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Problems for Moral Debunkers: On the Logic and Limits of Empirically Informed Ethics, written by Peter Königs

In: International Journal for the Study of Skepticism
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Olle Risberg Department of Philosophy, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, Sweden

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Peter Königs, Problems for Moral Debunkers: On the Logic and Limits of Empirically Informed Ethics. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, 2022. Pp. viii + 145. isbn: 9783110750171.

Debunking arguments have a long history in philosophy. The characteristic feature of such arguments is that they invoke empirical claims about the origin of some beliefs to raise doubts about their justification. Thrasymachus’s claim in Plato’s Republic that “justice is nothing but the advantage of the stronger” can be understood along these lines—the idea would be that we believe that certain acts are just only because it is in the interest of those in power that we hold those beliefs—and historical figures such as Nietzsche and Freud have also offered debunking arguments concerning our beliefs about morality and religion.

In contemporary discussions, debunking arguments are especially prominent in ethics and metaethics. One strategy is associated with utilitarians like Peter Singer and Joshua Greene, who have questioned the reliability of moral intuitions that appear to favor deontology by appeal to psychological claims about how those intuitions are formed, based for example on fMRI scans and reaction time data. On one such idea, deontological intuitions are unreliable because they tend to be ‘emotionally’ grounded, while verdicts that favor utilitarianism are to a larger extent ‘cognitively’ grounded and hence more trustworthy. Another influential line of argument has been presented by moral anti-realists such as Richard Joyce and Sharon Street, who argue that facts about the evolutionary origins of our moral beliefs suggest that it would be a sheer coincidence if those beliefs were to correspond to objective moral truths.

Peter Königs’s book Problems for Moral Debunkers is a contribution to the discussion of debunking arguments in moral philosophy. While the bulk of the book focuses on Singer’s and Greene’s attempts to debunk deontological intuitions (Chapters 2–5), there are also two chapters dedicated to Street’s and Joyce’s metaethical debunking projects (Chapters 6 and 7, respectively).Königs’s conclusions are largely negative: for various reasons, he suggests that all these debunking arguments fail to accomplish what their proponents have taken them to accomplish.

A recurring theme in the book, which Königs sees as its most important one (18, 128), concerns what he calls the backfiring problem. As he puts it, the problem is that “each of the moral debunking arguments under consideration [in the book] backfires in the sense that it challenges, in one way or other, the debunker’s own preferred moral or metaethical position” (18). Thus, according to Königs, Greene’s and Singer’s arguments against the reliability of deontological intuitions also threaten to undermine the justification of various judgments that they take to favor utilitarianism; Street’s debunking argument against moral realism also poses problems for her favored metanormative view (a form of Humean constructivism, according to which there are normative truths that depend on our attitudes); and Joyce’s version of the debunking challenge also threatens his moral fictionalist view that we have prudential reasons to engage in moral discourse as a kind of fiction, because the challenge is generalizable to our prudential beliefs.

The book thus lives up to its name, as it primarily focuses on problems for moral debunkers rather than on problems for moral debunking arguments as such. To illustrate, let us suppose that Königs is right that the Singer-Greene arguments against the reliability of deontological intuitions backfire in the sense that they also raise doubts about the reliability of various utilitarian intuitions. Clearly, this result does not in and of itself indicate that the arguments are unsound, that their premises are implausible, or that they are flawed in some other way. Rather, it might simply be the truth that both deontological and utilitarian intuitions are unreliable—as for example virtue theorists and particularists would be happy to learn—and Königs does not present any direct reasons to doubt that this is indeed the truth. Similar things can be said about his discussions of Street’s and Joyce’s arguments. Even if those arguments do indeed generalize so as to spell trouble for constructivism and fictionalism, that need not indicate that the arguments are flawed. It might instead be constructivism and fictionalism that are flawed, and again Königs does not directly address that possibility. In this way, many of Königs’s main claims about debunking arguments are ‘dialectical’, as they focus on what someone who endorses a certain debunking argument can consistently or plausibly say about other philosophical questions. Indeed, the “narrative arch” of the whole book is said to “[revolve] around the dialectical implications of debunking arguments in ethics” (19).

Dialectical points of this kind are not philosophically insignificant. One thing they can do is to help reveal that the commitments of some influential philosophers—e.g., Greene, Singer, Street, or Joyce—do not form coherent wholes. Given the popular methodological idea that we should strive for philosophical views which are in ‘reflective equilibrium’, that would in turn indicate that we should not take on board the commitments of these philosophers. Nonetheless, there are also obvious limitations to what purely dialectical points of this kind can teach us, and the book does not generally pay close attention to the non-dialectical epistemological issues that debunking arguments raise. To mention just a few examples: which epistemic principles should these arguments be taken to rely on, and how are those principles best supported? How should the relevant notion of a coincidence be understood, and why should the debunkers’ empirical conjectures be taken to indicate that it would be a sheer coincidence if the targeted moral beliefs were to correspond to the moral truths? And how (if at all) can debunkers respond to the increasingly influential objection that their arguments are self-defeating, in the sense that they generate skepticism also about the epistemic premises that they rely on? Readers who are interested in these issues will have to look elsewhere.

The book does not exclusively focus on issues related to the backfiring problem. Another central theme concerns what Königs calls the “scope problem,” which he thinks besets debunking arguments of deontological intuitions in particular. The worry here is that the even if the arguments that utilitarians have presented successfully debunk the particular deontological intuitions that they target—e.g., those that suggest that it is wrong to push a person in front of a trolley in order to save a greater number of people—they fall short of debunking all the intuitions and arguments that speak in favor of deontology. This point is compelling as far as it goes: not every belief that appears to favor deontology has been empirically studied by Greene, Singer, or other utilitarians, so they cannot yet reasonably claim to have debunked all such beliefs. However, Königs does not here make any suggestion to the effect that it would for principled reasons be impossible to debunk all such beliefs—his point is just that the arguments that utilitarians have actually presented fall far short of doing so. Proponents of the utilitarian debunking project could thus respond to his arguments by simply conceding that they have not yet debunked all considerations that seem to favor deontological theories. If they have managed to debunk at least a subset of them, that is itself a philosophical achievement, and given enough time and resources they may (for everything Königs says) be able to debunk the remaining ones as well.

I will end by discussing some surprising claims that Königs makes about debunking arguments that appeal to ‘higher-order evidence’. Königs appears to adopt a standard characterization of the distinction between higher-order evidence (or “hoe”) and first-order evidence (or “foe”), on which (roughly) one’s foe consists in considerations that indicate that a given proposition is true or false, whereas one’s hoe consists in evidence that is, in relevant ways, “about” one’s foe (cf. p. 10). To illustrate, suppose a thinker believes that next year will be rainier than usual on the basis of some weather data but is then told by an expert meteorologist that the data does not support her belief. In this case, the weather data constitutes foe while the expert’s testimony constitutes hoe, as it indicates that the thinker has not assessed her foe correctly. Many epistemologists also think that hoe can defeat the justification of one’s first-order beliefs (this is commonly called ‘higher-order defeat’). While the details are both complicated and controversial, the general idea is that the testimony provided by the expert seems not just to a be a reason for the thinker to adjust her (higher- order) belief about which beliefs the weather data support—it also seems to be a reason for her to become less confident in her (first-order) belief about next year being rainier than usual, and perhaps even to abandon that belief altogether.

In current discussions of debunking arguments and related epistemological issues, the concepts of higher-order evidence and higher-order defeat are often taken to be central (for illustrations, see, e.g., the essays in Skipper & Steglich-Petersen 2019 and Klenk 2020). Königs, however, voices serious misgivings about debunking arguments that rely on higher- order defeat. While he does so in connection with one of the arguments that Greene and Singer have presented, which seeks to show that “deontological theory is the product of confabulatory post hoc rationalization” (73), the concerns he raises are clearly meant to apply more generally and not just to that particular argument. According to Königs, “[d]ebunking arguments that rely on higher-order defeat are objectionably sloppy and therefore… should not be used in an academic setting” (90). He also thinks that they “should not be permitted in philosophical debate” (129). These strong claims are based on the contention that “academic debate is committed to a higher standard of precision” (84) than what such arguments manage to meet. His reasoning here is worth quoting at some length:

This standard [i.e., the one to which academic debate is committed] rules out critiques that rely on higher-order evidence, which—while not fallacious—typically yield only an approximate assessment of the first-order evidence. When criticizing some doctrine, one must engage with the first-order evidence that has been adduced in support of this doctrine rather than speculate about what is ‘probably’ the case. It does not suffice to invoke higher-order evidence to the effect that there is probably no reason to expect the first-order evidence to actually support the doctrine. The argument from confabulation violates this standard. It relies entirely on higher-order evidence and refuses to even consider the arguments that deontologists have appealed to to defend deontology. (84)

Königs also recommends utilitarians to engage with the existing arguments for deontology “in the standard way (that is, by engaging with the first-order evidence)” rather than arguing from higher-order evidence (88–89).

There are many things to say about these claims. One is that the distinction between engaging with the first-order evidence and presenting higher-order evidence is much less clearcut than what is sometimes assumed. One ‘standard’ way to engage with an argument for deontology, I take it, is to present an objection that targets the truth of one the argument’s premises—for example, by producing a counter-example to a principle that the argument invokes. If one succeeds in doing so, one has shown that a particular argument for deontology is unsound. Thus, by successfully engaging with the foe in this way, one also learns something about what it supports (or fails to support); namely, that it does not constitute a sound argument for deontology. And recall that what characterizes hoe is precisely that it is evidence about one’s foe. Thus, given this common definition of hoe, engaging with the foe ‘in the standard way’ often or always also amounts to presenting hoe that concerns it. (For related discussion regarding the interaction between ‘rebutting’ and ‘undermining’ defeat, see also Pryor 2013: sect. 2.)

More importantly, though, the distinction between arguments that rely on higher-order defeat and those that rely on other forms of defeat is clearly orthogonal to the distinction between sloppy arguments and non-sloppy arguments. Sloppy arguments may be either foe- or hoe-based, as may non-sloppy ones—the two distinctions do not even seem to approximately line up with each other. Thus, even if Königs’s concerns about sloppiness and lack of precision are warranted, it is hard to see how such concerns could motivate a general ban on hoe-based arguments in particular from academic discourse.1 A more promising proposal would be that an argument is problematic if it is sloppy or imprecise—whether or not it involves foe or hoe—and that some debunking arguments that utilitarians have presented are problematic for this reason. This proposal would allow Königs’s criticism of Greene’s and Singer’s argument from confabulation to remain mostly intact, and it does not have the radical upshot that hoe-based arguments in general should be disallowed in philosophical debate.2

References

  • Klenk, M. (ed.). 2020. Higher-Order Evidence and Moral Epistemology. New York: Routledge.

  • Pryor, J. 2013. “Problems for Credulism.” In C. Tucker (ed.), Seemings and Justification: New Essays on Dogmatism and Phenomenal Conservatism, 89132. New York: Oxford University Press.

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  • Skipper, M. & Steglich-Petersen, A. (eds.). 2019. Higher-Order Evidence: New Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1

Königs typically puts his points about hoe-based arguments using generics (e.g., “debunking arguments that rely on higher-order defeat are objectionably sloppy” [90]) rather than the corresponding universal generalizations (e.g., “all debunking arguments that rely on higher-order defeat are objectionably sloppy”), and he acknowledges in a footnote that there are possible situations in which debunking arguments that rely on higher-order defeat need not have approximate conclusions (86–87 n. 220). However, what I am questioning here is the plausibility not just of the relevant universal generalizations about hoe-based arguments but also of the corresponding generics.

2

For helpful comments, I am thankful to Folke Tersman. The work on this review was supported by Grant 2020–01955 from the Swedish Research Council and by Grant P23-0506 from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.

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