The journey so far

I think that basically now what you have to argue about is what is the actual structure of your book. If your basic thesis is really still an empirical theory of ethics that you want to elucidate, then you will have to defend your choice of methodology more than you have done so far in the blog. After all, an ethics that is grounded solely in the tradition of empiricism must be capable of taking a myriad of different directions empirically. Even you have sketched out more than once in this blog alternate directions in which an empirical theory of ethics might go. What makes yours better than all the others?

In the first, case, moral intuitions are experience-dependent1. That means that three basic things must satisfy any moral judgement for it to be empirically valid:

  1. It must not be based on farfetched examples2.
  2. Generalisations may not be made from trivial examples to important examples, nor from important to trivial examples3.
  3. One must actually be prepared to act according to the judgement that one has made4.


Yet it should be clear that the above criteria will not be enough to determine a complete theory of ethics. It was actually when the questions arose about how to adjudicate between different moral points of view that we came to ask whether social mores progress. In this regard, we attempted an analogy with Kuhnian science, but it proved to fail us where we needed it the most, to adjudicate between paradigms. An analogy with Popperian science on the other hand, gives us a clear rule of adjudication qua falsification. Because a criterion of falsifiability seems already to have worked with our surveys of certain moral theories, we are now expanding on analogies with falsification. We are currently exploring different senses of falsification for theories of ethics to see which ones will bear the most fruit, and that's the journey so far.

So in answer to your question, I'm still working out my own methodology. I can justify it to the extent that I can show that it makes a genuine effort to be conceived a posteriori, unlike either Bentham's or Singer's ethics, which rely on assumptions with no real empirical basis. I probably will not be able to justify it against any others that have different attempts at conception a posteriori. I can simply show that my approach is definitely one empirical approach that has been worked out to a high degree of consistency. But given that the search for an empirically based theory of ethics is an unusual thing for a philosopher to do in the first place, I'm not really very worried about it!

Notes


1Cf. "The experience-dependence of intuitions".
2Cf. "The use of farfetched examples".
3Cf. "The use of trivial examples - update 1".
4Cf. "Moral experimentation as praxis".

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