Proceedings And Addresses
January, 2005 (Volume 78, Issue 3)
Abstracts of Symposium Papers
Testimony and the Transmission of Defeaters:
Some Light from the Law of
Constructive Knowledge, Justifiable Reliance, and Imputed Knowledge
by Agents (V-D)
Christopher R. Green, University of Notre Dame
I model testimony on a principal's use of an agent or employee, and I model doxastic defeat on the way in which the law of constructive knowledge and justifiable reliance describe the normative consequences of certain failures of epistemic duty-fulfillment. On this basis, I criticize what Jennifer Lackey says about whether testifiers' doxastic defeaters pose an equivalent epistemic problem for those who receive their testimony. Because even an agent's constructive knowledge is imputed to a principal, there is good reason to think that testifiers' breaches of epistemic duty (or whatever other improprieties are at stake in doxastic defeaters) pose equivalent problems for both testifiers and the recipients of testimony.
Motivational Internalism: A New Problem (IV-E)
Christian B. Miller, Wake Forest University
The plausibility of various formulations of motivational internalism continues to remain one of the most hotly contested issues in contemporary metaethics and moral psychology. Motivational internalism rightly deserves the attention that it has received in these areas, if for no other reason than together with the Humean theory of motivation it seems to entail the denial of cognitivist theories of moral judgment. Fortunately for the cognitivist, familiar formulations of internalism all turn out to be false, or so at least I argue in the full version of this paper. Surprisingly, however, the most forceful reasons for why this is so are not the ones which have been cited in the literature thus far.
Motives, Conditional Intentions, and Abortions (I-G)
Stephen Munzer, Law, University of California-Los Angeles
This article addresses a range of cases
involving conception in which the parents have various motives, intentions
(conditional or unconditional), and plans. It is mainly concerned with
a class of cases in which couples conceive a child with a conditional
intention to abort. More precisely, the class is marked by a single
motive and a conditional intention. The single motive is to conceive
in order to aid an existing child with leukemia. The conditional intention
is, if prenatal testing reveals that the fetus is not a suitable tissue-type
match for the existing child, each member of the couple intends to have
the fetus aborted. I argue that even if the fetus is not a person, and
even if abortion would spare the child into which the fetus would develop
knowledge of the circumstances of his or her conception (knowledge that
might harm the child), a decision of the parents to abort is at least
morally problematic. The argument turns almost entirely on Kantian,
virtue-ethic, and moral-aesthetic considerations. The
argument is buttressed by contrasting the case just mentioned with other
cases that are in various respects similar or dissimilar to it. The
article also investigates the impact of the basic case and its variations
on suitability of the parents to give informed consent for harvesting
umbilical cord blood or bone marrow from the newborn child. The ultimate
conclusion is that the basic case involving a single motive with a conditional
intention to abort remains at least morally problematic.
The Phenomenal Stance (I-F)
Philip A. Robbins and Anthony I. Jack, Washington University in St. Louis
Human beings are "intuitive dualists" (Bloom 2004). Deep down, we all think that persons cannot be explained in causal-mechanistic terms. This intuition lies at the root of philosophical puzzlement over the explanatory gap between the mental and the physical. The explanatory gap is psychologically real, and it calls for an explanation of its own. In this paper we set out to show how recent work in cognitive neuroscience, and the neuroscience of social cognition in particular, can contribute to such an explanation. Our discussion proceeds in three stages. First, we map Dennett's distinction between the intentional stance and the physical stance onto the distinction between mind reading and folk physics, and use this mapping to locate one source of intuitive dualism. Second, we update Dennett's scheme by adding a new twist: the "phenomenal stance." The phenomenal stance captures an aspect of social cognition that, like folk physics, is relatively independent of mind reading — namely, moral cognition. Third, we argue that the phenomenal stance, like its intentional counterpart, is (in a sense to be explained) opposed to the physical stance, and that the natural antagonism between these stances helps to explain the origin and persistence of the explanatory gap.
A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories
of Value (XI-H)
Sharon A. Street, New York University
Contemporary realist theories of value claim to be compatible with natural science. In this paper, I call this claim into question by arguing that Darwinian considerations pose a dilemma for these theories. The main thrust of my argument is this. Evolutionary forces have played a tremendous role in shaping the content of human evaluative attitudes. The challenge for realist theories of value is to offer some account of the relation between these evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes, on the one hand, and the independent evaluative truths that realism posits, on the other. Realism, I argue, can give no satisfactory account of this relation. On the one hand, it may try to claim that there is no relation between evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes and the evaluative truths that it posits. But this, I argue, leads to the implausible skeptical result that most of our evaluative judgments are off track due to the distorting pressure of Darwinian forces. Realism's other option is to claim that there is a relation between evolutionary influences and the independent evaluative truths that it posits, namely, that natural selection favored ancestors who were able to grasp those truths. But this account, I argue, is unacceptable on scientific grounds. Either way, then, realist theories of value prove unable to accommodate evolutionary explanations of the widespread human tendencies to value some things rather than others.
Moral Influence, Moral Responsibility (VIII-F)
Manuel Vargas, University of San Francisco
The traditional consequentialist model of responsibility holds that praise and blame are forward-looking attempts to influence agents in socially desirable ways. The consensus — and it is virtually unanimous among philosophers of free will and moral responsibility — is that moral influence theories lack the resources to explain the operation and importance of the attitudes and practices characteristic of responsibility. In this paper, I aim to rehabilitate the moral influence approach in the context of the theory of responsibility. I will show how much of the power of traditional criticisms of the moral influence approach rests on (1) an overly simple model of moral influence and (2) tendentious assumptions about what is required of an adequate theory of moral responsibility. Once these impediments are removed, a theory of moral influence emerges as a viable account of individual moral responsibility.