Moral Epistemology
How is moral knowledge possible? This question is central in moral epistemology.
There are a cluster of problems in moral epistemology. The most important are the following.
Sociological thinking: The best explanation of the depth of moral disagreements and the social diversity that they reflect is one of two things.
(a) No moral facts exist to be known.
Moral disagreements exemplify merely clashes in moral sensibility rather than differences about matters of fact.
(b) Moral knowledge exists, but moral facts are relative to the social group in which moral sensibility is formed with the result that no moral truths are known to hold universally (Descriptive morality - Morals are made in a society and are binding on members of the society.).
Psychological thinking: Moral judgments are intrinsically motivating. Judgments about matters of fact, on the other hand, are never motivating just in themselves. Since to constitute moral knowledge a moral judgment must be made about some moral fact, moral knowledge is not possible.
Ontological: Moral knowledge is about moral reality. How is that reality constituted? Three general possibilities present themselves.
(a) Moral reality might be theological in nature, pertaining to (say) the will of God.
(b) It might be a non-natural realm that is neither theological nor natural, but sui generis.
(c) It might be comprehensible as a part of the natural world studied by science.
Each of these possibilities, however, is beset with difficulties.
Evolutionary: Where do human morals come from?
A familiar and widely accepted answer is that human morals are in essence, despite their modern variations, Darwinian adaptations. As such morals are about survival and reproduction and have nothing to do with moral truth.
While the intuitive, emotional basis of moral judgments was useful to our ancestors, this basis is out-dated and unreliable in modern industrial society and thus current moral thought in such society, which inevitably embeds this basis, is without rational foundation.
Methodological: Traditionally philosophers have sought to explain the possibility of knowledge by appeal to at least some principles that can be grasped and defended a priori and thus independently of natural science. A new and revolutionary epistemology introduced by Quine seeks to explain the possibility of knowledge through science itself. “Naturalized epistemology” has been immensely popular since its inception in the 1960s, largely because it promises to make epistemology consistent with a scientific world-view.
At the same time the new methodology appears to make it more difficult to explain the possibility of moral knowledge. Two allied methodologies that seek to find moral truth in a reflective equilibrium of judgments or in applications of rational choice theory are much less restrictive but open to the objection that they are morally conservative. A recent methodology allied to naturalized epistemology is pragmatic naturalism. Taking its inspiration from examples of transforming the moral status quo, it is less vulnerable to the charge of moral conservatism. However, by understanding moral knowledge as mainly a matter of knowing how to live well interdependently with others by resolving issues collectively as they arise, this methodology may not offer a conception of moral truth appropriate to genuine moral knowledge.
Moral: Feminists among others are often critical of traditional epistemologies as well as the innovative recent methodologies on the moral ground that the standards found there are unjustly biased against women and other marginalized groups. For example, feminists often reject the standard of impartiality contained in these forms of epistemology because it renders invisible important knowledge possessed by women and thereby contributes to their oppression.
If, for reasons to be given, the criticism has merit, then it presents an apparent paradox within feminist moral epistemology, since it appears to reject the ideal of impartiality on the ground that it is not itself impartial.
The Marxist complaint that the standard of impartiality is unjustly biased against the working class because it renders invisible their exploitation gives rise to the same contradiction. Resolution of the paradox is important for both evaluating such criticisms and understanding in general how to evaluate moral criticisms of epistemic standards.
About the entry in the Plato Encyclopedia
First, the entry ignores global skepticism, which doubts the possibility of anyone's having any knowledge at all.
Second, in keeping with the last restriction, the entry takes for granted that our capacity to have other kinds of knowledge is not in question. Indeed, the six problems above arise in part because of the implications of having other kinds of knowledge.
Third, the entry assumes that moral knowledge entails (roughly) justified true moral belief. An expressivist may invoke a deflationary conception of truth to support the idea that we can speak of justified moral beliefs that are “true” — without implying that justified moral beliefs accurately represent moral reality. Moral justification is discussed below, however, only as it pertains to putatively reliable representations of moral reality.
Fourth, many important epistemological issues arise in the context of considering specific normative theories or types of normative theory. (Can virtue ethics explain how we can know what course of action is morally acceptable for a situation demanding the exercise of conflicting virtues?) The focus in this entry is on issues that are special to moral epistemology.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-epistemology/
No comments:
Post a Comment