Abstract
In this paper I defend dependence on moral testimony. I show how going defenses of dependence on moral testimony have portrayed it as second-best by centering on how and why it is an important means to overcoming our defects. I argue that once we consider the pervasiveness of moral testimony in the context of intimate relationships, we can see that the value of dependence on moral testimony goes beyond this: it is not only our flaws and limitations that justify our dependence on moral testimony, but also the importance of such dependence for the flourishing of our intimate relationships. On my view, dependence on moral testimony is not simply for those who cannot realize the ideals of moral agency; it is among those ideals.
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Notes
Hume (2000, 84).
My focus here is on the ethics of depending on moral testimony; I acknowledge, however, that there is a whole host of interesting issues surrounding the epistemology and ethics of testifying about moral matters.
Groll and Decker (2014).
The terms “pessimists” and “optimists” are originally from Hopkins (2007), although they are now widely used in the literature on dependence on moral testimony.
Wiland (2014, 176).
Jones (1999, 77–78).
Enoch (2014, 258).
Sliwa (2012, 179). Sliwa’s point in this passage is made in terms of moral advice. But, since Sliwa argues that moral advice and moral testimony are of a kind, what is true of moral advice holds true of moral testimony, mutatis mutandis. While I disagree with Sliwa that moral testimony and moral advice are of a kind (for reasons I present elsewhere), it strikes me that one could make an argument for the non-remedial value of dependence on moral advice that closely parallels the argument that I give for the value of dependence on moral testimony.
The optimist literature on dependence on moral testimony has, up to this point, centered on discrete acts of dependence. I prefer to focus on dispositions for a number of reasons. While a detailed exploration of these reasons is beyond the scope of this paper, I’ll briefly mention them here. For one, it strikes me as immensely plausible that a disposition to depend on moral testimony is a good general strategy for addressing the broader fact that our moral standpoints are often skewed by our epistemic limitations (irrespective of the particulars of these limitations). So, while discrete acts of dependence on moral testimony may be valuable in the ways that optimists have contended that they are, their value may also be derivative on the value of a disposition to depend on moral testimony. Additionally, because of its dispositional nature, my account avoids some theoretical baggage: it does not entail doxastic voluntarism nor does it, strictly speaking, entail moral reasons for belief.
Crisp (2014, 142).
Dependence can be related to trust in other complex and interesting ways that are also valuable in friendship. For example, by depending on our friends we can build or repair trust in the relationships. However, I will restrict my focus here to dependence as an expression of trust, which I take to be one of the key roles that dependence plays in friendship.
Hill (1973, 89).
Kant (1963, 204–205).
Note that even in such cases, the history of reciprocity might still be at work; we often say when we care for friends when they are sick or overburdened something along the lines of, “You’d do it for me.”
Jollimore (2011, 64). On Jollimore’s view, it is because Agnes knows Brad’s character that she is justified in depending on his testimony.
Again, I am operating under the assumption that epistemic conditions are ideal (Agnes knows Brad to be reliable, she doesn’t have any defeaters for believing his testimony, etc.).
McGrath (2011, 115).
Some philosophers have defended the view that address is necessary for a speech act to even count as an instance of testimony, while others have denied this even though they allow that some cases of testimony involve address. My account is consistent with the views of both of these camps: whether address is part of the best analysis of testimony, or whether it is just a contingent feature of a subset of cases of testimony, my view is just that the disposition I have defended is a disposition to depend on testimony that is addressed to you by a friend. Even more specifically, it is a disposition to depend on testimony that is addressed to you in such a way as to function as an invitation to accept the testimony just based on the testifier’s say-so.
Anscombe (1979, 145). We can draw even more fine-grained distinctions than Anscombe does here, by distinguishing between genuinely presenting evidence in an impartial way and presenting evidence with the hope that the person will adopt a particular view.
A helpful reviewer has rightly encouraged me to emphasize this point—that my partner and I share the same non-moral information—in order to focus on the most controversial cases at the heart of the debate about dependence on moral testimony, cases of so-called pure moral dependence. These are cases in which “one in effect treats the person to whom one defers as having purely moral information that one lacks” (McGrath 2009, 322). Pure moral dependence is properly contrasted with impure moral dependence, which involves depending on another’s testimony for both moral and non-moral information. The disposition I’m defending is a disposition to depend on a friend’s testimony when you share the same non-moral information; that is, a disposition involving cases of pure moral dependence.
Parfit (1984).
Jollimore (2011), Keller (2004), and Stroud (2006) have each pressed back against this sort of objection in defending the basic idea that good friendship involves not only good motives and positive feelings directed towards our friends, but also favorable epistemic practices: we must, on their views, endeavor to see our friends and their projects in a good light. The lines of thought pursued by these philosophers lend further support to the spirit of the project I engage in in this section: to show that norms of friendship can conflict with epistemic norms. So how is my view different from the views of these philosophers? For one, their views principally concern how friendship normatively shapes how and what we believe about our friends (their characters and their projects), while my view is about how friendship normatively shapes how we believe about the world. What’s more, recall that up to this point, in keeping with the extant literature on moral testimony, I have defended dependence on moral testimony under the assumption that hearers are justified in thinking that testifiers are in fact reliable. So, all my efforts up to this point defending dependence on moral testimony are consistent with both the affirmation and denial of these philosophers’ views—which is to say that their views, while having affinities with my own, are orthogonal to it. Finally, my view is unique in this camp because of its focus on dispositions, which, as I note in a preceding footnote, allows me to readily head off charges that my view commits me to doxastic voluntarism or to the existence of practical reasons for belief.
Thanks to a reviewer for pointing out that Gendler (2011) makes a similar point in her paper, “On The Epistemic Costs of Implicit Bias”. Gendler, for example, points out that “a perfectly rational decision maker will manifest different behaviors, explicit and implicit, towards members of different races,” even though such behavior is profoundly morally troubling (p. 57).
Buchak (2012, 233).
Preston-Roedder (2013, 35–36) makes this point in defending faith in humanity, which he argues involves charitable, to the point of sometimes being anti-evidential, belief forming practices.
For a more subtle articulation and careful defense of this point, see Jollimore (2011).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank several people for helpful feedback on this article. Special thanks to: an anonymous referee of this journal; Lara Buchak; Nick Casalbore; Cassie Herbert; Anne Langhorne; Maggie Little; Ryan Preston-Roedder; Karen Stohr; and most especially, Mark Murphy.
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McShane, P.J. The non-remedial value of dependence on moral testimony. Philos Stud 175, 629–647 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0885-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0885-6