Debunking Arguments in Ethics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanno Sauer
Keyword(s):  
Debunking Arguments

Defending Virtuous Motivation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua May
Keyword(s):  
Framing Effects ◽  
Moral Behavior ◽  
Situational Factors ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Moral Hypocrisy ◽  
Debunking Arguments ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Mood Effects ◽  
The Right

This chapter considers remaining empirical challenges to the idea that we’re commonly motivated to do what’s right for the right reasons. Two key factors threaten to defeat claims to virtuous motivation, self-interest (egoism) and arbitrary situational factors (situationism). Both threats aim to identify defective influences on moral behavior that reveal us to be commonly motivated by the wrong reasons. However, there are limits to such wide-ranging skeptical arguments. Ultimately, like debunking arguments, defeater challenges succumb to a Defeater’s Dilemma: one can identify influences on many of our morally relevant behaviors that are either substantial or arbitrary, but not both. The science suggests a familiar trade-off in which substantial influences on many morally relevant actions are rarely defective. Arriving at this conclusion requires carefully scrutinizing a range of studies, including those on framing effects, dishonesty, implicit bias, mood effects, and moral hypocrisy (vs. integrity).

scholarly journals Belief Pills and the Possibility of Moral Epistemology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Sinclair
Keyword(s):  
Moral Epistemology ◽  
Moral Truth ◽  
Recent Attempt ◽  
Evolutionary Debunking Arguments ◽  
Debunking Arguments ◽  
Moral Judgements ◽  
Evolutionary Debunking ◽  
Evolutionary Explanations ◽  
Moral Facts

This chapter argues that evolutionary debunking arguments are dialectically ineffective. Such arguments rely on the premise that moral judgements can be given evolutionary explanations which do not invoke their truth. The challenge for the debunker is to bridge the gap between this premise and the conclusion that moral judgements are unjustified. After discussing older attempts to bridge this gap, this chapter focuses on Joyce’s recent attempt, which claims that ‘we do not have a believable account of how moral facts could explain the mechanisms…which give rise to moral judgements’. It argues that whether there is such an account depends on what it is permissible to assume about moral truth and that it is reasonable to make assumptions which allow for the possibility of at least partial moral epistemologies. The challenge for the debunker is to show that these assumptions are unreasonable in a way which does not render their debunking argument superfluous.

Unbunking Arguments

2019 ◽  
pp. 384-402
Author(s):  
Christopher Frugé
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Research ◽  
Cross Domain ◽  
Debunking Arguments ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Relevant Domain

This chapter develops a style of argument that realists can use to defend the methodological propriety of appealing to a given range of intuitions. Unbunking arguments are an epistemically positive analogue of debunking arguments, and they revolve around the claim that the processes dominantly responsible for beliefs about a given domain are reliable. However, processes cannot always be assessed for accuracy with respect to the relevant domain, so this chapter also develops the cross-domain strategy, which involves arguing that processes known to be reliable in one domain are similarly reliable with respect to a different domain. The chapter ends by unbunking our metaphysical intuitions about mutual supervenience by way of a cross-domain strategy that draws on cognitive scientific research into our ability to track correlations.

scholarly journals Debunking, supervenience, and Hume’s Principle

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (8) ◽  
pp. 1083-1103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Leng
Keyword(s):  
Mathematical Realism ◽  
Mathematical Beliefs ◽  
Conceptual Truth ◽  
Hume’S Principle ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
Debunking Arguments ◽  
Moral Facts

AbstractDebunking arguments against both moral and mathematical realism have been pressed, based on the claim that our moral and mathematical beliefs are insensitive to the moral/mathematical facts. In the mathematical case, I argue that the role of Hume’s Principle as a conceptual truth speaks against the debunkers’ claim that it is intelligible to imagine the facts about numbers being otherwise while our evolved responses remain the same. Analogously, I argue, the conceptual supervenience of the moral on the natural speaks presents a difficulty for the debunker’s claim that, had the moral facts been otherwise, our evolved moral beliefs would have remained the same.

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