Debunking, Epistemic Achievement, and Undermining Defeat

American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (1):43-60 (2022)
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Abstract

Several anti-debunkers have argued that evolutionary explanations of our moral beliefs fail to meet a necessary condition on undermining defeat called modal security. They conclude that evolution, therefore, does not debunk our moral beliefs. This article shows that modal security is false if knowledge is virtuous achievement. New information can undermine a given belief without providing reason to doubt that that belief is sensitive or safe. This leads to a novel conception of undermining defeat, and it shows that successful debunking of moral realism is possible.

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Michael Klenk
Delft University of Technology

Citations of this work

Moral realism, disagreement, and conceptual ethics.Michael Klenk - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (9):2884-2901.
Pragmatism and Moral Objectivity.Michael Klenk - 2021 - European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 13 (2).

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References found in this work

Knowledge and its limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Being Realistic About Reasons.Thomas Scanlon - 2014 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moral realism: a defence.Russ Shafer-Landau - 2003 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism.David Enoch - 2011 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.

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