Normative Ethics: an Armchair Discipline?

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Johnnie R.R. Pedersen ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Reflective Equilibrium ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Normative Ethics

This paper discusses a challenge to normative ethics motivated by experimental philosophy. Experimental philosophers object to the perceived “armchair” or a priori nature of philosophy, claiming it should rather be empirical or naturalistic. The paper investigates the application of this claim to normative ethics. Dubbing the application of the experimental philosophers’ contention to normative ethics “the Armchair Claim,” I distinguish descriptive and normative versions of this challenge, and consider their merits as comments on the method of normative ethics (descriptive versions), and as comments on how normative ethics should be done (normative versions). Characterizing normative ethics as essentially involving the use of the method of reflective equilibrium, I show how the versions of the Armchair Claim that I distinguish either misconstrue normative ethics, or are committed to metaethical views that are controversial. To bring home the latter point, I contrast two meta-ethical positions, and show how, on one such view, naturalism, the descriptive version could be correct, whereas on another, intuitionism, it would be false. The normative version, in turn, is consistent with naturalism, but begs the question against the intuitionist since she argues that normative ethics cannot be empirical. The upshot is that a conclusive assessment of the Armchair Claim will have to await the resolution of disputed issues in meta-ethics. However, normative ethicists can get on with their work since reflective equilibrium is unaffected by such debates.

當代生命倫理學危機的根源及解決方案——David Solomon文章評析

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-130
Author(s):  
Ruipeng LEI
Keyword(s):  
Reflective Equilibrium ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Normative Ethics ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Foundational Principle ◽  
Digital Commons

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract in English only.David Solomon proposes in his article that deep divisions in our culture, which are reflected in the variety and opposition of foundational normative theories, are key to understanding the contemporary crisis in bioethics. Solomon examines two recent attempts to respond to this crisis of authority in bioethics and suggest that both proposals make the situation worse. However, his criticism of principlism, which has been dominant in bioethics since the 1980s, seems implausible. As observed by Aristotle, the rationale of a principle-based approach lies in the tensions between generality, considered judgment and ethical deliberation. The principle-based approach to meta-ethics is characterized as a dialectic between moral principles and considered judgment, which is analogous to Rawls’s concept of reflective equilibrium. The four principles formulated by Beauchamp and Childress are prima-facie binding, but subject to specification and balancing. It is possible for us to overcome these deep foundational disagreements in normative ethics by emphasizing the foundational principle held by the ancient Greeks; that is, our natural desire to live a good life.DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 41 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.

Parfit’s Final Arguments in Normative Ethics

2021 ◽  
pp. 213-232
Author(s):  
Brad Hooker
Keyword(s):  
Reflective Equilibrium ◽  
Normative Ethics ◽  
Final Part ◽  
The Third ◽  
Rule Consequentialism ◽  
Final Volume ◽  
Act Consequentialism ◽  
What Matters

This paper starts by juxtaposing the normative ethics in the final part of Parfit’s final book, On What Matters, volume iii (2017), with the normative ethics in his earlier books, Reasons and Persons (1984) and On What Matters, volume i (2011). The paper then addresses three questions. The first is, where does the reflective-equilibrium methodology that Parfit endorsed in the first volume of On What Matters lead? The second is, is the Act-involving Act Consequentialism that Parfit considers in the final volume of On What Matters as plausible as Rossian deontology? The third is, how is the new argument that Parfit puts forward for Rule Consequentialism supposed to work?

Moral epistemology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Wedgwood
Keyword(s):  
Reflective Equilibrium ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Moral Epistemology ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Thinking ◽  
Moral Intuitions ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
Factual Proposition ◽  
The Way

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. So moral epistemology is the study of what would be involved in knowing, or being justified in believing, moral propositions. Some discussions of moral epistemology interpret the category of ‘moral propositions’ broadly, to encompass all propositions that can be expressed with terms like ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘ought’. Other discussions have focused on a narrower category of moral propositions – such as propositions about what rights people have, or about what we owe to each other. According to so-called noncognitivists, one cannot strictly speaking know (or be justified in believing) a moral proposition in the same sense in which one can know (or be justified in believing) an ordinary factual proposition. Other philosophers defend a cognitivist position, according to which it is possible to know or be justified in believing moral propositions in the very same sense as factual propositions. If one does know any moral propositions, they must presumably be true; and the way in which one knows those moral truths must provide access to them. This has led to a debate about whether one could ever know moral truths if a realist conception of these truths – according to which moral truths are not in any interesting sense of our making – were correct. Many philosophers agree that one way of obtaining justified moral beliefs involves seeking ‘reflective equilibrium’ – that is, roughly, considering theories, and adjusting one’s judgments to make them as systematic and coherent as possible. According to some philosophers, however, seeking reflective equilibrium is not enough: justified moral beliefs need to be supported by moral ‘intuitions’. Some hold that such moral intuitions are a priori, akin to our intuitions of the self-evident truths of mathematics. Others hold that these intuitions are closely related to emotions or sentiments; some theorists claim that empirical studies of moral psychology strongly support this ‘sentimentalist’ interpretation. Finally, moral thinking seems different from other areas of thought in two respects. First, there is particularly widespread disagreement about moral questions; and one rarely responds to such moral disagreement by retreating to a state of uncertainty as one does on other questions. Secondly, one rarely defers to other people’s moral judgments in the way in which one defers to experts about ordinary factual questions. These two puzzling features of moral thinking seem to demand explanation – which is a further problem that moral epistemology has to solve.

Experimental philosophy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ron Mallon ◽  
Shaun Nichols
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Experimental Techniques ◽  
Folk Theory ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Philosophical View ◽  
The Right

Experimental philosophy is not a philosophy, it is a method that is supposed to contribute to philosophical inquiry. Characteristically, experimental philosophers use empirical techniques to investigate philosophically significant intuitions about cases. An intuition, in this context, is a spontaneous judgement a person makes about a case with little or no conscious reason for their judgement. Intuitions play a key role in much philosophical theorizing. The attempt to provide a conceptual analysis or definition for important philosophical concepts, e.g. knowledge, meaning, responsibility, has long been a major theoretical concern in philosophy. One prominent philosophical view holds that the meaning of our concepts is given by the folk theory (or set of common-sense beliefs) in which the concepts are embedded. Intuitions about cases are thought to reveal the contours of the folk theory and the meaning of the concept. As a result, in pursuing conceptual analyses, many philosophers rely on intuitions about cases to descry the folk theories in which those concepts are embedded. In addition to their role in conceptual analysis, philosophers invoke intuitions as evidence for substantive philosophical claims, perhaps in much the same way as empirical scientists invoke observation as evidence. For instance, the intuition that it is wrong to push one man in front of a speeding trolley to save five others is invoked as evidence that utilitarianism does not give the right theory of how we ought to act. Similarly, intuitions are used to support substantive claims about knowledge, meaning and responsibility. When philosophers use intuitions - whether in the service of conceptual analysis or in the effort to establish a more substantive philosophical claim - the traditional methodology looks a priori. That is, one arrives at one’s judgements without relying on evidence from sensory perception. For instance, to analyse the concept intentional a philosopher might consult their intuitions about whether the concept applies in various actual and possible circumstances, and a condition of adequacy upon the definition is that it best conforms to these intuitions. In contrast, experimental philosophers use experimental techniques to study intuitions about philosophically important concepts.

On the Nature and Significance of (Ideal) Rational Choice Theory

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-160
Author(s):  
Hartmut Kliemt
Keyword(s):  
Rational Choice ◽  
Rational Choice Theory ◽  
Choice Theory ◽  
Reflective Equilibrium ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Choice Making ◽  
Great Achievement ◽  
Active Choice ◽  
Science Management ◽  
Interdisciplinary Exchange

Abstract The increasingly wide spread use of RCM, rational choice modeling, and RCT, rational choice theory, in disciplines like economics, law, ethics, psychology, sociology, political science, management facilitates interdisciplinary exchange. This is a great achievement. Yet it nurtures the hope that a unified account of rational (inter-)active choice making might arise from ‘reason’ in (a priori) terms of intuitively appealing axioms. Such ‘rationalist’ characterizations of rational choice neglect real human practices and empirical accounts of those practices. This is theoretically misleading and practically dangerous. Searching for a wide reflective equilibrium, WRE, on RCT in evidence-oriented ways can explicate ‘rational’ without rationalism.

Philosophical Naturalism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Kornblith
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Philosophical Naturalism ◽  
Philosophical Questions

This article focuses on naturalistic approaches to philosophical methodology. It begins with an overview of naturalism, its relationship with views about the a priori, and the implications of a philosopher’s commitment to naturalism for proper method in philosophy. It then considers the disagreement among naturalists about the tenability of the a priori/a posteriori distinction with respect to naturalism, before turning to a discussion of the use of science to address philosophical questions. It also looks at work in epistemology which draws on results in the cognitive sciences as a way of understanding the nature of knowledge, with particular emphasis on the role of Alvin Goldman in getting epistemologists to pay attention to the import of empirical work for understanding epistemological issues. Finally, it explores experimental philosophy as a methodological approach to philosophical questions and comments on the debate over the legitimacy of armchair methods in philosophy.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 132-132
Author(s):  
William G. Lycan
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Community ◽  
Reflective Equilibrium ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Philosophical Method ◽  
Wide Reflective Equilibrium ◽  
Scientific Results

In this book I have presented and defended a coherent philosophical method. It rests ultimately on intuitions. It draws on scientific results so far as the scientific community considers them established or at least well supported. It entitles itself to prefer Moorean facts to a priori philosophical assumptions. And it tries to bring all these into a (very) wide reflective equilibrium....

scholarly journals Necessary Moral Principles

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 617-634 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICHARD SWINBURNE
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Reflective Equilibrium ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Wide Sense ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
Moral Goodness ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
As If

ABSTRACT:Moral realism entails that there are metaphysically necessary moral principles of the form ‘all actions of nonmoral kind Z are morally good’; being discoverable a priori, these must be (in a wide sense) logically necessary. This article seeks to justify this apparently puzzling consequence. A sentence expresses a logically necessary proposition iff its negation entails a contradiction. The method of reflective equilibrium assumes that the simplest account of the apparently correct use of sentences of some type in paradigm examples is probably logically necessary. An account is simple insofar as it uses few predicates designating properties easily recognizable in many different kinds of paradigm examples. I illustrate how reflective equilibrium uses these criteria to discover logically necessary nonmoral propositions such as ‘if S remembers doing X, S believes that he did X’ and ‘if it is scarlet, it is red’. I then illustrate how exactly the same procedures can lead us from paradigm examples of apparently true sentences asserting that actions of some kind are good to discovering moral principles. I advance the contingent hypothesis that most contemporary humans, although they initially disagree about moral issues, have derived from different paradigm examples the same concept of moral goodness, which will ensure that the use of reflective equilibrium will lead to eventual agreement about moral issues. That strongly suggests that the moral principles eventually reached by reflective equilibrium are logically necessary ones.

scholarly journals “Ethical Minefields” and the Voice of Common Sense: A Discussion with Julian Savulescu

Conatus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
Evangelos D. Protopapadakis
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Reflective Equilibrium ◽  
Normative Ethics ◽  
Ethical Theories ◽  
Ethical Problems ◽  
Practical Ethics ◽  
The Voice

Theoretical ethics includes both metaethics (the meaning of moral terms) and normative ethics (ethical theories and principles). Practical ethics involves making decisions about every day real ethical problems, like decisions about euthanasia, what we should eat, climate change, treatment of animals, and how we should live. It utilizes ethical theories, like utilitarianism and Kantianism, and principles, but more broadly a process of reflective equilibrium and consistency to decide how to act and be.

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