Remembering what is right

Abstract

According to Pessimism about moral testimony, it is objectionable to form moral beliefs by deferring to another. This paper motivates Pessimism about another source of moral knowledge: propositional memory. Drawing on a discussion of Gilbert Ryle’s on forgetting the difference between right and wrong, it argues that Internalism about moral motivation offers a satisfying explanation of Pessimism about memory. A central claim of the paper is that Pessimism about memory (and by extension, testimony) is an issue in moral psychology rather than moral epistemology. That is because it is best explained by appeal to claims about the constitution of moral knowledge as a state of mind, rather than requirements on belief formation. The paper also provides reason to suspect that the focus on testimony is something of a red herring.

Keywords:

• moral motivation
• moral knowledge
• testimony
• memory
• Ryle, Gilbert
• Aquinas

Acknowledgements

Thanks to comments from two anonymous referees for this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Casey Doyle is a Junior Researcher at the University of Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic. He was previously a Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. He works at the intersections of philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics, with a focus on self-knowledge. He received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh.

ORCID

Casey Doyle http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7394-7084

Notes

1 The labels “Optimist” and “Pessimist” come from Hopkins (2007). Pessimists include Wolff ([1970] 1998), Nickel (2001), Hopkins (2007), Hills (2009, 2013), and Howell (2014). Optimists include Jones (1999) and Sliwa (2012). Groll and Decker (2014) and Mogensen (2017) offer qualified defences of Pessimism.

2 Some Pessimists deny that moral knowledge is available by testimony (Wolff [1970] 1998). See Hopkins (2007) and 2011 for arguments against that position.

3 Pessimists can grant that deference about some nonmoral matters, such as aesthetics, is also objectionable, of course. The point is just that moral testimony is problematic in a way that ordinary testimony is not.

4 And it isn’t an instance of relying on others. I rely on a fact about others in my reasoning, not their word. I would be relying on others if I took the bumper sticker (popular in the UK) “A dog is for life, not just for Christmas” at face value.

5 I focus on the case of moral testimony in Doyle (2019).

6 Contra Hopkins (2007). I discuss his view later in the paper.

7 For the purposes of this paper, “memory” will refer to propositional or declarative memory, rather than imagistic or procedural memory. See Michaelian and Sutton (2017) for a helpful overview of the issues.

8 The standard view in the literature is that propositional memory entails knowledge (Williamson 2007). If that’s right, then it might not be possible to form a belief on the basis of remembering. Even so, we can ask how a subject is justified in retaining a held belief, and it seems fair to appeal to memory here.

9 Perhaps the factive attitude that she remembers isn’t reflectively accessible. The point stands if we think that seeming to remember or something similar serves as one’s reason.

10 Howell might still be right that believing that P upon learning that I used to believe it is analogous to deference. But memory isn’t like that. For discussion see Barnett (2015).

11 Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.

12 One lesson we are to draw from this, and surely an important one for Ryle, is that we cannot identify moral knowledge with either knowing how or knowing that. It is a third species of knowledge.

13 The absurdity is quite strong, but not magical. He writes:

… the assertion that it is absurd to say that a person might forget the difference between right and wrong could be misconstrued as the ascription to our knowledge of right and wrong of an inspiring kind of indelibility, perhaps a Heaven-hinting innateness or a trailing cloud of glory. No such edifying moral can be looked for. (2009, 395)

Apparently, for Ryle, the moral law is not written in the hearts of all.

14 This is not to deny that there may be a puzzle that arises only for the speech act. See McGrath (2015).

15 Ryle discusses knowledge, while most contemporary metaethicists conceive of Internalism as a claim about moral judgment (Shafer-Landau 2003). It is not clear whether Ryle thinks that moral judgments or beliefs that do not express knowledge are accompanied by motivation as well. For the sake of simplicity, I will present Internalism as a thesis about moral belief. But this could be modified without loss to whichever version of the view one favours.

16 Ryle intentionally leaves the form of motivation open writing, “[t]his caring is not a special feeling; it covers a variety of feelings, like those that go with being shocked, ashamed, indignant, admiring, emulous, disgusted, and enthusiastic” (2009, 400).

17 Unlike Tresan, I assume that Internalism is a thesis about individuals and not groups.

18 It’s not easy to determine just what counts as a moral proposition. I’ll have to rely on the intuitive idea here.

19 It seems clear that Ryle accepts the constitutional reading. At one point he makes the claim, familiar from Hare (1952), that a moral belief unaccompanied by motivation could only involve the moral “ought” in an inverted comma sense. The subject recognizes that it is wrong but only “what other people call ‘wrong’” (2009, 398). What the nonconstitutional reading makes room for comes to more than this, though. It makes room for a belief with moral content that lacks motivation without inverted commas, the kind of moral beliefs held, arguably, by depressed people. It is, I think, a considerable strength of that reading that it isn’t forced into Hare’s interpretation of such cases. That is, we needn’t suppose that subjects who lack the relevant motivations (such as depressed people or you in Meat is Murder) are insincere or exhibit some semantic failure.

20 See Radcliffe (2006) for some discussion from a Humean perspective.

21 Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this example and worry.

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported by the European Social Fund for the project “International mobilities for research activities of the University of Hradec Králové” [CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/16_027/0008487].