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Moral Understanding and Cooperative Testimony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2019

Kenneth Boyd Open the ORCID record for Kenneth Boyd [Opens in a new window]
Kenneth Boyd*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto at Scarborough, Scarborough, ON, Canada
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Abstract

It is has been argued that there is a problem with moral testimony: testimony is deferential, and basing judgments and actions on deferentially acquired knowledge prevents them from having moral worth. What morality perhaps requires of us, then, is that we understand why a proposition is true, but this is something that cannot be acquired through testimony. I argue here that testimony can be both deferential as well as cooperative, and that one can acquire moral understanding through cooperative testimony. The problem of moral testimony is thus not a problem with testimony generally, but a problem of deferential testimony specifically.

Keywords

understandingtestimonymoral knowledgemoral understanding

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Type
Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 18 - 33
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Canadian Journal of Philosophy

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