Abstract
Many philosophers think that we can identify, e.g., a weather expert by checking if she has a track record of making accurate weather predictions but that there isn’t an analogous way for laypeople to verify the judgement of a putative moral expert. The weather is an independent check for weather expertise but there is no independent check for moral expertise, and the only way for laypeople to identify moral experts is to engage in first-order moral reasoning of one’s own. But if one can do that, one would not need to rely on a moral expert in the first place. This paper provides an account of Feedback as an independent check for moral expertise in the form of certain positive and negative changes in the lives of advisees after they started acting in accordance with an advisor’s advice whilst nothing else of significance changed in their lives in that period. Given our folk background theories, and some specific information about the advisee’s situation, Feedback suggests that the advisor’s advice was correct. Laypeople would identify moral experts by inferring that the best explanation of the correctness of the advisor’s advice in a high proportion of cases in which she dispensed advice is that the advisor had moral knowledge. Identifying moral experts in this way involves the use of some moral reasoning of one’s own but it is too elementary to make moral experts redundant.
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Notes
Exceptions: Sliwa (2012) rejects IP on the grounds that the requirement for an independent check is simply too strong because the lack of an independent check would make it impossible to assess the reliability of one’s own moral judgement as well. Driver (2013) argues that we can identify moral experts the way we identify an aesthetic expert, by how convincing we find a putative aesthetic expert’s explanation of their judgment. I will not discuss these views in this paper.
To be fair, McGrath (and most other philosophers who have written on this subject) seems to be concerned only with Hard Cases in her formulation of IP which she uses to motivate an argument for moral scepticism. However, no argument is provided for the idea that IP is, or should be, limited to Hard Cases.
The view defended here is influenced in certain important ways by Railton’s early work on moral realism.
Of course, it is possible to construe both the cases in such a way that the relevant agents’ prudential benefits outweigh the prudential costs. However, my own construal is also plausible and both the vignettes make the general point that often enough moral and prudential good come apart.
See, for example, Howell and Hills for their use of “rabbi” and “priest” in their discussions of moral experts.
The notion of a universal sage is questionable because the human mind is most probably not able to grasp all the fine details of every context in which a moral judgement is to be made. Without such familiarity, one would not know how to apply or use even a very sophisticated moral theory (unless the most sophisticated theory will somehow include those contextual details).
A nosey and gossipy stranger could access the relevant information about others, be morally insightful and keen to dispense advice, but the featured moral experts in my illustrative cases are acquaintances of the advisees because typically it is only one’s acquaintances who know one’s personal details well, and in any case, one is unlikely to accept or act upon the unsolicited advice of strangers.
Some readers might be curious here about the identity of the assessors. They might ask: Who are these people who have access to such personal details about the lives of others? If so, please note the contextual setting of the examples: it’s a relatively traditional community that is closely knit and less private than a typical modern or individualistic one.
Indeed, it is with this assumption in the background that some of the most pressing questions and views in the history of ethics or practical philosophy make sense. Consider, for example, Glaucon’s story about Gyges’s ring that launches the question “Why should one be moral?” in moral philosophy, and the Greek moralists’ attempt to show that moral virtues are in fact part of an agent’s interests [see Irwin (1995) for this traditional interpretation of the Greek moralists, and Annas (1995) for an alternative one]. And more recently, almost all theories of practical reason make that assumption, including rational egoism, on which what we have most reason to do is what is in our self-interest, or impartialist theories on which what we have most reason to do takes into account all concerned, and Sidgwick’s “dualism of practical reason” where what’s prudentially rational to do and what is morally rational to do are two equally valid perspectives on a single situation.
I am just going to assume without argument that mere belief or merely true belief are possible alternative explanations. A standard justification provided by internalists in the philosophy of mind refers to the causal efficacy of narrow rather than broad mental states.
In debates on moral explanations, the notion of supervenience is often invoked to undermine the explanatory value of moral properties. There isn’t a straightforward application of that argument against moral explanation to RESPONSE, since the relevant explanans is the proposition that the advisor had a certain mental state (knowledge) rather than a proposition about a moral property of the state of affairs to be explained, and it is extremely controversial (and not directly relevant to the current discussion) whether supervenience suggests that it is the physical realizers of mental states rather than mental states themselves that have explanatory value. However, Audi suggests that in addition to an ontological dependence on the base properties, moral properties also have an epistemic dependence on them: “knowing a particular to have a moral property depends on knowing it to have one or more of a certain range of base properties” (1997: 118). One might extend this idea in support of the claim that the moral knowledge of the advisor can be wholly replaced by her non-moral knowledge as the explanans in RESPONSE. But this idea depends on an inferentialist account of moral knowledge, which is highly implausible. And even assuming its plausibility does not undermine RESPONSE, for being practical in nature the advice would need to be based on, or derived from, at least some normative knowledge rather than entirely descriptive knowledge.
Peter Railton relies on scholarly historical research to make a similar point: “…the discontent of long-suffering groups often is galvanized into action only when customary entitlements are threatened or denied…genuine change may result from these restorative efforts” (1986, ftnt 33). An interesting treatment of the idea is the subject of at least two Bollywood films: Arth (1982) and English Vinglish (2012).
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Acknowledgements
I’m deeply indebted to all the following philosophers for detailed discussions and comments on drafts of this paper: Sarah Buss, Roger Crisp, David Enoch, Maria Lasonen, Hallvard Lillehammer, Ishani Maitra, Peter Railton, Rob Shaver and Timothy Williamson.
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Riaz, A. How to Identify Moral Experts. J Ethics 25, 123–136 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-020-09338-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-020-09338-y