A defense of moral skepticism

I really hope that the discussion which follows has the audience clinging to their keyboards. Undeniably, my challenger has borrowed and fashioned an argument created by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong—an argument which diminishes ethical knowledge to nothing more than unjustified skepticism derived from non-inferential epistemology. I find this argument unconditionally unpersuasive and relatively distressing. Accordingly, I would like to lure attention to premise 2. Specifically, ‘No person T is ever noninferentially justified in believing any moral claim. ’ The declaration being made here, “Knowledge of what is ethical cannot be accomplished unless it is consequential by means of warranted justification,” is primarily founded upon a conflation and misappropriation of moral ontology and moral epistemology. Thus, I find this premise to be demonstrably fallacious for a multitude of reasons. But then again, is this proposition comprehensive? First of all: I don’t perceive any reason to accept as true that a coherent human being with appropriately operational cognitive aptitudes wouldn’t be vindicated believing in the claim it is unconditionally immoral to torture and murder small children or babies merely for one's enjoyment. An idiosyncrasy may be drawn about what precisely makes this action immoral and how we know this action is immoral; consequently, there is still no discrepancy that it is, in principle, immoral. Fundamentally, my opponent must create an argument that one way or another demonstrates the reasonableness of doubting knowledge of gratuitously immoral behaviour as unwarranted, i. e. , torturing and killing small children; rather, than merely assert that our moral intuitions aren’t warranted unless they rest on inferential premisses. Conversely, knowledge of what is moral can justifiably rest on perceptive premisses; rather, than inferential premises. For example, one need not know atomic theory to be able to perceive water while one need not know how an internal combustion engine works in order to know that your car is running while you are driving it. Matthew Flannagan has written,[1] “Water is constituted by H20, if I2 is true it would follow one cannot tell that the cup of liquid I am drinking is water because of its taste unless I know that H20 tastes that way. But this is clearly false. Medieval men could recognize by taste a cup of water as well as any modern person despite not knowing anything about H20. ” He later writes, “The property of being water is constituted by the property of being H20; as such H20 and water are not ontologically independent. Yet, as noted, for thousands of years people could perceive water, drink it, detect it, and use it etc without knowing anything about atomic theory. Hence, our knowledge of water is independent of our knowledge of H20. Yet this fact does not mean that water is not constituted by H20. Sinnott-Armstrong’s objection therefore fails; it is hard to avoid Craig’s assessment that Sinnott-Armstrong’s critique is “pervaded by the conflation of moral ontology with moral epistemology. ” Although it's sufficient to simply point out that P2 of my opponent's argument is demonstrably false, I'd like to offer an a fortiori argument by defending the rationality of inferring warranted beliefs from our noninferential moral experience. Any argument against the reliability of moral experience can be applied equally to sense experience. Suppose that one day you are taking a walk and you clearly perceive a tree to be in front of you. Are you justified in believing that there likely is a tree in front of you? Yes, for your sense experiences are prima facie justified. Of course, you could be wrong, but there's no good reason to think you are. The exact same scenario is true with moral experience. Suppose one forms the belief that it is wrong to lynch somebody based on their skin color. Are you justified in believing that it's actually wrong? Yes, for your moral experiences, like your sensory experiences, are prima facie justified. Any argument that one could use against trusting our moral experiences can be equally used against sense experience. There is no essential difference between the two. One might retort, “But we can empirically confirm sense experience, while our moral experience cannot be empirically confirmed. ” This response begs the question, for the very idea of attempting to empirically justifying our sense experience assumes that our sense experiences are reliable, since it assumes that we are accurately perceiving what is in fact happening. The idea, of course, is that our experiences are prima facie justified. That is, they have a defeasible epistemic status. While our sense or moral experiences could be wrong (Say, it was a dark and foggy day), the proper thing to do is to assume them to be reliable until we have an adequate defeater for their reliability. We should not do is approach them with an ipso facto standard of skepticism, less we regress into complete agnosticism. It seems to me that my challenger has generated a thought-provoking argument that draws a very stark inference, i. e. , the denial of moral axioms. Nonetheless, the declaration of the argument is false as I have pointed out that knowledge of what constitutes moral behavior isn’t essential to inferential warrant and justification—beliefs can be understood as properly basic self-evident axioms. To suppose otherwise, as my opponent has done, is to participate in committing a category error, whereby, one conflates and misappropriates ontology with epistemology. Bibliography: [1] . http://www.mandm.org.nz...