Online research in philosophy

Most philosophers think that there is an asymmetry between relying on moral testimony and relying on non-moral testimony: the first is almost always problematic while the second is not. The most common explanation of why there is a problem with relying on moral testimony is that being a good moral agent involves acting with moral understanding, and one cannot have such understanding through moral testimony. Crucially, proponents of this view think there is no analogous problem for reliance on non-moral testimony. (...) And so we arrive at the asymmetry. -/- We argue against this by showing that, (i) just as there are many cases where relying on moral testimony to navigate the world is problematic, there are many cases where relying on non-moral testimony to navigate the world is problematic and (ii) just as there are many cases where relying on non-moral testimony in navigating the world is unproblematic, there are many cases where relying on moral testimony to navigate the moral world is unproblematic. -/- What unites problematic instances of reliance on moral testimony, we argue, is not that they involve moral knowledge, but rather that they involve normal knowledge—knowledge that properly functioning agents are expected to have independently of testimony. (shrink)

This paper provides a defence of the thesis that responsible belief is permissible rather than obliged belief. On the Unique Thesis (UT), our evidence is always such that there is a unique doxastic attitude that we are obliged to have given that evidence, whereas the Permissibility Thesis (PT) denies this. After distinguishing several varieties of UT and PT, we argue that the main arguments that have been levied against PT fail. Next, two arguments in favour of PT are provided. Finally, (...) two motivations for PT are put forward by showing that PT is entailed by two views that are quite popular among theorists working on doxastic responsibility. If the arguments in this paper are successful, we not only have good reasons to prefer PT over UT, but also good reasons to think that the gap between the ways in which we are meant to normatively assess belief and action may not be as wide as has been thought. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend against a number of criticisms an account of slurs, according to which the same semantic content is expressed in the use of a slur (e.g. 'chink') as is expressed in the use of its neutral counterpart (e.g. 'Chinese'), while in addition the use of a slur conventionally implicates a negative, derogatory attitude. Along the way, I criticise competing accounts of the semantics and pragmatics of slurs, namely, Hom's 'combinatorial externalism' and Anderson and Lepore's 'prohibitionism'.