One‐Person Moral Twin Earth Cases
Author(s) -
Sinhababu Neil
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
thought: a journal of philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.429
H-Index - 8
ISSN - 2161-2234
DOI - 10.1002/tht3.400
Subject(s) - epistemology , content (measure theory) , interpersonal communication , psychology , social psychology , moral psychology , moral disengagement , social cognitive theory of morality , philosophy , mathematics , mathematical analysis
This paper presents two cases demonstrating that theories allowing the environment to partially determine the content of moral concepts (such as the causal theory of reference) that provide incorrect truth‐conditions for moral terms. While typical Moral Twin Earth cases seek to establish that these theories fail to account for moral disagreement, neither case here essentially involves interpersonal disagreement. Both involve a single person retaining moral beliefs despite recognizing actual or potential mismatches with the purportedly content‐determining facts. This lets opponents of such theories grant objections that standard Moral Twin Earth cases fail to demonstrate disagreement, and argue more straightforwardly that they generate implausible truth‐conditions for moral claims.
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