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Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Think No Evil: Ethics and the Appeal to Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Paul Lauritzen
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Abstract

This essay distinguishes three types of appeals to experience in ethics, identifies problems with appealing to experience, and argues that appeals to experience must be open to critical assessment, if experientially-based arguments are to be useful. Unless competing and potentially irreconcilable experiences can be assessed and adjudicated, experientially-based arguments will be problematic. The paper recommends thinking of the appeal to experience as a kind of story telling to be evaluated as other stories are.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , Spring 1997 , pp. 83 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by Hypatia, Inc.

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