W.S.Armstrong.Moral.Scepticism

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The Philosophical Quarterly Vol.
, No.
July
ISSN
–
doi:
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MODERATE CLASSY PYRRHONIAN
MORAL SCEPTICISM
B
W
S
-A
This précis summarizes my book ‘Moral Skepticisms’, with emphasis on my contrastivist analysis of
justified moral belief and my Pyrrhonian moral scepticism based on meta-scepticism about relevance.
This complex moral epistemology escapes a common paradox facing moral philosophers.
I. A PARADOX
Many moral philosophers today live a double life. They teach philosophy
classes which study extreme positions, such as moral egoism, nihilism and
relativism. Then they walk across campus to serve on ethics committees in
hospitals or laboratories.
This double life is filled with tensions. Suppose patient Bob tests positive
for HIV, but his doctor Alice thinks that she should lie to her patient about
the test results, because the bad news would hurt him, and doctors should
do whatever is best for their patients. Alice goes to the hospital ethics com-
mittee and asks whether it would be morally wrong for her to lie to her
patient about the test results. It would be very unusual for any member of
the committee to respond that morality is just an illusion, and so nothing is
morally wrong. If such moral nihilism were expressed, it would be dismissed
quickly with laughter or disdain and without argument.
This reaction should be contrasted with that in a philosophy class which
has studied moral nihilism, egoism and scepticism for a whole term. Many
bright students have defended these positions in discussions. In her final
paper, one student, Eve, argues that it is morally wrong for doctors to lie to
their patients, but she does not even mention moral nihilism, egoism or
scepticism. Eve would and should receive a low grade.
A paradox arises when we enter moral epistemology and ask whether the
committee’s moral belief and the student’s moral belief are epistemically
justified. The hospital ethics committee seems justified in concluding that
© The Author Journal compilation © The Editors of
The Philosophical Quarterly
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, UK, and
Main Street, Malden,
, USA
MODERATE CLASSY PYRRHONIAN MORAL SCEPTICISM
the doctor should not lie, even though the committee never considers moral
nihilism, egoism or scepticism. In contrast, the philosophy student does not
seem justified in reaching the same conclusion, because she has no response
to such extreme positions. This is paradoxical: if neither the philosophy
student nor the committee can rule out moral nihilism, then how can this
inability show that the philosophy student’s moral belief is
not
justified when
the committee’s moral belief
is
justified?
One main purpose of my book
Moral Skepticisms
(Oxford UP,
), was
to resolve this paradox. The solution lies in contrast classes.
II. CONTRAST CLASSES
Contrast classes are apparent in explanations: temperature is the reason why
it is raining as opposed to snowing, but humidity is the reason why it is
raining as opposed to not precipitating at all. Similarly for reasons to act: my
reason to bake my son a birthday cake on May
as opposed to June
is
that his birthday is May
, but my reason to bake him a birthday cake on
as opposed to baking him a pie is his dislike of pie. When surveyed,
all kinds of reasons seem to introduce relativity to contrast classes.
Reasons for belief are no exception. Suppose I see a bird on my lawn and
believe that it is a crow. I can distinguish my actual visual experience from
the experience which I would have if the bird were a cardinal or an ostrich,
but I cannot distinguish my visual experience from the experience that I
would have if the bird were a raven or a rook. Hence my visual experience
gives me evidence and a reason to believe that it is a crow as opposed to a
cardinal or ostrich, but no evidence or reason to believe that it is a crow as
opposed to a raven or rook. I am then justified out of one contrast class but
not out of the other in believing that it is a crow. (Even a reliabilist should
admit this, because a birdwatcher can be reliable at picking out some birds
but not others.) The plausibility and usefulness of these relativized claims
reveals a place for contrast classes in epistemology.
This place can be specified by definitions:
S
is justified out of a contrast class
c
in believing a proposition
p
when
and only when
S
is not able to rule out
p
and is able to rule out the
disjunction of all other members of
c
.
This account is analogous in some ways to conditional probability. Just as
the conditional probability of
p
given
q
is calculated by counting only poss-
ibilities where
q
is true, so we determine whether
S
is justified in believing
p
out of
c
by assuming that some member of
c
is true and then asking whether
S
has evidence against the alternatives to
p
within
c
.
© The Author Journal compilation © The Editors of
The Philosophical Quarterly
May
WALTER SINNOTT-ARMSTRONG
This definition does not depend on any view about scepticism, so it
should be acceptable to sceptics and anti-sceptics alike. Still, it illuminates
scepticism when we distinguish two contrast classes:
The extreme contrast class
for a belief that
p
=
all claims contrary to
p
, including
sceptical scenarios which are systematically uneliminable
The modest contrast class
for a belief that
p
=
all claims contrary to
p
which need
to be eliminated in order to meet usual epistemic standards.
To call certain standards ‘usual’ is not to endorse them but only to say that
most people use them. In this non-normative sense, the usual epistemic
standards do not require believers to eliminate sceptical scenarios, so the
extreme and modest contrast classes di
S
is justified out of the
extreme
contrast class in believing
p
S
is justified out of the
modest
contrast class in believing
p
.
Judgements of this form are denied by two kinds of relativized moral
scepticism:
Scepticism about
extremely
justified belief
=
no belief is justified out of the
extreme contrast class
Scepticism about
modestly
justified belief
=
no belief is justified out of
the modest contrast class.
The former does not entail the latter, so a compromise is possible:
Moderate
scepticism about justified belief
=
scepticism about extremely
justified belief but not about modestly justified belief.
This compromise should be attractive to those who admit that we cannot
rule out extreme sceptical scenarios, such as deceiving demons and brains in
vats, but who also think that we can sometimes rule out all but one member
of the class which needs to be considered in order to meet usual epistemic
standards.
III. MORAL CONTRAST CLASSES
This structure applies neatly to moral beliefs. Just add ‘moral’ before ‘belief’
in the definitions.
The only complication is that moral beliefs are relative to three kinds of
contrast classes. A moral believer might be justified in believing that one act
© The Author Journal compilation © The Editors of
The Philosophical Quarterly
er.
These two contrast classes can be used to distinguish two epistemic
judgements:
ff
MODERATE CLASSY PYRRHONIAN MORAL SCEPTICISM
as opposed to a second act is morally wrong, without being justified in
believing that the first act as opposed to some third act is morally wrong.
Hence we need a class of contrasting
acts
. Similarly, a moral believer might
be justified in believing that an act has one moral status (such as being
morally right) as opposed to a second moral status (such as being morally
wrong), without being justified in believing that the act has the first status as
opposed to some third status (such as being supererogatory). Thus we need a
class of contrasting moral
statuses
. Again, a moral believer might be justified
in believing in one moral theory as opposed to a second moral theory,
without being justified in believing in the first theory as opposed to some
third theory (if, for example, he has a counter-example which refutes the
second but not the third). So we need a class of contrasting moral
theories
.
For any of these contrasts, moderate moral scepticism follows from these
definitions if some moral believers can sometimes rule out all but one of the
alternatives in the modest contrast class, but no moral believer can ever rule
out all of the extreme alternatives lying outside the modest contrast class but
inside the extreme contrast class. My book argues for this compromise.
Although other extreme moral views could work, I focus on moral nihil-
ism, which claims that nothing is morally wrong. It is important that real
people really believe in moral nihilism on the basis of real arguments. Hence
moral nihilism cannot be dismissed on grounds which some (such as Peirce)
cite for dismissing general sceptical scenarios, such as deceiving demons and
brains in vats, which nobody really believes in or argues for.
But can moral believers rule out moral nihilism? No. To rule out a mem-
ber of a contrast class, believers need some conflicting ground which does
not beg the question. Some moral believers try to rule out moral nihilism by
appealing to moral intuitions, but those moral intuitions are predicted and
explained by moral nihilists with the help of biology and psychology, so it
begs the question to cite moral intuitions against moral nihilism. Moral
nihilism also cannot be ruled out by logic or semantics, because it is logically
and semantically consistent when developed properly. Furthermore, no non-
normative premises, inference to the best explanation, or contractualist
framework can justify a denial of moral nihilism. To show all of this, I run
through naturalism, normativism, intuitionism and coherentism in part II of
my book. I cannot repeat those arguments here, so I shall simply take it for
granted that we cannot rule out moral nihilism. It follows that we are not
extremely justified as moral believers.
None the less, in my closing chapter, I show how some of us can some-
times use coherentist methods to rule out all but one of the alternatives
in the modest moral contrast class. These methods are exemplified in
properly structured ethics committees. The main philosophical trick involves
© The Author Journal compilation © The Editors of
The Philosophical Quarterly
WALTER SINNOTT-ARMSTRONG
second-order beliefs about reliability. Again I cannot go into detail here, so I
shall simply take it for granted that some moral believers are modestly
justified. The result is moderate scepticism about justified moral belief.
IV. RELEVANCE AND CONTEXTUALISM
Everything I have said so far could be accepted by a wide variety of
epistemologists, including invariantists and contextualists, because I have
discussed only relativized epistemic judgements with explicit contrast classes.
The classic disputes in epistemology arise over unrelativized epistemic
judgements without explicit contrast classes.
Some epistemologists might hold that unqualified epistemic judgements,
such as ‘
S
is justified in believing
p
’, are primitive and should not be ana-
lysed in terms of contrast classes at all. This dodge is hardly illuminating.
Moreover, because so many epistemic judgements (and judgements about
reasons of other kinds) are relative to contrast classes, the burden of proof
seems to lie on anyone who claims that any epistemic judgements are excep-
tions to that general pattern. Besides, almost any account of ‘
S
is justified in
believing
p
’ will be equivalent to some account in terms of contrast classes.
Thus there is no good reason to avoid contrast classes in the analysis of
unqualified epistemic judgements.
With contrast classes, several options arise, but I propose this analysis:
S
is justified (without qualification) in believing
p
=
S
is justified, out of
the contrast class which is relevant, in believing
p
.
This proposal should be obvious, since to call a contrast class ‘relevant’ here
is just to say that a believer needs to be able to rule out all other alternatives
in that contrast class in order to be justified without qualification in believing
a member of that contrast class. What is at issue is relevance to the status of
being epistemically justified, not relevance to practical purposes, to morality,
to religion, or to anything other than epistemic justifiedness.
This analysis is compatible with a variety of views about which contrast
class is relevant.
Invariantists
hold that a certain contrast class is always
relevant.
Extreme invariantists
see the extreme contrast class as always relevant.
Modest invariantists
see the modest contrast class as always relevant.
Context-
ualists
then deny invariantism and hold instead that which contrast class is
relevant varies from context to context. The standard version of contextual-
ism claims that the modest contrast class is relevant in everyday contexts,
and the extreme contrast class is not relevant in everyday contexts but is
relevant in some philosophical contexts.
© The Author Journal compilation © The Editors of
The Philosophical Quarterly
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