Resultados del desempe˜no por objeto

According to the fifth burden of judgment:

“e. Often there are different kinds of normative considerations of different force on both sides of an issue and it is difficult to make an overall assessment.” (ibid: 57)

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The fifth burden of judgment is analogous to the first burden; except where the first burden is about the difficulty of judging the normative epistemic force of all one’s evidential considerations, the fifth burden is about the difficulty of judging the normative moral force of all the moral considerations. Recall that according to the first burden, the complexity of scientific and empirical evidence makes it difficult to assess the overall strength of one’s evidence. This difficulty licenses disagreement about the target proposition as rational. Similarly, according to the fifth burden, rational disagreement about a moral question is made possible because of the greater complexity of different moral considerations. To see the distinction more clearly, I shall present an instance of each type of question.

An instance of the first burden in action is when trying to determine whether increasing the minimum wage exacerbates unemployment. The evidence regarding this is complex and conflicting. For instance, different ways of measuring employment co-vary differently with increases in the minimum wage21. This makes it difficult to judge overall whether the minimum wage policies have any effect.

An instance of the fifth burden in action is when trying to determine whether abortion at a given stage in the pregnancy is permissible. There are a number of competing considerations on both sides of the issue. For instance, there is a question of whether the foetus can survive outside of the womb, and if it can, what interests it may have. At the other side of the issue is what burdens the woman may face if she carries the foetus to term, versus what risks she faces in removing the foetus without injuring it, versus any risks inherent in the abortive procedure. As per the fifth burden, these considerations make it difficult to judge whether abortion at a given stage is permissible.

The contrast between the two burdens becomes clear if we note that in principle, there could be some issue which is not subject to the first burden but which is subject to the fifth. As we saw with regard to abortion, the difficulty in assessing whether it was permissible was a result of conflicting pro-tanto duties and permissions. On one side is a pro-tanto duty regarding the welfare of the foetus. On the other side is a pro-tanto permission to use defensive force against other beings which might threaten it. In principle, it is possible that the evidence we have for each

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For instance, David Card and Alan Krueger’s (1994) study using survey data from employers indicates that minimum wage increases have no statistically significant effect on unemployment. By contrast, David Neumark and William Wascher’s (1995) analysis of unemployment over the same time period and region using administrative payroll records showed unemployment was exacerbated to a statistically significant degree.

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pro-tanto duty or permission is clear and not conflicting. For instance, the foetus may be at a late stage in the pregnancy and the statistical evidence clearly indicates that it is likely to survive with medical assistance outside the womb if extracted pre- term. At the same time, statistical and diagnostic evidence might clearly show that there are significant risks to the expectant woman if she continues to carry the foetus to term or an attempt was made to extract it without killing it. Therefore, we can suppose that there are at least some cases in which the evidence is not conflicting with regards to each pro-tanto duty or permission. Therefore, in this case, the first burden is not playing a significant role in generating reasonable disagreement. However, even where the evidence is not conflicting, the existence of these conflicting pro-tanto duties and permissions still makes deciding whether abortion in the given case is permissible difficult.

Having distinguished the fifth burden from the first burden, we are now in a position to see how the fifth burden also presupposes permissivism. The claim made by the fifth burden is that with many different moral considerations on both sides of an issue, it is difficult to make an assessment and that this makes rational disagreement possible. Notably, no mention is made of whether the disagreeing parties disagree about the strength of the various considerations. That is to say, according to the fifth burden, people would rationally disagree about a given moral issue even if they agreed about what the relevant moral considerations were and the relative strengths of these considerations. This would be the case as long as there were many considerations on both sides of an issue, making it difficult to make an overall assessment. If people agreed about the relevant moral considerations and their relative strengths, then their evidence has to be relevantly similar and hence can be taken to be shared.

The point here, of course, is not that whenever there are multiple considerations on both sides of an issue, people share the same evidence. Rather, when people do not share the same evidence, we do not need to appeal to the fact that there are multiple considerations on both sides of a given issue in order to explain rational disagreement. Consider the following case:

Kitten Torture: Sid was raised in an environment where he was not exposed to suffering in either in himself or in others22. Therefore, he does not know what suffering or pain is and does not know what

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Buddhist mythology describes Prince Siddhartha, the person who would eventually become the Buddha as having been raised shielded from any knowledge of pain and suffering.

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torture is. Therefore, he does not know that torturing kittens for fun is wrong. Bud is acquainted with pain and therefore knows that torturing kittens for fun is wrong.

Kitten Torture provides us with a case in which there are not many considerations on both sides of an issue. We can therefore take it that the fifth burden is not operative in this case. If someone knows what pain and suffering are, they should know that the intentional infliction of pain and suffering on a kitten for fun is wrong. This is therefore not a situation in which multiple considerations on both sides of an issue make an overall assessment difficult. Sid lacks evidence about pain and therefore does not know what it is, while Bud possesses said evidence. This difference in evidence is sufficient to explain rational disagreement between Sid and Bud about a moral question. Given that a difference in evidence is sufficient to explain rational moral disagreement when the fifth burden is not operative, the fifth burden must presuppose that disagreeing parties would disagree even if they did share the same evidence. That is to say, the fifth burden presupposes permissivism. We can now turn our attention to the sixth or last of the listed burdens of judgment. 2.7 The Sixth Burden

According to the sixth burden:

“f. Finally, as we note in referring to Berlin’s view (V:6.2), any system of social institutions is limited in the values it can admit so that some selection must be made from the full range of moral and political values that might be realised. This is because any system of institutions has, as it were, a limited social space. In being forced to select among cherished values, or when we hold to several and must restrict each in view of the requirements of the others, we face great difficulties in setting priorities and making adjustments. Many hard decisions may even seem to have no clear answer.” (ibid)

The sixth burden firstly concerns cases in which trade-offs between certain moral and political values must be made because no social institutional arrangement can fully realise (Berlin 1988) all of them. The key point to note here is that disagreement here is purely practical. It arises even when both parties share all the same normative beliefs. It is perhaps more accurate to call this, not a source of rational disagreement as such, but one of the circumstances of politics that gives

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rise to practical conflict. As such, since our concern in this thesis is about epistemically rational disagreement, the sixth burden is of little concern.

Summing up, I have clarified in this chapter what it means to share a total body of evidence and demonstrated that four of the six listed burdens of judgment presuppose permissivism. One burden, the sixth according to which “disagreement” arises because people have to make trade-offs between equally important goals, is completely irrelevant to rational disagreement as such and only one burden, the fourth, accounts for rational disagreement by appealing to different evidence. Even for this burden, of the three possible ways in which people’s differing backgrounds might generate rational disagreement, two of those ways are compatible with them having the same total body of evidence and hence presuppose permissivism. The burdens of judgment are specifications of when rational disagreement is possible. Insofar as they mostly presuppose permissivism, this gives us some reason to think that the standard version of political liberalism requires permissivism to be true. Moreover, recall that other political liberals like Larmore (2008), Gaus (2011) and Quong (2010) also regard the burdens of judgment or something very much like them as explaining the existence of rational disagreement about a great many moral and political matters. If the burdens, or anything like them presupposes permissivism, and permissivism is false, political liberalism, or at least the standard version of it is in trouble. My task in the rest of the thesis is to show that permissivism is in fact false.

46 Chapter 3: The Best Version of Permissivism Background

In the second chapter, I showed that most of the burdens of judgment presuppose permissivism. In the remaining chapters, I shall hence show that permissivism is false by arguing for the uniqueness thesis according to which:

Uniqueness: Given a total body of evidence and proposition, at most one doxastic attitude towards that proposition is the rationally justified one.

Before I proceed to arguing for uniqueness, I shall clarify again the terms of doxastic attitude and evidence. In general, a doxastic attitude may refer, on a coarser grained account, to something like a belief, disbelief or suspension of judgment. On a maximally fine grained account, we may wish to represent doxastic attitudes in terms of credences or precise probability values. While not taking a stand on which is the right way to conceive of our doxastic attitudes, the arguments I shall be offering will be compatible with both coarser and finer grained analyses of doxastic attitudes.

By the term evidence, I mean anything that could bear, one way or another, on the proposition at hand. This, as I have mentioned before is compatible with different views about what counts as evidence. Evidence may, for instance, be only propositional or ultimately non-propositional, or some mixture of the two. For ease of presentation, most of the cases I will be presenting will involve propositional evidence, but that is not to be taken to mean that I endorse any particular conception of evidence as being necessarily either propositional or non- propositional. Evidence, as I have discussed previously, is evidence that is possessed by the agent and is therefore a mental state. In addition, as I have mentioned before, a mental state like a belief counts as evidence only if it carries some positive epistemic status like being justified, known or reliably formed. Nothing I will discuss in this thesis hangs on which positive epistemic status makes any given mental state count as evidence.

Finally, I should emphasise that uniqueness, as I have specified, implies that there is at most one rational doxastic attitude which is permissible, given the evidence. I do not rule out the possibility that there might be cases where there is no fully rational response to the evidence. I also do not commit myself to the claim that

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evidential reasons are the only reasons for belief. I do however commit myself to the claim that if there are non-evidential reasons, and if these pull in a different direction from evidential reasons, there may be no fully rational attitude to take given the evidence.

Uniqueness can be contrasted with permissivism according to which:

Permissivism: Given a total body of evidence and proposition, it is possible that more than one doxastic attitude towards that proposition could be rationally justified.23

Correspondingly, we might call a case in which the body of evidence justifies more than one doxastic attitude towards a given proposition a permissive case. The uniqueness thesis can then be restated as the claim that there are no permissive cases. The general strategy for arguing for uniqueness is to show that supposing that a given case is permissive requires us to accept certain implausible claims. I will do this by drawing upon a distinction made by Kopec and Titelbaum between intrapersonal and inter-personal uniqueness (Kopec and Titelbaum, 2016). Intrapersonal uniqueness restricts the permitted range of attitudes for each person. That is to say according to intrapersonal uniqueness, if some doxastic attitude A1 is rational for Bob, then no other attitude is rational for Bob. But it may be that a different attitude A2 is rational for Adam. Inter-personal uniqueness is logically stronger in that if attitude A1 is rational for Bob, no other attitude is rational for Adam or, for that matter, anyone else, given a body of evidence. In order to show that reasonable disagreement about fundamental moral principles is not possible, I need to show that inter-personal uniqueness is the case.

In this chapter, I shall argue that any plausible account of permissivism must be consistent with intrapersonal uniqueness. To start off with, I shall first present Roger White’s Evidence Pointing Problem (White 2014) and his Arbitrariness Objection (ibid) to permissivism. I shall then present Miriam Schoenfield’s response to White, in which she argues that the latter’s arguments only show that intrapersonal uniqueness is true. Schoenfield argues that rational disagreement is possible if people have different epistemic standards (Schoenfield 2014). I shall briefly discuss an objection to the Arbitrariness Objection and an alleged counterexample to both of

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As many authors on this topic have noted, many epistemological theories like van Fraassen’s Voluntarist Epistemology, various types of Epistemic Conservatism, Foley/James style instrumentalism, Rawlsian reflective equilibrium, orthodox Bayesianism and coherentism require permissivism to be true (White 2005; Kelly 2010; Ballantyne and Coffman 2011; Schoenfield 2014).

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White’s arguments and argue that we can disregard them. This should show that the only plausible route to permissivism is Schoenfield’s by which people can permissibly respond differently to evidence if and only if they permissibly accept different epistemic standards. This is consistent with the claim made by the second burden of judgment, according to which, people can rationally disagree because they disagree about the strength of various evidential considerations. In Chapter 2, I interpreted this disagreement about the strength of evidential considerations to refer to having different epistemic standards. The argument in this chapter will show that having different epistemic standards is not just sufficient for rational disagreement given the same evidence, it is necessary as well. Given this conclusion, in subsequent chapters, I shall present different accounts of permissivism which are consistent with intrapersonal uniqueness and argue that each account nevertheless faces insurmountable problems.