A Hard Look at Moral Perception

This paper concerns what I take to be the primary epistemological motivation for defending moral perception. Offering a plausible account of how we gain moral knowledge is one of the central challenges of metaethics. It seems moral perception might help us meet this challenge. The possibility that we know about the instantiation of moral properties in something like the way we know that there is a bus passing in front of us raises the alluring prospect of subsuming moral epistemology under the (relatively) comfortable umbrella of perceptual or, more broadly, empirical knowledge. The good news on this front is that various combinations of metaethical positions and theories of perception arguably have the potential to vindicate moral perception (though I won’t do much to defend this claim here). The bad news, I’ll argue, is that moral perception would be dependent for its epistemic merit on background knowledge of bridge principles linking moral and non-moral properties. Thus, in order to defend a purely perceptual moral epistemology, one would have to argue that knowledge of those principles is likewise perceptual. I further argue it is not

Do Property Rights Presuppose Scarcity?

There is a common view, dating back at least to Hume, that property rights presuppose scarcity. This paper is a critical examination of that thesis. In addition to questioning the thesis, the paper highlights the need to divorce the debate over this thesis from the debate over Intellectual Property (IP) rights (the area where it is most frequently applied). I begin by laying out the thesis’ major line of defense. In brief, the argument is that (1) property rights are legitimate only when necessary, (2) necessary only to avoid injury resulting from one party’s use or possession of a good over others’, and (3) that such injury is possible only where there is scarcity. While I accept (1) (at least for the sake of argument), I argue that each of three prominent theories of the justification of property rights cast doubt on (2) and (3). As it turns out, at the theoretical level, there are a number of different ways of dealing with this conflict. However, I argue, no matter which theoretical path one takes, it turns out that the practical implications of the relationship between property rights and scarcity have been woefully misconstrued. Finally, I recount an independent argument for the thesis under consideration and argue that, whether or not it is successful against IP, it does not extend as an argument against ownership of non-scarce goods in general. This serves to further highlight the need to distinguish arguments for the thesis under consideration from arguments against IP

Moral Perception and the Reliability Challenge

Given a traditional intuitionist moral epistemology, it is notoriously difficult for moral realists to explain the reliability of our moral beliefs. This has led some to go looking for an alternative to intuitionism. Perception is an obvious contender. I previously argued that this is a dead end, that all moral perception is dependent on a priori moral knowledge. This suggests that perceptualism merely moves the bump in the rug where the reliability challenge is concerned. Preston Werner responds that my account rests on an overly intellectualized model of perception. In this paper, I argue that though Werner may well be correct, my arguments, properly extended, still suggest that perceptualism leaves realists in no better position than intuitionism when it comes to the reliability challenge