Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances

My dissertation, Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances: An Essay in Moral Epistemology, is about moral intuitions. In it, I address questions about the psychological nature of those intuitions, about what role they should play in justifying moral claims, and about how we might do ethics without them. My advisor was Catherine Wilson. The other readers on my committee were Jonathan Adler, Michael Levin, Jesse Prinz, and David Rosenthal.

Abstract

Recreational killing strikes most of us as wrong. Such "moral appearances," in which the world appears to us to be a certain way, morally speaking, play an important role in moral epistemology, usually in the guise of "moral intuitions."

Moral appearances are natural phenomena, however, and scientists are discovering the psychological mechanisms underlying them. Recent research suggests a "developmental sentimentalist" model of moral appearances, on which moral appearances arise from "moral sentiments," which develop through a process of emotional conditioning.

This naturalistic account of moral appearances allows us to explain our moral appearances without supposing that their intentional content is true. This explanatory irrelevance gives us a prima facie reason to discount moral appearances when deciding which moral claims to endorse. Sensibility theory and rational intuitionism attempt to validate the use of moral appearances in the face of their explanatory irrelevance. I argue that neither theory succeeds.

But it seems that moral appearances cannot be discounted altogether, for it is unclear how we could justify moral claims without them. I introduce the notion of "practical coherence" as a basis for deciding between alternative systems of evaluative claims, including both moral and non-moral claims. I assume that evaluative claims have, as at least one function, the prescription of actions. A system of evaluative claims, containing both moral and non-moral evaluations, is practically coherent to the extent that, given current circumstances, performing the actions prescribed by any one evaluative claim in the system increases, or at least does not reduce, the probability of being able to perform the actions prescribed by other claims in the system. Because the practical relations between different actions is determined by the world, not by what we think, practical coherence ties evaluative systems to the world. A practical coherence-based approach to ethics leads to a multidisciplinary method of ethical inquiry that will allow us to devise more satisfying answers to the central question of ethics: How should one live?