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MORAL EXPERTISE: JUDGMENT, PRACTICE, AND ANALYSIS*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2014

Julia Driver
Julia Driver*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Washington University, St. Louis
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Abstract

This essay defends moral expertise against the skeptical considerations raised by Gilbert Ryle and others. The core of the essay articulates an account of moral expertise that draws on work on expertise in empirical moral psychology, and develops an analogy between moral expertise and linguistic expertise. The account holds that expertise is contrastive, so that a person is an expert relative to a particular contrast. Further, expertise is domain specific and characterized by “automatic” behavior and judgment. Some disagreements in the literature regarding moral expertise are diagnosed as being due to failures to adequately distinguish different ways in which someone can be a moral expert. For example, expertise in action does not imply expertise in judgment or analysis.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 30 , Issue 1-2 , January 2013 , pp. 280 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2013 

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was presented at a Workshop on Moral Expertise presented at Princeton University, April, 2011, organized by Sarah McGrath and David Estlund. I thank the organizers and other participants at the workshop as well as the other contributors to this volume for their very helpful feedback on the paper, and particularly Jamie Dreier for his excellent written comments.

References

1 Ryle, Gilbert, “On Forgetting the Difference Between Right and Wrong,” in Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. Melden, A. I. (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1957)Google Scholar.

2 Eric Wiland made this point during the Workshop on Moral Expertise held at Princeton University, April 2011.

3 Singer, Peter, “Moral Experts,” Analysis 32, no. 6 (1972): 115–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 I discuss this issue of trust more fully in “Autonomy and the Asymmetry Problem for Moral Expertise,” Philosophical Studies 128 (2006): 619–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Hills, Alison, “Moral Testimony and Moral Epistemology,” Ethics 120 (2009): 94–127CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Szabados, Béla, “On Moral Expertise,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8 (1978): 117–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Narvaez, Darcia and Lapsley, Daniel K., “The Psychological Foundations of Everyday Morality and Moral Expertise,” in Character Psychology and Character Education, ed. Lapsley, D. and Power, C., (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 140–65Google Scholar.

8 This is, of course, controversial. See, for example, Prinz, Jesse's work on innateness; such as “Is Morality Innate?” in Moral Psychology, Vol. I, edited by Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008): 367–406Google Scholar.

9 Mikhail, John, “Moral Grammar: Theory, Evidence, and the Future,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11 (2007): 143–52CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Mikhail, also discusses this in depth inElements of Moral Cognition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Ibid.

11 Rawls, Johnfamously developed the analogy between morality and language in hisTheory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar. Other writers, besides Mikhail, who develop the comparison are Erica Roedder and Gilbert Harman, “Moral Grammar,” (unpublished manuscript); and Dwyer, Susan, Huebner, Bryce, and Hauser, Marc, “The Linguistic Analogy: Motivations, Results, and Speculations,” Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (2010): 486–510CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. It is worth noting that even if there is no UMG, the analogy can still be productive. The point of raising UMG is simply to provide a plausible account of why we might have underlying dispositions to think in moral terms.

12 Singer, “Moral Experts,” 117.

13 Eagleman, David, Incognito (New York: Random House, 2011), 57 ffGoogle Scholar.

14 Kook, Hyung Joon and Novak, Gordon S. Jr., “Representation of Models for Expert Problem Solving in Physics,” IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 3, no. 1 (1991): 48–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Ibid. They also discuss ways in which machine problem solvers can also deploy models.

16 Narvaez and Lapsley, “The Psychological Foundations of Everyday Morality and Moral Expertise,” 143.

17 See my “Dubious Virtue Psychology” in Uneasy Virtue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 42–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Bentham, makes this quite explicit inThe Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1948), 31Google Scholar, when, after describing the many different parameters along which pleasure and pain are measured to determine the moral correctness of an action or policy he states: “It is not to be expected that this process should be strictly pursued previously to every moral judgment, or to every legislative or judicial operation.”

19 Narvaez and Lapsley, “The Psychological Foundations of Everyday Morality and Moral Expertise,” 141.

20 Ibid.

21 I discuss this in “Autonomy and the Asymmetry Problem for Moral Expertise.”

22 See Hooker, Brad's “Moral Expertise” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Craig, Edward (New York: Routledge, 1998): 510Google Scholar.

23 Sanford, Anthony J. and Sturt, Patrick, “Depth Processing in Language Comprehension: Not Noticing the Evidence,” Trends in Cognitive Science 6 (2002): 384CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

24 More distinctions are possible. There is the expert actor, the expert deliberator, the expert advisor, as well as the metamoral expert.

25 Pinker, Steven, The Language Instinct (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998)Google Scholar.

26 Langendoen, D. Terence, “On a Class of Not Ungrammatical Constructions,” Journal of Linguistics 18, no. 1 (March 1982), 107CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other possibilities are: “… just between you and I …”; “There are frogs in the pond.” These are discussed in Sobin, Nicolas, “An Acceptable Ungrammatical Construction,” in The Reality of Linguistic Rules, ed. Lima, Susan D., et al. (Philadelphia: John Benjamin, 1994): 51–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Note that this is itself distinct from the issue of truth. If Mackie is right then sentences expressing moral claims can be well formed even though all of them are false. What is important is simply that there is some standard of assessment. If not “true/false,” then “appropriate/inappropriate” would be fine.

28 Note that the particular form of the example is not important. If one does not like this one, or agree with its use, just pick another.

29 Hume, David, Selected Essays, edited by Copley, Stephen and Edgar, Andrew (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 133–53Google Scholar.

30 Narvaez and Lapsley, “The Psychological Foundations of Everyday Morality and Moral Expertise,”150–51.

31 McDowell, John, “Virtue and Reason,” The Monist 62 (1979): 331–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Dretske, Fred, Seeing and Knowing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar.