In one of his arguments for taking compassion to be the basis of morality, Schopenhauer offers a thought experiment involving two characters: Titus and Caius. The 'Titus Argument,' as I call it, has been misunderstood by many of Schopenhauer's readers, but is, I argue, worthy of attention by contemporary ethicists and metaethicists. In this chapter, I clarify the argument's structure, methodology, and its key philosophical move, drawing comparisons with Newton's experimental methodology in optics and Raimond Gaita's moral parodies.

ABSTRACTCommentators have generally seen the compassionate person as a second-rate character vis-à-vis the ascetic ‘saint’ who denies the will-to-life and resigns from willing altogether in Schopen...

According to a popular thought, sympathy is an epistemic phenomenon: in sympathizing with others we come to be aware of them as fellow sentient beings. This view–which I call the Epistemic View–effectively characterizes sympathy as a form of social cognition. In this paper, I will argue against the Epistemic View. As far as I can see, this view radically misconstrues the way sympathy is directed at others. I will at the same time provide some material for, and motivate, an alternative (...) proposal according to which the primary significance of sympathy is practical rather than epistemic. On this account, sympathy is a form of interpersonal acknowledgment rather than interpersonal awareness. (shrink)

According to “debunking arguments,” our moral beliefs are explained by evolutionary and cultural processes that do not track objective, mind-independent moral truth. Therefore (the debunkers say) we ought to be skeptics about moral realism. Huemer counters that “moral progress”—the cross-cultural convergence on liberalism—cannot be explained by debunking arguments. According to him, the best explanation for this phenomenon is that people have come to recognize the objective correctness of liberalism. Although Huemer may be the first philosopher to make this explicit empirical (...) argument for moral realism, the idea that societies will eventually converge on the same moral beliefs is a notable theme in realist thinking. Antirealists, on the other hand, often point to seemingly intractable cross-cultural moral disagreement as evidence against realism (the “argument from disagreement”). This paper argues that the trend toward liberalism is susceptible to a debunking explanation, being driven by two related non-truth-tracking processes. First, large numbers of people gravitate to liberal values for reasons of self-interest. Second, as societies become more prosperous and advanced, they become more effective at suppressing violence, and they create conditions where people are more likely to empathize with others, which encourages liberalism. The latter process is not truth tracking (or so this paper argues) because empathy-based moral beliefs are themselves susceptible to an evolutionary debunking argument. Cross-cultural convergence on liberalism per se does not support either realism or antirealism. (shrink)

Taking perceptual experience to consist in a relation of acquaintance with the sensible qualities, I argue that the state of being acquainted with a sensible quality is intrinsically a form of knowledge, and not merely a means to more familiar kinds of knowledge, such as propositional or dispositional knowledge. We should accept the epistemic claim for its explanatory power and theoretical usefulness. That acquaintance is knowledge best explains the intuitive epistemic appeal of ‘Edenic’ counterfactuals involving unmediated perceptual contact with reality (...) (cf. Chalmers, in: Gendler, Hawthorne (eds) Perceptual experience, Oxford University Press, 2006). It explains the elusiveness of knowledge gained through new acquaintances. It coheres with the knowledge-like functional role of acquaintance in the special context of evaluative beliefs and evaluative reasoning, where the objects of acquaintance serve as evidence and inferential basis. And, finally, taking acquaintance to be knowledge is theoretically fruitful: it helps vindicate claims about the relationship between knowledge and concern for others we already find intuitive or outright accept. After developing a novel case for the epistemic claim, I respond to two familiar objections against it: namely, (1) that there are no pre-propositional, pre-conceptual cases of perceptual experience that remain epistemically relevant (Sellars in Empiricism and the philosophy of mind, Routledge, 1968, McDowell, in: Lindgard (ed) John McDowell: Experience, norm, and nature, Blackwell, 2008); and (2) that the category of knowledge appears gerrymandered once we add ‘object’ knowledge to the epistemological mix (Farkas, in: Knowles, Raleigh (eds), Acquaintance: new essays, Oxford University Press, 2019). (shrink)