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A Critique of John Mcdowell's Theory of Moral Perception

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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2021 A Critique of John McDowell's Theory of Moral Perception Edward Ray Falls [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Metaphysics Commons Recommended Citation Falls, Edward Ray, "A Critique of John McDowell's Theory of Moral Perception. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2021. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/6517 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Edward Ray Falls entitled "A Critique of John McDowell's Theory of Moral Perception." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Philosophy. Kristina Gehrman, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Kristina Gehrman, Jon Garthoff, Clerk Shaw, Megan Bryson Accepted for the Council: Dixie L. Thompson Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) A Critique of John McDowell’s Theory of Moral Perception A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Edward Falls August 2021 Abstract This dissertation examines an argument that John McDowell’s view is structurally analogous to Protagoreanism, and that arguments structurally analogous to Plato’s arguments against Protagoreanism apply to McDowell’s view. Through philosophical investigation, the dissertation shows that Plato’s arguments do not perfectly apply to McDowell’s view, but that the view nevertheless is unable to address the metastasized problem of constraint. The metastasized problem of constraint arises in at least two kinds of circumstances: situations where cultural relativism is a concern, and situations where there is pressure to adapt to unforeseeable natural developments. ii Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One Against Protagoreanism ......................................................................................................... 10 Section One—A Reading of the Theaetetus ........................................................................................... 11 Section Two—The Protagorean Metaphysics of Flux ............................................................................ 18 Section Three—The Self-Refutation Argument and the Argument from Expertise ............................... 27 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 36 Chapter Two Perceptual Incorrigibility ...................................................................................................... 38 Section One McDowell on Sellars on Kant on Conceptual Capacities in Perception ............................ 38 Section Two Burge’s Critique of Sellarsian Views ................................................................................ 46 Section Three McDowell’s Response to Burge ...................................................................................... 51 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 57 Chapter Three Second Nature Naturalism and Global Metaontological Deflationism ............................... 61 Section One Distinguishing First and Second Nature ............................................................................. 62 Section Two Moral Phenomenology and Wittgensteinian Quietism ...................................................... 66 Section Three What Metaontological Deflationism Has to Do with It ................................................... 77 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 96 Chapter Four The Argument Against Quietism .......................................................................................... 97 Section One John Hacker-Wright’s Pragmaticization of McDowell’s View ......................................... 97 Section Two Arguing Against Quietism ............................................................................................... 103 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 109 Conclusion: Reconsidering the Comparison with Protagoreanism, and Honest Deflationism ................ 111 Appendix Defending Global Anti-realism .................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined. Works Cited .............................................................................................................................................. 117 Vita ............................................................................................................................................................ 146 iii Introduction We can readily imagine a way of life that comprises a way of going on, but not of going on well. Wendy Farley describes a toxic way of going on: In Atlanta, thousands of people drive beautiful cars with fine audio systems on roads so clogged that a twenty-minute drive is expanded to an hour or more. The air is so polluted that many days of the year school children cannot go outside to play. People wear beautiful clothes as they work eighty or so hours a week at a job that exhausts them physically and spiritually. The outward signs of affluence, power, and success conceal the disintegration of health, family life, connections to community, and even a capacity for joy. Equally invisible is the price the rest of the world pays in low-wage labor and poisoned water, land, and air for our affluence. (Farley 2005: 36) What was true of a way of going on in Atlanta in 2005 was true of ways of going on in other U.S. cities down to the time of the pandemic in 2020-2021, which has done nothing to resolve the inherent toxicity of such a form of life, though it has brought complications and fresh challenges to going on well. Of course, with the example in hand, we can tell the difference between going on well and not so doing. We can tell that such a way of life is toxic. We can tell that because the way of going on still possesses, within it, the relevant resources for going on well. Something internal to the way of going on shapes our perceptions and influences our judgments about such a way of going on, e.g., the recognition that it is not sustainable. Our judgment is constrained by our perceptions, in such instances. There are other kinds of cases, though. What happens when a way of going on does not possess the internal resources to help us make these kinds of determinations? What happens when the way of going on itself comes into question? For example, within a certain way of going on, social injustice has become recognizable only in rough outline over the past two hundred years. But how has this happened? How has social injustice become recognizable within a way of going on which was (and still is) socially unjust? Emerging technologies and emerging pathogens can give rise to circumstances which might outstrip the resources of current ways of going on. Who would have guessed, before 2020, that it could be a moral question whether to let your children hug their grandparents (due to no fault of the grandparents’, that is)? Expert epidemiologists 1 might have made predictions, but the point is that our general way of going on must be adaptive. Explaining how this works requires an account of the sort of unanticipated friction that a particular way of going on may encounter. The philosophical question raised by such examples is how things beyond the control of a way of going on may exert pressure on that way of going on to change it for the better. I shall call this the problem of constraint. John McDowell is an influential philosopher for whom the problem of constraint has been a central theme, not only as it relates to value theory but as the problem relates to epistemology more broadly. McDowell’s solution to the problem is well known. He thinks it is imperative, a matter of philosophical sanity, to avoid picturing the problem of constraint in such a way as to be seduced by problematic sorts of solutions to the problem. Picturing this problem the wrong way, we can get into a conceptual bind which presses us either to accept an utterly incoherent view of constraint (the Myth of the Given), or to go toward a position which completely abandons constraint altogether, except for the slight constraint of logical consistency (here the image is that of wheels spinning frictionlessly in a void). McDowell disarms the problematic picture of constraint by a series of moves which can be characterized as laying out a third option, the option of quietism.
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