Do framing effects make moral intuitions unreliable?

Philosophical Psychology 29 (1):1-22 (2016)
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Abstract

I address Sinnott-Armstrong's argument that evidence of framing effects in moral psychology shows that moral intuitions are unreliable and therefore not noninferentially justified. I begin by discussing what it is to be epistemically unreliable and clarify how framing effects render moral intuitions unreliable. This analysis calls for a modification of Sinnott-Armstrong's argument if it is to remain valid. In particular, he must claim that framing is sufficiently likely to determine the content of moral intuitions. I then re-examine the evidence which is supposed to support this claim. In doing so, I provide a novel suggestion for how to analyze the reliability of intuitions in empirical studies. Analysis of the evidence suggests that moral intuitions subject to framing effects are in fact much more reliable than perhaps was thought, and that Sinnott-Armstrong has not succeeded in showing that noninferential justification has been defeated.

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Joanna Demaree-Cotton
Oxford University

Citations of this work

Philosophy Within its Proper Bounds.Edouard Machery - 2017 - Oxford University Press.
Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind.Joshua May - 2018 - Oxford University Press.
Debunking Arguments in Ethics.Hanno Sauer - 2018 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
How to Debunk Moral Beliefs.Victor Kumar & Joshua May - 2019 - In Jussi Suikkanen & Antti Kauppinen (eds.), Methodology and Moral Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 25-48.

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