Courts play a key role in deciding on public health controversies, but the legitimacy of judicial intervention remains highly controversial. In this article I suggest that we need to carefully distinguish between different reasons for persistent disagreement in the domain of public health. Adjudicating between public health controversies rooted in factual disagreements allows us to investigate more closely the epistemic capacities of the judicial process. While the critics typically point out the lack of appropriate expertise of judges—in particular with (...) respect to health and public health—we should not move too fast in inferring from this a generalized competence problem. This article offers four reasons for vindicating the importance of judicial intervention in factual disagreements: the relative independence of judges from the political establishment, the judicial commitment to evidence, the specific nature of judicial reasoning and an additional voice for the people in the policy-making process. (shrink)

This paper surveys recent work on moral expertise. Much of that work defends an asymmetry thesis according to which the cognitive deference to expertise that characterizes other areas of inquiry is out of place in morality. There are two reasons why you might think asymmetry holds. The problem might lie in the existence of expertise or in deferring to it. We argue that both types of arguments for asymmetry fail. They appear to be stronger than they (...) are because of their focus on moral expertise regarding all-in judgments about rightness. We reject this emphasis on all-in judgment in favor of an account of moral expertise as typically multi-stranded and domain limited. This account of moral expertise is better able to address the problem of how to identify those who have expertise. It also offers a more nuanced picture of the contrast between accepting a moral claim on one's own and accepting it on testimony. (shrink)

In modern democracies, moral experts play an increasingly important role in law-making. Apart from the question of which competences characterize moral experts, their influence on the legitimacy of democratic procedures must be discussed. On the one hand, the contribution of moral experts promises to improve the quality of decision making. On the other hand, however, moral experts cannot claim to represent the will of the people. In this essay, at first a concept of the moral (...) expert will be sketched which does without the assumption of a privileged access to 'moral truths'. Then a procedural understanding of democratic legitimacy without epistemic components will be defended. Finally there will be a distinction between the purely consultative and the quasi-legislative tasks of ethics committees. Whereas councelling by moral experts does not influence the legitimacy of democratic procedures, giving them quasilegislative functions is connected to risks in this respect. (shrink)

Philosophers and others have questioned whether or not expertise in morality is possible. This debate is not only theoretical, but also affects the perceived legitimacy of clinical ethicists. One argument against moral expertise is that in a pluralistic society with competing moral theories no one can claim expertise regarding what another ought morally to do. There are simply too many reasonable moral values and intuitions that affect theory choice and its application; expertise is (...) epistemically uniform. In this article, we discuss how similar concerns have recently threatened to undermine expertise in medicine and science. In contrast, we argue that the application of values is needed to exercise medical, scientific, and moral expertise. As long as these values are made explicit, worries about a pretense to authority in the context of a liberal democracy are ill-conceived. In conclusion, we argue for an expertise that is epistemically diverse. (shrink)

Philosophers have harbored doubts about the possibility of moral expertise since Plato. I argue that irrespective of whether moral experts exist, identifying who those experts are is insurmountable because of the credentials problem: Moral experts have no need to seek out others’ moral expertise, but moral non-experts lack sufficient knowledge to determine whether the advice provided by a putative moral expert in response to complex moral situations is correct and hence whether (...) an individual is a bone fide expert. Traditional accounts of moral expertise require that moral experts give reliably correct moral advice supported by adequate justification, an account which, I argue, is too lean in allowing for the possibility of a moral expert who is motivationally indifferent to her own moral judgments and advice. Yet even if the proposition that a moral expert is an individual who provides reliably correct moral advice supported by adequate justification and is necessarily motivated by that advice exhausts the necessary and sufficient conditions for moral expertise, this proposition cannot function as an applicable criterion for non-experts to use in appraising would-be experts’ claims to expertise. The credentials problem thus remains unanswered. (shrink)

This collection addresses whether ethicists, like authorities in other fields, can speak as experts in their subject matter. Though ethics consultation is a growing practice in medical contexts, there remain difficult questions about the role of ethicists in professional decision-making. Contributors examine the nature and plausibility of moral expertise, the relationship between character and expertise, the nature and limits of moral authority, how one might become a moral expert, and the trustworthiness of moral testimony. (...) This volume engages with the growing literature in these debates and offers new perspectives from both academics and practitioners. The readings will be of particular interest to bioethicists, clinicians, ethics committees, and students of social epistemology. These new essays promise to advance discussions in the professionalization and accreditation of ethics consultation. (shrink)

We argue that the way in which the concept of expertise is understood and invoked has prevented progress in the debate as to whether moral philosophers can be said to be ‘moral experts’. We offer an account of expertise that draws on the role of tacit knowledge in order to provide a basis upon which the debate can progress. Our analysis consists of three parts. In the first part we highlight two specific problems in the way (...) that the concept of expertise has been invoked in the moral expertise debate, namely the understanding of expertise as an exclusive concept and the conflation of expertise with the idea of ‘authority’. In the second part we suggest an alternative way of approaching the concept of expertise. This is based on Collins and Evans’ sociological theory of expertises. This theory provides a valuable analytical framework for thinking about claims to expertise and for drawing the kinds of distinctions which allow for different kinds of moral expertises and competencies. In the final part, we show how the application of this theory helps to avoid some of the problematic conclusions which theorists have arrived at to date and provides a common platform for debate. Ultimately, it permits the argument to be made that moral philosophers could be considered specialist members of an expert community of moral decision-makers. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Skepticism about ethical expertise has grown common, raising concerns that bioethicists’ roles are inappropriate or depend on something other than expertise in ethics. While these roles may depend on skills other than those of expertise, overlooking the role of expertise in ethics distorts our conception of moral advising. This paper argues that motivations to reject ethical expertise often stem from concerns about elitism: either an intellectualist elitism, where some privileged elite have supposedly special access (...) in virtue of expertise in moral theory; or an authoritarian elitism, where our reliance on experts in ethics risks violation of autonomy and democracy. The paper sketches an anti-elitist conception of ethics expertise in bioethics as continuous with an anti-elitist conception of ethics expertise in common moral practice, undercutting the intellectualism, and then uses this anti-elitist conception to reject arguments that ethical expertise violates autonomy or democracy. An anti-elitist picture of ethical expertise both renders it consistent with our general moral practice and allows us to resist skeptical concerns. (shrink)

Philosophers, particularly moral philosophers, are increasingly being involved in public decision‐making in areas which are seen to raise ethical issues. For example, Dame Mary Warnock chaired the ‘Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilization and Embryology’ in the UK in 1982–4; the Philosophy Department at Auckland was commissioned by the Auckland Regional Authority to report on the ethical aspects of fluoridating the public water supply in 1990; and many of us are serving on ethics committees of various sorts. Not only (...) are philosophers actually being called on or consulted, but many of us would argue that a philosophical contribution in such areas is essential.The involvement of moral philosophers in public policy decisions raises a question of professional ethics, viz, what role should a philosopher's own moral perspective or judgements play in the advice s/he gives, or contribution s/he makes, to public decision‐making on ethical issues. Like most problems in professional ethics, this prompts reflection on the nature of the profession, and in particular on the expertise we take moral philosophy to offer. It also prompts reflection on how processes of public decision making in ethically problematic areas should be understood. I explore these issues in this paper. (shrink)

Philosophers, particularly moral philosophers, are increasingly being involved in public decision‐making in areas which are seen to raise ethical issues. For example, Dame Mary Warnock chaired the ‘Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilization and Embryology’ in the UK in 1982–4; the Philosophy Department at Auckland was commissioned by the Auckland Regional Authority to report on the ethical aspects of fluoridating the public water supply in 1990; and many of us are serving on ethics committees of various sorts. Not only (...) are philosophers actually being called on or consulted, but many of us would argue that a philosophical contribution in such areas is essential.The involvement of moral philosophers in public policy decisions raises a question of professional ethics, viz, what role should a philosopher's own moral perspective or judgements play in the advice s/he gives, or contribution s/he makes, to public decision‐making on ethical issues. Like most problems in professional ethics, this prompts reflection on the nature of the profession, and in particular on the expertise we take moral philosophy to offer. It also prompts reflection on how processes of public decision making in ethically problematic areas should be understood. I explore these issues in this paper. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a lively (bio-)ethical debate on the nature of moral expertise and the concept of moral experts. However, there is currently no common ground concerning most issues. Against this background, this paper has two main goals. First, in more general terms, it examines some of the problems concerning moral expertise and experts, with a special focus on moral advice and testimony. Second, it applies the results in the context of (...) medical ethics, especially in the clinical setting. By situating the debate in the clinical setting, one arrives at some important conclusions to better understand the relevant concepts and vital problems in the general discussion on moral expertise and the requirements of who counts as a moral expert. (shrink)

Not so long ago it was fashionable to claim that it is not the moral philosopher's business to say what things are good or what actions we should perform. This view is succinctly stated by A. J. Ayer:There is a distinction, which is not always sufficiently marked, between the activity of a moralist, who sets out to elaborate a moral code, or to encourage its observance, and that of a moral philosopher, whose concern is not primarily to (...) make moral judgments but to analyse their nature.On the other hand, in direct opposition to this, recently many philosophers actively moralize, in the sense that they argue for substantive normative ethical positions. In doing this they tend to assume but not to explore seriously two views: that the notion of moral expertise is unproblematic, and that moral philosophers in particular are moral experts. My aim in this paper is to promote the exploration of these questions. is logically prior to. Nevertheless I begin with discussing ; for puzzles about expertise in morals naturally emerge when one examines the credentials of candidates for the job. (shrink)

Philosophers, particularly moral philosophers, are increasingly being involved in public decision‐making in areas which are seen to raise ethical issues. For example, Dame Mary Warnock chaired the ‘Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilization and Embryology’ in the UK in 1982–4; the Philosophy Department at Auckland was commissioned by the Auckland Regional Authority to report on the ethical aspects of fluoridating the public water supply in 1990; and many of us are serving on ethics committees of various sorts. Not only (...) are philosophers actually being called on or consulted, but many of us would argue that a philosophical contribution in such areas is essential.The involvement of moral philosophers in public policy decisions raises a question of professional ethics, viz, what role should a philosopher's own moral perspective or judgements play in the advice s/he gives, or contribution s/he makes, to public decision‐making on ethical issues. Like most problems in professional ethics, this prompts reflection on the nature of the profession, and in particular on the expertise we take moral philosophy to offer. It also prompts reflection on how processes of public decision making in ethically problematic areas should be understood. I explore these issues in this paper. (shrink)

Using the bench trial of Colorado’s Amendment 2 as an example, this article focuses on the more general question of expert testimony in moral philosophy. It argues that there is indeed expertise in moral philosophy but argues against admitting such expert testimony in cases dealing with what John Rawls terms “constitutional essentials” and ‘matters of basic justice.” Developing the idea of public reason inherent in the Rawlsian concept of political liberalism, the article argues that philosophers can and (...) should speak out on public issues, if they do so with due respect for certain restrictions, but that they should not serve as expert witnesses on core constitutional questions, since doing so suggests that they claim a type of authority that would require fellow citizens to defer to their views. Such claims to authority in basic ethical matters threaten the mutual respect for divergent comprehensive doctrines that lies at the core of political liberalism. Philosophers have a duty to serve the public good, and they perform this service in fruitful ways. But they should refuse a public role that appears incompatible with equal respect for the committed ethical searching of their fellow citizens. (shrink)

Discussions of the nature or possibility of moral expertise have largely proceeded in atheoretical terms, with little attention paid to whether moral expertise depends on theoretical knowledge of morality. Here I argue that moral expertise is more theory-dependent than is commonly recognized: Moral expertise consists, at least in part, in knowledge of the correct or best moral theory, and second, that knowledge of moral theory is essential to moral experts (...) dispensing expert counsel to non-experts. Moral experts would not be moral experts absent knowledge of moral theory, nor could they play the testimonial role we would expect them to play in moral inquiry and deliberation absent such knowledge. (shrink)

Not so long ago it was fashionable to claim that it is not the moral philosopher's business to say what things are good or what actions we should perform. This view is succinctly stated by A. J. Ayer:There is a distinction, which is not always sufficiently marked, between the activity of a moralist, who sets out to elaborate a moral code, or to encourage its observance, and that of a moral philosopher, whose concern is not primarily to (...) make moral judgments but to analyse their nature.On the other hand, in direct opposition to this, recently many philosophers actively moralize, in the sense that they argue for substantive normative ethical positions. In doing this they tend to assume but not to explore seriously two views: that the notion of moral expertise is unproblematic, and that moral philosophers in particular are moral experts. My aim in this paper is to promote the exploration of these questions. is logically prior to. Nevertheless I begin with discussing ; for puzzles about expertise in morals naturally emerge when one examines the credentials of candidates for the job. (shrink)

Considerable attention in bioethics has been devoted to moral expertise and its implications for handling applied moral problems. The existence and nature of moral expertise has been a contested topic, and particularly, whether philosophers are moral experts. In this study, we put the question of philosophers’ moral expertise in a wider context, utilizing a novel and global study among 4,087 philosophers from 96 countries. We find that despite the skepticism in recent literature, (...) the vast majority of philosophers do believe in moral expertise and in the contribution of philosophical training and experience to its acquisition. Yet, they still differ on what philosophers’ moral expertise consists of. While they widely accept that philosophers possess superior analytic abilities regarding moral matters, they diverge on whether they also possess improved ability to judge moral problems. Nonetheless, most philosophers in our sample believe that philosophers possess an improved ability to both analyze and judge moral problems and that they commonly see these two capacities as going hand in hand. We also point at significant associations between personal and professional attributes and philosophers’ beliefs, such as age, working in the field of moral philosophy, public involvement, and association with the analytic tradition. We discuss the implications of these findings for the debate about moral expertise. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a neglected puzzle for the moral realist. I then canvass some potential responses. Although I endorse one response as the most promising of those I survey, my primary goal is to make vivid how formidable the puzzle is, as opposed to offering a definitive solution.

There seem to be two clearly-defined camps in the debate over the problem of moral expertise. On the one hand are the “Professionals”, who reject the possibility entirely, usually because of the intractable diversity of ethical beliefs. On the other hand are the “Ethicists”, who criticise the Professionals for merely stipulating science as the most appropriate paradigm for discussions of expertise. While the subject matter and methodology of good ethical thinking is certainly different from that of good (...) clinical thinking, they argue, this is no reason for rejecting the possibility of a distinctive kind of expertise in ethics, usually based on the idea of good justification. I want to argue that both are incorrect, partly because of the reasons given by one group against the other, but more importantly because both neglect what is most distinctive about ethics: that it is personal in a very specific way, without collapsing into relativism. (shrink)

The phenomenon of persistent ethical disagreement is often cited in connection with the question of whether there is any ‘‘absolute’’ morality, or whether, instead, morality is in some sense merely ‘‘a matter of personal opinion’’. Citing disagreement, many people who hold strong views about controversial issues such as the permissibility of abortion, eating meat, or the death penalty deny that these views are anything more than ‘‘personal beliefs’’. But while there might be inconsistencies lurking in this position, it is not (...) obviously at fault for according the facts about disagreement some epistemic weight. This paper addresses the question of whether and to what extent moral disagreement undermines moral knowledge. The most familiar arguments from disagreement in the literature purport to establish conclusions about the metaphysics of morality: that there are no moral facts, or that there are no moral properties, or that the moral facts are relative rather than absolute. Of course, the conclusions of some such metaphysical arguments might be perfectly consistent with the existence of considerable moral knowledge. For example, even if there is some successful argument from disagreement to the conclusion that moral facts are relative rather than absolute, this might very well be consistent with our having just as much moral knowledge as we.. (shrink)

This paper is about two proposals endorsed by Xunzi. The first is that there is such a thing as a moral expert, whose moral advice we should adopt even when we cannot appreciate for ourselves the considerations in favor of it. The second is that certain political authorities should be treated as moral experts. I identify three fundamental questions about moral expertise that contemporary philosophy has yet to address in depth, explicate Xunzi’s answers to them, (...) and then give an account of politically authorized moral expertise as Xunzi understands it. The three questions at the heart of this study are these: how should we distinguish between knowing the correct course of action on another’s authority and knowing it for oneself? What exactly are the underlying considerations that the expert grasps and the novice does not? Who are the experts and in what spheres of life can they legitimately claim expertise? (shrink)

The unusual essays gathered here explore the proposition that as a society we are becoming amoral, our professions no longer have a moral dimension. Wide-ranging, it looks at, for example, the ethics of forestry and planetary engineering.

This paper explores the concept of moral expertise in the contemporary philosophical debate, with a focus on three accounts discussed across moral epistemology, bioethics, and virtue ethics: an epistemic authority account, a skilled agent account, and a hybrid model sharing key features of the two. It is argued that there are no convincing reasons to defend a monistic approach that reduces moral expertise to only one of these models. A pluralist view is outlined in the (...) attempt to reorient the discussion about moral expertise. (shrink)

Several recent articles have weighed in on the question of whether moral philosophers can be counted as moral experts. One argument denying this has been rejected by both sides of the debate. According to this argument, the extent of disagreement in modern moral philosophy prevents moral philosophers from being classified as moral experts. Call this the Argument From Disagreement. In this article, I defend a version of AD. Insofar as practical issues in moral philosophy (...) are characterized by disagreement between moral philosophers who are more or less equally well credentialed on the issue, non-philosophers have no good reasons to defer to their views. (shrink)

This essay will examine scholarly attempts at distilling a proto-ethical philosophy from the Daoist classic known as the Zhuangzi. In opposition to interpretations of the text which characterize it as amoralistic, I will identify elements of a natural normativity in the Zhuangzi. My examination features passages from the Zhuangzi – commonly known as the “knack” passages – which are often interpreted through some sort of linguistic, skeptical, or relativistic lens. Contra such readings, I believe the Zhuangzi prescribes an art of (...) living – or shù [術] – which incorporates a few motifs familiar to certain threads of philosophical naturalism. Building on existing scholarship which treats of the praxeology of the text, I argue that the naturalist themes present in the Zhuangzi support an unusual, but robust, view of moral expertise. (shrink)

Recently a well-known magazine published an article entitled ‘Moral Specialist.’ This article recounts the activities of Russell McIntyre, described by the authors as a theologian and philosopher who specializes in bioethics. McIntyre is routinely consulted by physicians for help in solving ethical problems. He is asked for moral advice on such matters as abortion, euthanasia, and sterilization for teenagers. McIntyre even wears an electronic ‘beeper’ so that when untimely moral quandaries arise he can easily be reached. McIntyre (...) says that ultimately such moral decisions should be made by the people involved — the physician, the patient, and the family. However, he claims that there are still many gray areas in bioethics ‘where it is best to call in an expert for consultation.’. (shrink)

In this article I examine the consequences of the dominance of intuitive thinking in moral judging and deciding for the role of moral reasoning in moral education. I argue that evidence for the reliability of moral intuitions is lacking. We cannot determine when we can trust our intuitive moral judgements. Deliberate and critical reasoning is needed, but it cannot replace intuitive thinking. Following Robin Hogarth, I argue that intuitive judgements can be improved. The expertise (...) model for moral development, proposed by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, not only teaches us how we acquire intuitive moral judgements, it also shows the interconnectedness of intuitive thinking and deliberate reasoning. Analysing the expertise model in more detail, I show that it cannot do justice to the importance of reasoning skills. Reasoning skills are needed because we expect people to be able to argue for their standpoints. I conclude that moral education should not only aim at improving intuitive moral judgements, but also at acquiring reasoning skills. (shrink)

Moral expertise in the Laches -- The Laches -- Socratic ignorance and socratic wisdom -- Vituperation -- Virtue and craft -- Expertise in the Charmides -- Ironies -- The definitions -- Quietness -- Modesty -- Doing or making one's own -- Doing, not making, one's own -- Doing good things -- Knowing oneself -- Knowledge of itself and all other knowledges -- Good, evil, and temperance -- Expertise in republic -- Preliminaries -- Republic viii -- The (...) text -- Mathematical indeterminacy -- Metaphysical necessity -- Justice "writ large" -- The most formidable question -- Preliminaries -- The context of the argument -- The most formidable argument itself -- The image -- Not knowing the things we know -- Attending to words -- Larger issues -- The third man argument. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCompared to expertise in other domains, moral expertise remains a controversial topic. The current research employs a folk-psychological approach to explore which characteristics laypeople...

Well-functioning modern democracies depend largely on expert knowledge and expert arrangements, but this expertise reliance also causes severe problems for their legitimacy. Somewhat surprisingly, moral and political philosophers have come to play an increasing role as experts in contemporary policymaking. The paper discusses different epistemic and democratic worries raised by the presence of philosopher experts in contemporary governance, relying on a broad review of existing studies, and suggests measures to alleviate them. It is argued that biases philosophers are (...) vulnerable to may contribute to reducing the quality of their advice, and that the characteristics of philosophers’ expertise, and controversies around what their competences amount to, make it hard to distinguish proper from less proper philosopher experts. Reliance on philosopher experts may also intensify democratic worries not least due to the depoliticization pressures that the introduction of ethics expertise tends to give rise to. Still, philosophers have competences and orientations that policy discussions and democratic deliberations are likely to profit from. Worries about philosopher experts may moreover be mitigated by means of a proper design of expert arrangements. Confronted with the genuine epistemic risks and democratic challenges of contemporary governance any quick fix is obviously unavailable, but when institutionalized in the right way philosophers’ involvement in present-day policymaking bears significant promise. (shrink)

While it is generally accepted that we need to use our intelligence in order to get what we want, it is thought to be a cardinal error to imagine that by reasoning we can discover what we ought to want. Reason can in no way constrain the choice of ends, it can only constrain the choice of means once an end has been adopted. In Plato's philosophy we find a view strongly opposed to this attitude towards reason. It is widely (...) held, however, that to arrive at a position which is plainly opposed to common sense, Plato must have grossly confused reasoning about means with reasoning about ends. Evidence of this confusion is found in Plato's use of analogies between statecraft and navigation, and between virtue and skill. But the diagnosis of confusion rests on a misunderstanding of how Plato wanted to use the word translated ‘skill’, i.e. ‘ technē ’, and this misunderstanding is shared even by those who see Plato as rejecting the virtue/skill analogy. (shrink)

We seem less likely to endorse moral expertise than reasoning expertise or aesthetic expertise. This seems puzzling given that moral norms are intuitively taken to be at least more objective than aesthetic norms. One possible diagnosis of the asymmetry is that moral judgments require autonomy of judgement in away that other judgments do not. However, the author points out that aesthetic judgments that have been ‘borrowed’ by aesthetic experts generate the same autonomy worry as (...) moral judgments which are borrowed by moral experts. The author then explores various approaches to accepting the testimony of moral experts and concludes that the asymmetry may best be explained by (1) the conditions for moral expertise being more difficult to satisfy than those of aesthetic expertise and (2) the intuitive greater seriousness of accepting the moral judgments of others, since moral norms are generally viewed as more binding than aesthetic norms. (shrink)

Deliberation is the intellectual activity of rational agents in their capacity as rational agents, and good deliberation is the mark of those who have practical wisdom. That is Aristotle's general view,2 one we may safely attribute to Plato as well. Some philosophers, however, have tried to specifiy Plato's view in ways that accentuate the differences between him and Aristotle. They align Plato's views about deliberation and virtue closely with views the fifth-century sophists, and suppose that Plato borrows from the sophists (...) certain suppositions that Aristotle would reject. In the Protagoras, for example, when Protagoras asserts that he teaches virtue, he claims to teach it as the expertise. (shrink)

: The increasing reliance upon, and perhaps the growing public and professional skepticism about, the special expertise of bioethicists suggests the need to consider the limits of moral expertise. For all the talk about method in bioethics, we, bioethicists, are still rather far off the mark in understanding what we are doing, even when we may be going about what we are doing fairly well. Quite often, what is most fundamentally at stake, but equally often insufficiently acknowledged, (...) are inherently political, essentially contested visions of the most compelling and attractive forms of life for individuals and social organization. The current situation in bioethics parallels similar debates in eighteenth-century jurisprudence, especially Jeremy Bentham's withering critique of the prevalent forms of judicial argument and his own, equally unsuccessful, attempt to develop a decision-making procedure in ethics that would operate on a plane above politics. The risk, both then and now, is that we will fail to appreciate the wide range of reasonable disagreement that will remain past the point of extended reflection and discussion. (shrink)

According to cognitive psychologists, moral decision-making is a dual-process phenomenon involving two types of cognitive processes: explicit reasoning and implicit intuition. Moral development involves training and integrating both types of cognitive processes through a mix of instruction, practice, and reflection. Serious games are an ideal platform for this kind of moral training, as they provide safe spaces for exploring difficult moral problems and practicing the skills necessary to resolve them. In this article, we present Morality Play, (...) a model for the design of serious games for ethical expertise development based on the Integrative Ethical Education framework from moral psychology and the Lens of the Toy model for serious game design. (shrink)

Are philosophers moral experts, and if so, what does this imply for their proper role in moral decision-making? The dominant view on this subject argues that philosophers have superior moral understanding, but they are not better judges of what is morally right. Consequently, philosophers cannot and should not have an authoritative role in moral decision-making. In this article, I challenge this view and argue that an examination of the intimate connection between two capacities – to understand (...) and to judge – reveals that it is both inconsistent and simplistic. It is inconsistent because, all things being equal, if philosophers better understand moral problems, they are also better judges of them. It is simplistic because it adopts an all-or-nothing approach to moral expertise, while expertise is in fact conditional. Inspired by the psychological literature on expertise, I claim that we should not ask whether philosophers are moral experts but rather under which conditions they successfully execute their expertise. The conclusion of the dominant view needs to be reconsidered to reflect the conditional nature of philosophers' expertise. Although more empirical research is required, I offer several hypotheses for future endeavours that demonstrate what a conditional view of philosophers' moral expertise could look like. -/- . (shrink)

In recent decades, the discipline of bioethics has grown rapidly, as has the practice of ethical consultation. Interestingly, this new recognition of the relevance of moral philosophy to our daily life has been accompanied by skepticism among philosophers regarding the existence of moral expertise or the benefits of philosophical training. In his recent article in Bioethics, William R. Smith suggested that this skepticism is rooted in philosophers' belief that moral expertise is inconsistent with liberal–democratic values, (...) when in fact they are compatible. In this paper, we provide a unique opportunity to empirically examine Smith's observation by utilizing and extending global data on philosophers' beliefs about moral expertise, involving 4087 philosophers from 96 countries. Our findings support Smith's theoretical observation and show that societal levels of support for liberal–democratic values are associated with greater skepticism about moral expertise. We suggest that these findings might be explained by the cognitive process of motivated reasoning and an invalid inference of “is” from “ought.” Consequently, the potential tension between moral expertise and liberal–democratic values is invalidly used for rejecting the existence of moral expertise, while its main and valid implication is for how moral expertise should be applied in liberal–democratic settings. (shrink)

The weaponizing of scientific expertise to oppose regulation has been extensively studied. However, the relevant studies, belonging to the emerging discipline of agnotology, remain focused on the analysis of empirical corruption: of misinformation, doubt mongering, and other practices that cynically deploy expertise to render audiences ignorant of empirical facts. This paper explores the wrongful deployment of expertise beyond empirical corruption. To do so, I develop a broader framework of morally subversive expertise, building on recent work in (...) political philosophy (Howard, 2016). Expertise is subversive if it sets up its audience to fail morally, either intentionally or negligently. I distinguish three modes of subversive expertise: empirical subversion (the focus of agnotology), normative subversion and motivational subversion. Drawing on these distinctions, I offer a revisionary account of the Trump Administration’s regulatory science as a case study. I show that the Trump Administration’s use of expertise to dismantle climate regulation, contra the standard charge, cannot be explained using the resources of agnotology alone: the Administration produced highly reliable climate assessments, detailing the risks of climate change, candidly admitting the harms of its proposed policies, and still successfully deployed these findings to justify massive climate deregulation. The lesson of the analysis is that dismissing the expertise that underpins climate deregulation as empirically corrupt ‘anti-science’ both obscures its actual role in the politics of climate change and understates its wrongfulness: it misses the breadth of the assault on moral agency that sustains climate injustice. (shrink)

It seems that we can know moral truths. We are also rather reluctant to defer to moral testimony. But it’s not obvious how moral cognitivism is compatible with pessimism about moral testimony. If moral truths are knowable, shouldn’t it be possible for others to know moral truths you don’t know, so that it is wise for you to defer to what they say? Or, alternatively, if it’s always reasonable to refuse to defer to the (...) wisest among us, doesn’t this show that morality is not genuinely cognitive? There is a tension in our commonsense moral epistemology. In this chapter I (a) explicate this tension, (b) criticize how others have attempted to resolve it, and finally (c) explain how Rossian deontology helps us see that the tension is only apparent: morality is indeed knowable, despite the fact that it is usually wise to refuse to defer to moral testimony. (shrink)