An Interpretation of Value Change: A Philosophical Disquisition of Climate Change and Energy Transition Debate

Changing values may give rise to intergenerational conflicts, like in the ongoing climate change and energy transition debate. This essay focuses on the interpretative question of how this value change can best be understood. To elucidate the interpretation of value change, two philosophical perspectives on value are introduced: Berlin’s value pluralism and Dworkin’s interpretivism. While both authors do not explicitly discuss value change, I argue that their perspectives can be used for interpreting value change in the case of climate change and the energy transition. I claim that Berlin’s pluralistic account of value would understand the value change as an intergenerational conflict and therefore provide a too narrow and static ground for understanding ongoing value change. Instead, by exploring Dworkin’s standpoint in moral epistemology, this essay distills a more encompassing perspective on how values may relate, converge, overlap, and change, fulfilling their functions in the course of climate change and energy transition. This perspective is further detailed by taking inspiration from Shue’s work on the (re)interpretation of equity in the climate change debate. I argue that the resulting perspective allows us to see value change as a gradual process rather than as a clash between generations and their values.

Necessity, Universality, and the A Priori in Ethics

This paper asks what form of moral epistemology is best fitted to the claims of moral particularism. It argues that moral truths can be known a priori even though moral truths about particular cases are context-sensitive and so contingent. The general idea is that although one needs empirical knowledge of the situation, one’s knowledge of how to respond is not thereby shown to be empirical. We emerge with synthetic a priori knowledge of a range of truths including among them the moral. Particular attention is paid to Kant’s claim that since moral truths apply to all rational beings, they must be universal in form

Aristotle’s Account of Moral Perception (EN.VI.8) & Nussbaum’s Priority of the Particular Thesis

Consider a contemporary retrieval of Aristotle’s account of moral perception. Drawing from EN.VI.8, Martha Nussbaum argues that we perceive moral particulars prior to ethical principles. First, I explain her priority of the particular thesis. The virtuous person perceives value in the world, as part of her moral deliberation. This perceptual skill is an important aspect of her virtuous activity, and hence also part of her eudaimonia. Second, I present her priority thesis with a dilemma: our perception of moral particulars is either non-inferential or it is inferential. If Nussbaum accepts a non-inferential interpretation, then she is committed to an unsavory view about moral epistemology –one that invites intuitionism and relativism. But if she accepts a non-inferential account, then the moral particular is no longer prior to the ethical principle. I suggest that her better option is to grab the second horn. This move avoids the problems of the first horn without sacrificing her neo-Aristotelian commitments or her overarching view that the perception of moral particulars is ineliminable to moral deliberation (and eudaimonia). At the same time, this move renders her priority thesis trivial.

The Problem of Evil, Skeptical Theism and Moral Epistemology

This paper argues that skeptical theism isn’t susceptible to criticisms of the view presented in James Sterba’s new book on the logical problem of evil. Nevertheless, Sterba’s argument does serve to underscore the unpalatable moral-epistemological consequences of skeptical theistic skepticism (STS): for precisely the reasons that STS doesn’t succumb to Sterba’s critique, STS threatens to undermine moral knowledge altogether.

A Defense of Locke’s Moral Epistemology

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke provides an empirical account of all of our ideas, including our moral ideas. However, Locke’s account of moral epistemology is difficult to understand leading to mistaken objections to his moral epistemological theory. In this paper, I offer what I believe to be the correct account of Locke’s moral epistemology. This account of his moral epistemology resolves the objections that morality is not demonstrable, that Locke’s account fails to demonstrate the normativity of statements, and that Locke has not provided us with the means to determine the correctness of the moral rules.

Moral Realism and the Argument from Skepticism

A long-standing family of worries about moral realism focuses on its implications for moral epistemology. The underlying concern is that if moral truths have the nature that realists believe, it is hard to see how we could know what they are. This objection may be called the “argument from skepticism” against moral realism. Realists have primarily responded to this argument by presenting accounts of how we could acquire knowledge of moral truths that are consistent with realist assumptions about their nature. Less time has been spent, however, on the question of why it would be a problem for moral realism if it leads to skepticism in the first place, and on the related question of which skeptical conclusions it would be problematic for realists to simply accept. This paper considers several answers to these questions, thereby distinguishing a number of versions of the argument from skepticism, and discusses their prospects.

A teoria hegeliana da justificação moral

The contribution pursues two interrelated aims: the first one is to interpret the transition from Morality to Ethical Life in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right as a theory of moral justification; the second one is to show the meaning of this theory for contemporary philosophy. The essay thus seeks to turn to Hegel’s conception in order to shed light on the limits of the current discussion in moral epistemology and then to present a possible alternative. To this end, Hegel’s text is confronted with the main theses of intuitionism, on the one hand, and Kantian constructivism, on the other, as the most prominent contemporary forms, respectively, of ethical foundationalism and coherentism.

The Projectability Challenge to Moral Naturalism

The Projectability Challenge states that a metaethical view must explain how ordinary agents can, on the basis of moral experience and reflection, accurately and justifiably apply moral concepts to novel situations. In this paper, we argue for two primary claims. First, paradigm nonnaturalism can satisfactorily answer the projectability challenge. Second, it is unclear whether there is a version of moral naturalism that can satisfactorily answer the challenge. The conclusion we draw is that there is an important respect in which nonnaturalism holds an advantage over its most prominent naturalist rivals. The conclusion is interesting if only because it is widely assumed that naturalism has an easier time handling thorny problems in moral epistemology. We argue that there is at least one such problem of which this assumption is not true.