the solution to the puzzle of (...)
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  • Moral and Non-moral Testimony { Revisiting an Alleged Asymmetry.Maximilian Kiener - 2017 - Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 31 (1):25-44.
    In this essay, I oppose the ‘Asymmetry Thesis’ according to which moral matters are simply different in kind from non-moral matters when it comes to testimony because moral matters require understanding in a way in which non-moral matters do not. I argue that the requirement of understanding is not unique to morality and also deny that there is a genuine requirement of understanding after all. Instead, cases of moral and non-moral testimony are often troubling for the same reason, namely the (...)
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  • Familiarity inferences, subjective attitudes and counterstance contingency: towards a pragmatic theory of subjective meaning.Christopher Kennedy & Malte Willer - 2022 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (6):1395-1445.
    Subjective predicates have two interpretive and distributional characteristics that have resisted a comprehensive analysis. First, the use of a subjective predicate to describe an object is in general felicitous only when the speaker has a particular kind of familiarity with relevant features of the object; characterizing an object as _tasty,_ for example, implies that the speaker has experience of its taste. Second, subjective predicates differ from objective predicates in their distribution under certain types of propositional attitude verbs. The goal of (...)
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  • Moral Expertise.Karen Jones & François Schroeter - 2012 - Analyse & Kritik 34 (2):217-230.
    This paper surveys recent work on moral expertise. Much of that work defends an asymmetry thesis according to which the cognitive deference to expertise that characterizes other areas of inquiry is out of place in morality. There are two reasons why you might think asymmetry holds. The problem might lie in the existence of expertise or in deferring to it. We argue that both types of arguments for asymmetry fail. They appear to be stronger than they are because of their (...)
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  • Hypocrisy and Moral Authority.Jessica Isserow & Colin Klein - 2017 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 12 (2):191-222.
    Hypocrites invite moral opprobrium, and charges of hypocrisy are a significant and widespread feature of our moral lives. Yet it remains unclear what hypocrites have in common, or what is distinctively bad about them. We propose that hypocrites are persons who have undermined their claim to moral authority. Since this self-undermining can occur in a number of ways, our account construes hypocrisy as multiply realizable. As we explain, a person’s moral authority refers to a kind of standing that they occupy (...)
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  • Is knowledge of causes sufficient for understanding?Xingming Hu - 2019 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (3):291-313.
    ABSTRACT: According to a traditional account, understanding why X occurred is equivalent to knowing that X was caused by Y. This paper defends the account against a major objection, viz., knowing-that is not sufficient for understanding-why, for understanding-why requires a kind of grasp while knowledge-that does not. I discuss two accounts of grasp in recent literature and argue that if either is true, then knowing that X was caused by Y entails at least a rudimentary understanding of why X occurred. (...)
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  • Google Morals, Virtue, and the Asymmetry of Deference.Robert J. Howell - 2012 - Noûs 48 (3):389-415.
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  • Intuitive Expertise in Moral Judgments.Joachim Horvath & Alex Wiegmann - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2):342-359.
    According to the ‘expertise defence’, experimental findings suggesting that intuitive judgments about hypothetical cases are influenced by philosophically irrelevant factors do not undermine their evidential use in (moral) philosophy. This defence assumes that philosophical experts are unlikely to be influenced by irrelevant factors. We discuss relevant findings from experimental metaphilosophy that largely tell against this assumption. To advance the debate, we present the most comprehensive experimental study of intuitive expertise in ethics to date, which tests five well- known biases of (...)
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  • Why you cannot make people better by telling them what is good.Ulf Hlobil - 2020 - European Journal of Philosophy 28 (4):986-996.
    So-called optimists about moral testimony argue, against pessimists, that, ceteris paribus, we ought to accept and act in accordance with trustworthy, pure moral testimony. I argue that even if we grant this, we need to explain why moral testimony cannot make us more virtuous. I offer an explanation that appeals to the fact that we cannot share inferential abilities via testimony. This explanation is compatible with the core commitments of optimism, but it also allows us to see what is right (...)
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