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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The moral skeptic's replacement argument is not conclusively established

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.It is not clear whether non-moral explanations work as well as moral explanations in all cases
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    • 2.It is not clear whether inference to the best explanation must underlie all justified belief
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Gilbert Harman's original formulation requires that moral facts add explanatory power beyond physical-psychological facts, but this standard is not met by the replacement argument itself.
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    • 2.Nicholas Sturgeon's response demonstrates that moral facts like 'Hitler was evil' do explanatory work that cannot be fully captured by purely descriptive psychological or sociological substitutes.
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    • 3.If non-moral explanations systematically required moral concepts to individuate the relevant phenomena, then the replacement is circular rather than genuinely reductive.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Inference to the best explanation, as defended by Peter Lipton, requires that the competing explanation be equally coherent and not merely extensionally equivalent under redescription.
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    • 2.A non-moral explanation that preserves all predictive content of a moral explanation while stripping normative content fails Lipton's loveliness criterion, since it explains less about why agents are motivated.
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    • 3.Therefore the replacement argument cannot be conclusively established without a prior and contested resolution of the metaethical debate about whether motivation is internally or externally related to moral judgment.
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