Equal Standing and Proper Reliance on Others
Theoria 86 (6):821-425 (
2020)
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Abstract
According to a traditional account, moral cognition is an achievement
gained over time by sharing a practice under the guidance and the
example of the wise, in analogy with craft and apprenticeship. This
model captures an important feature of practical reason, that is, its
incompleteness, and highlights our dependence on others in obtaining
moral knowledge, coherently with the socially extended mind agenda
and recent findings in empirical psychology. Insofar as it accords to
exemplars decisive authority to determine the standard of correctness
for moral cognition, however, the model does not offer protection against
arbitrariness and discrimination. The article argues that to understand
the socially distributed nature of practical knowledge, we have to discard
the notion of exemplars and reconceive of others as peers, i.e. having
equal normative standing. This claim allows us to revisit the conception
of autonomy as key to distributed practical knowledge. While autonomy
does not amount to self-sufficiency and self-reliance, it does demand
independence of judgment and stands in contrast to servility,
submission, and other sorts of defective ways of relying on others. The
requirement of equal standing provides the basis or distinguishing between proper and improper reliance on others.