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Suikkanen on Social Reliabilism & Moral Epistemology

By Lawrence Solum

If you have any interest in moral epistemology, check out Jussi Suikkanen's post, Intuitionism and Social Reliabilism on Pea Soup. Here is a taste:

Moral epistemology is an area of metaethics that I feel most uneasy about. I?ve done the least research in this area, and I?m never quite happy with what I read. However, I have tried to get at least started. So, this post is a Groundwork to my moral epistemology (not that the presented view will be original). I want to start from Sidgwick?s intuitionist position as described by Roger Crisp in the section 3.4 of his book. Call this the ?Crispwick? view which I used to find very appealing. I will then explain why I have come to doubt this view, and why these doubts give me a reason to be drawn into a view which I call ?Social Reliabilism?.

And:

Different social settings have different social normative-belief-formation-systems that tend to gravitate towards consensus. If one thinks that there are normative facts, then some of these social belief-formation methods are more reliable than others. Which ones are more reliable depends on what the normative facts are and which of the social ways of belief-formation get them more often than not right. And, as a result, an individual has a justified normative belief when her belief is formed through education and reflection within a reliable social system (and it satisfies the first three conditions from Sidgwick).

This short post has much to chew on.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on March 15, 2010 (boomark / email).