The ethics of emergencies

Do we have stronger duties to assist in emergencies than in nonemergencies? According to Peter Singer and Peter Unger, we do not. Emergency situations, they suggest, merely serve to make more salient the very extensive duties to assist that we always have. This view, while theoretically simple, appears to imply that we must radically revise common-sense emergency norms. Resisting that implication, theorists like Frances Kamm, Jeremy Waldron, and Larry Temkin suggest that emergencies are indeed normatively exceptional. While their approach is more in line with common-sense, however, it is theoretically less simple, and it is has proven difficult to justify the exception. In this paper we propose a model of emergencies that we call the Informal-Insurance Model, and explain how this can be used to combine theoretical simplicity with common-sense emergency norms.

Intuitive Expertise and Irrelevant Options

In the ‘push-dilemma,’ a train is about to run over several people and can only be stopped by pushing a heavy person onto the tracks. Most lay people and moral philosophers consider the ‘push-option,’ i.e., pushing the heavy person, as morally wrong. Peter Unger (1992, 1996) suggested that adding irrelevant options to the push-dilemma would overturn this intuition. This chapter tests Unger’s claim in an experiment with both lay people and expert moral philosophers. This allowed an investigation of the ‘expertise defense,’ which various philosophers have suggested as an answer to ‘experimental restrictionists,’ who argue that experimental philosophy undermines the trustworthiness of intuitions about hypothetical cases. Overall, the chapter finds that adding irrelevant options increases the ratings for the push-option. Moreover, the intuitions of expert moral philosophers are no less susceptible to the presence of irrelevant options than lay people’s intuitions. The chapter discusses how these findings bear on the expertise defense.

Moore against the New Skeptics

Moore’s method as detailed in Chapter 1 is applied against epistemological skepticism, and shown to have force in a way that other Moorean responses do not. The objections of Keith Lehrer, Peter Unger, and Barry Stroud are rebutted. In addition, this chapter responds to Stroud’s demand for a “deeper” response to the skeptic, and argues that the idea of a deeper response itself succumbs to Moore. It also addresses Moore’s own worry that “I know that I have hands” is both controversial and logically stronger than “I have hands,” arguing that that difference does not disqualify the knowledge claim as a term of the operative credibility comparison.

Accident, Evidence, and Knowledge

I explore and develop the idea, due to Peter Unger, that knowledge is non-accidentally true belief. Non-accidental truth is different from the absence of epistemic luck, as discussed by Pritchard. The original analysis faces two counterexamples, the Meson Case and the Light Switch Case. The former concerns knowledge of nomological necessities; the latter turns on the direction-of-fit between a belief and the facts. I propose: (ENA) S knows that P when S’s belief that P is non-accidentally true because (i) it is based on good evidence, and (ii) in and of themselves, beliefs based on good evidence tend to be true. ENA gets the two examples right, and compares favorably with safety, defeasibility, and knowledge-as-credit accounts. Lackey has claimed that the credit-based approach mishandles knowledge via testimony. I critically examine her objection, and show that ENA faces no difficulty of that sort.

From No People to No Languages

This chapter shows that the method that Peter Unger (1979, 1980) has developed for dealing with the sorites paradox can, and perhaps should, be extended and applied to the semantic paradoxes—specifically, to Grelling’s paradox and to the liar paradox. After carefully explicating Unger’s earlier method for treating the sorites, the chapter expands on a very brief, compact argument in which he (1979) contends that, in light of certain putatively paradoxical semantic expressions, which are not obviously soritical, there are no expressions and, hence, no languages. The concluding section of the chapter identifies some important similarities between the liar paradox and the sorites.

Does “One Cannot Know” Entail “Everyone is Right?” The Relationship between Epistemic Scepticism and Relativism

The objective of the paper is to seek clarification on the relationship between epistemic relativism and scepticism. It is not infrequent to come across contemporary discussions of epistemic relativism that rely upon aspects of scepticism and, vice versa, discussions of scepticism drawing upon aspects of relativism. Our goal is to highlight the difference(s) between them by illustrating (1) that some arguments thought to be against relativism are actually against scepticism, (2) that there are different ways of understanding the relationship between relativism and scepticism, and (3) that a commitment to either relativism or scepticism does not entail commitment to the other. The paper focuses upon the works of Peter Unger and Paul Boghossian to show how this terrain can be variously conceived and to illustrate that Boghossian's conception of the landscape is incorrect.