Philosophical Progress, Finally
Does philosophy make progress? Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau (2022) think so, writing:
“Through a long process of critiquing once-prominent claims or arguments, making novel distinctions, incrementally improving leading contenders, and exploring brand new possibilities, contemporary metaethicists have unearthed the following non-obvious truths about the connection between moral reasons and motivation:
- Something is a motivation only if it is capable of contributing to an explanation of an agent’s action.
- There is a distinction between (at least) two types of motivation: a certain type of mental state, such as desire, that plays a causal role in action (a ‘motivator’), and a consideration in the light of which one acts (a ‘motivating reason’).
- Motivators and motivating reasons are both distinct from normative reasons, which are considerations that favor some response.
- A consideration is a good motivating reason if and because it is also a strong, undefeated normative reason.
- Something is a moral reason only if it is a normative reason.
- A reason is normative only if, when it is sufficiently strong, flouting it renders one blameworthy absent excuse.
- There is no direct correlation between the strength of a motivator and the strength of a normative reason.
- There can be a moral reason for an agent to act at a given time even though the agent lacks a motivator or a motivating reason at that time.
- When an agent accesses one of her normative reasons, it is capable of serving as a motivating reason.
- In certain conditions, that capacity is realized: a moral reason and motivating reason then converge.
- When this happens, agents earn defeasible moral credit.
- A paradigm of a virtuous agent is one who exemplifies such convergence to a substantial degree.
- A paradigm of a vicious agent is one for whom there is a systematic divergence between his moral reasons, on the one hand, and his motivating reasons, on the other.”
They say the apparent lack of progress is due to the fact that, when evaluating philosophy, people tend to ignore the fact that philosophers take for granted many shared assumptions.
This explanation is compelling. When faced with a purported example of established philosophical truths, I am automatically drawn to argue against their status as truths. I tend to ignore the things that are not salient objects of disagreement.
The lesson might be: philosophical progress exists…as long as you don’t draw attention to it!