Sinnott-Armstrong's moral scepticism

Ratio

Volumn 16, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 63-82

  Nelson, Mark T ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 60949193038     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9329.2003.00206.x     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. 'Moral Skepticism and Justification' in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Mark Timmons, eds., Moral Knowledge? New Readings in Moral Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 3-48, at p. 8
2. Sinnott-Armstrong, 'Moral Skepticism and Justification', p. 8
3. It begs the question by asserting as a premise in an argument something that is not better known than the conclusion that the argument is meant to support. This premise is not better known because (allegedly) it cannot be known independently of knowing the conclusion in question. In understanding 'begging the question' thus, I am interpreting the present argument context as one of 'inquiry', where the goal is the 'acquisition of an increment of knowledge', as distinct from, say, the persuasion of some interlocutor, real or imagined. In such 'persuasive dialogue' contexts, on the other hand, begging the question involves asserting as a premise in one's argument something that one's interlocutor would not concede. For a discussion of these and other argument contexts, and their bearing on 'begging the question', see Douglas N. Walton, Informal Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 5-7, 22-3, 52-4
4. See also Sinnott-Armstrong's own account in his 'Begging the Question', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 77 (1999), pp. 174-191. There he argues that 'begging the question cannot be understood merely formally, but must be defined at least partly by the context in which the argument is used' (p. 178). The context will determine among other things, whether the argument is used for justification, explanation, figuring out, etc, and in the case of justification, which beliefs are to be justified and whose
5. See Fred Dretske, 'Epistemic Operators', Journal of Philosophy, LXVII (1970), pp. 1007-1023
6. Alvin Goldman, 'Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge', Journal of Philosophy, LXXIII (1976), pp. 771-791
7. and Bas Van Frassen, 'The Pragmatics of Explanation', American Philosophical Quarterly, 14 (1977), pp. 143-150
8. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in the Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans by Elizabeth Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, Vol. I, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), p. 172
9. See, e.g., Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), chs. 1-2
10. J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 15-49
11. For replies to the objection that ethical knowledge is specially problematic, see A. Gewirth, 'Positive "Ethics" and Normative "Science"', Philosophical Review, LXIX (1960), pp. 311-330
12. and Richard Boyd, 'How to be a Moral Realist', in G. Sayre-McCord, Essays on Moral Realism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 181-228
13. Dretske, 'Epistemic Operators', p. 1007
14. In case this example does not persuade, Dretske notes other examples of failure of penetration. For a discussion of failure to transmit justification across deductive inferences that does not involve Dretske's idea of contrast classes, see Robert Audi, Belief, Justification and Knowledge (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1988), pp. 77-78
15. For a sustained critique of scepticism based such principles of closure, see Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1981), pp. 172-247
16. For an accessible discussion of Nozick's treatment, see J. Dancy, Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1985), pp. 37-48
17. I am indebted to an anonymous referee for this example. For an accessible introduction to these issues, see Jonathan Vogel, 'Lottery Paradox', in J. Dancy and E. Sosa, eds., A Companion to Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 265-267
18. William Rowe, I believe, coins this term in 'The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism', American Philosophical Quarterly, 16 (1979), pp. 335-341
19. Roderick Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977, p. 120
20. Other positions on the Problem of the Criterion may be possible, including a sort of coherentism, according to which one begins with both substantial and methodological commitments, and then works to bring these into reflective equilibrium. Michael DePaul discusses such possibilities in 'The Problem of the Criterion and Coherence Methods in Ethics', Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 18 (1988), pp. 67-86
21. It is important not to confuse Chisholm's 'particularism' with another epistemological position of the same name that is sceptical about the role of general principles in moral reasoning on the grounds that 'we cannot know, in advance, what contribution any particular non-moral property will make to the moral nature of an action': David McNaughton, Moral Vision (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 193
22. See also Jonathan Dancy, 'Ethical Particularism and Morally Relevant Properties', Mind, 92 (1983), pp. 530-547. My example of Chisholmian particularism ('It is always wrong to torture babies for fun') is not particularist in McNaughton's and Dancy's sense of the word. I am indebted to Brad Hooker for alerting me to this possible confusion
23. R.M. Chisholm, 'The Problem of the Criterion' in The Foundations of Knowing (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 61-75, at p. 67. In case it is not obvious how an appeal to such generalisations would be arbitrary, imagine that we were to ask the empirical methodist why he or she prefers perception over flipping a coin as a way of answering 'yes' or 'no' questions about the physical world. Why would the empiricist prefer perception over coin-flipping unless he or she thought that it would be more likely to lead to the correct answer? And why would he or she think that it would be more likely to lead to the correct answer, unless he or she began with an idea of what the correct answer looked like?
24. Chisholm, 'The Problem of the Criterion', p. 67. This is not to imply that Sinnott-Armstrong is an empiricist. I do not know his overall epistemological position
25. Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, p. 121
26. Catherine Tennant, 'The Week Ahead', Telegraph Magazine, 17 October 1998, p. 124
27. William Alston, e.g., defines the epistemic point of view in terms of 'the aim of maximising truth and minimising falsity in a large body of beliefs'. See his 'Concepts of Epistemic Justification', Monist, 68 (1985), pp. 57-89, at p. 59
28. For a different definition, see Michael DePaul, Balance and Refinement (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 60-91