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Defusing the Regress Challenge to Debunking Arguments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2020

Shang Long Yeo Open the ORCID record for Shang Long Yeo [Opens in a new window]
Shang Long Yeo*
Affiliation:
School of Philosophy, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia; Department of Philosophy, National University of Singapore, Singapore
*
Email: shang.yeo@anu.edu.au
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Abstracts

A debunking argument contends that some target moral judgments were produced by unreliable processes and concludes that such judgments are unjustified. Debunking arguments face a regress challenge: to show that a process is unreliable at tracking the moral truth, we need to rely on other moral judgments. But we must show that these relied-upon judgments are also reliable, which requires yet a further set of judgments, whose reliability needs to be confirmed too, and so on. Some argue that the debunker faces an insurmountable regress, which disables the debunking conclusion. In this paper, I explore and defuse this regress challenge.

Keywords

Debunking argumentsregress challengemoral epistemologymoral psychology
Type
Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 50 , Issue 6 , August 2020 , pp. 785 - 800
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Canadian Journal of Philosophy

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