Table Of ContentTHE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF MORAL
EPISTEMOLOGY
The Routledge Handbook of Moral Epistemology brings together philosophers, cognitive scientists,
developmental and evolutionary psychologists, animal ethologists, intellectual historians, and
educators to provide the most comprehensive analysis of the prospects for moral knowledge ever
assembled in print. The book’s thirty chapters feature leading experts describing the nature of moral
thought, its evolution, childhood development and neurological realization. Various forms of moral
skepticism are addressed along with the historical development of ideals of moral knowledge and
their role in law, education, legal policy, and other areas of social life.
Highlights include:
• Analyses of moral cognition and moral learning by leading cognitive scientists
• Accounts of the normative practices of animals by expert animal ethologists
• An overview of the evolution of cooperation by preeminent evolutionary psychologists
• Sophisticated treatments of moral skepticism, relativism, moral uncertainty, and know-how by
renowned philosophers
• Scholarly accounts of the development of Western moral thinking by eminent intellectual
historians
• Careful analyses of the role played by conceptions of moral knowledge in political liberation
movements, religious institutions, criminal law, secondary education, and professional codes of
ethics articulated by cutting-edge social and moral philosophers.
Aaron Zimmerman is Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Santa Barbara, and the
author of two books: Moral Epistemology (2010) and Belief: A Pragmatic Picture (2018).
Karen Jones is Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne. She has written extensively about
trust, what it is, and when it is justified. She is the coeditor, with Francois Schroeter, of The Many
Moral Rationalisms (2018). Much of her work is from a feminist perspective.
Mark Timmons is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. He specializes in Kant’s
ethics and metaethics. A collection of his essays on Kant, Significance and System: Essays on Kant’s Ethics
was published in 2017. He is currently at work on two books: one on Kant’s doctrine of virtue and
another (with Terry Horgan) on moral phenomenology.
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important fields in philosophy, providing accessible yet thorough assessments of key problems,
themes, thinkers, and recent developments in research.
All chapters for each volume are specially commissioned and written by leading scholars in the
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in philosophy. They are also valuable teaching resources as accompaniments to textbooks, antholo-
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ALSO AVAILABLE:
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF COLLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY
Edited by Marija Jankovic and Kirk Ludwig
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SCIENTIFIC REALISM
Edited by Juha Saatsi
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PACIFISM AND NON-VIOLENCE
Edited by Andrew Fiala
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Edited by Rocco J. Gennaro
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE OF ADDICTION
Edited by Hanna Pickard and Serge Ahmed
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF MORAL EPISTEMOLOGY
Edited by Aaron Zimmerman, Karen Jones, and Mark Timmons
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbooks-in-
Philosophy/book-series/RHP
THE ROUTLEDGE
HANDBOOK OF MORAL
EPISTEMOLOGY
Edited by
Aaron Zimmerman
Karen Jones
Mark Timmons
First published 2019
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Aaron Zimmerman, Karen Jones, and Mark Timmons to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
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registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
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A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-81612-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-71969-6 (ebk)
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CONTENTS
Contributors viii
Preface to Routledge Handbook of Moral Epistemology xiv
SECTION I
Science 1
1 The Quest for the Boundaries of Morality 15
Stephen Stich
2 The Normative Sense: What is Universal? What Varies? 38
Elizabeth O’Neill and Edouard Machery
3 Normative Practices of Other Animals 57
Sarah Vincent, Rebecca Ring, and Kristin Andrews
4 The Neuroscience of Moral Judgment 84
Joanna Demaree-Cotton and Guy Kahane
5 Moral Development in Humans 105
Julia W. Van de Vondervoort and J. Kiley Hamlin
6 Moral Learning 124
Shaun Nichols
7 Moral Reasoning and Emotion 139
Joshua May and Victor Kumar
8 Moral Intuitions and Heuristics 157
Piotr M. Patrzyk
v
Contents
9 The Evolution of Moral Cognition 174
Leda Cosmides, Ricardo Andrés Guzmán, and John Tooby
SECTION II
Normative Theory 229
10 Ancient and Medieval Moral Epistemology 239
Matthias Perkams
11 Modern Moral Epistemology 254
Kenneth R. Westphal
12 Contemporary Moral Epistemology 274
Robert Shaver
13 The Denial of Moral Knowledge 289
Richard Joyce
14 Nihilism and the Epistemic Profile of Moral Judgment 304
Jonas Olson
15 Relativism and Pluralism in Moral Epistemology 316
David B. Wong
16 Rationalism and Intuitionism—Assessing Three Views about the
Psychology of Moral Judgments 329
Christian B. Miller
17 Moral Perception 347
Robert Audi
18 Moral Intuition 360
Matthew S. Bedke
19 Foundationalism and Coherentism in Moral Epistemology 375
Noah Lemos
20 Moral Theory and Its Role in Everyday Moral Thought and Action 387
Brad Hooker
SECTION III
Applications 401
21 Methods, Goals, and Data in Moral Theorizing 409
John Bengson, Terence Cuneo, and Russ Shafer-Landau
vi
Contents
22 Moral Knowledge as Know-How 427
Jennifer Cole Wright
23 Group Moral Knowledge 440
Deborah Tollefsen and Christopher Lucibella
24 Moral Epistemology and Liberation Movements 454
Lauren Woomer
25 Moral Expertise 469
Alison Hills
26 Moral Epistemology and Professional Codes of Ethics 482
Alan Goldman
27 Teaching Virtue 493
Nancy E. Snow and Scott Beck
28 Decision Making under Moral Uncertainty 508
Andrew Sepielli
29 Public Policy and Philosophical Accounts of Desert 522
Steven Sverdlik
30 Religion and Moral Knowledge 537
C.A.J. Coady
Index 552
vii
CONTRIBUTORS
Kristin Andrews is York Research Chair in the Philosophy of Animal Minds and Associ-
ate Professor of Philosophy at York University in Toronto, Canada, and is the author of two
books: Do Apes Read Minds? Toward a New Folk Psychology (MIT 2012) and The Animal Mind
(Routledge 2015).
Robert Audi is John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
His research interests focus on ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, religious episte-
mology, and philosophy of mind and action. He is the author of numerous books and arti-
cles, including Moral Perception (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Means, Ends, and Persons:
The Meaning and Psychological Dimensions of Kant’s Humanity Formula (Oxford University
Press, 2015).
Scott Beck is the Head Principal at Norman High School in Norman, Oklahoma, and
holds a PhD in educational leadership and policy studies. He serves on the Leadership Team
for the Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing at the University of Oklahoma.
Matthew S. Bedke is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of British
Columbia. He has published widely in metaethics, with particular interest in the nature
of normativity, moral intuitions and their epistemology, reasons internalism, motivational
internalism, and non-representationalist theories of normative thought and language. He
has recently edited a special volume with the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Representation
and Evaluation.
John Bengson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madi-
son, working primarily in epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and
philosophical methodology. He is coeditor of Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and
Action (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Terence Cuneo is Marsh Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at the University
of Vermont. He is the author of The Normative Web (Oxford University Press, 2007), Speech
viii
Contributors
and Morality (Oxford University Press, 2014), and Ritualized Faith (Oxford University Press,
2016).
Russ Shafer-Landau is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
He is the author of Moral Realism: A Defense (Oxford University Press, 2003) and the editor
of Oxford Studies in Metaethics.
C.A.J. (Tony) Coady is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne.
His books include the influential Testimony: A Philosophical Study (1992) and the widely cited
Morality and Political Violence (2008). In 2005, he gave the Uehiro Lectures on Practical Ethics
at the University of Oxford, and in 2012 he delivered the Leverhulme lectures at Oxford.
Leda Cosmides is Distinguished Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, where she codirects the Center for Evolution-
ary Psychology with John Tooby. She received the AAAS Prize for Behavioral Science
Research, the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for an
Early Career Contribution to Psychology, and a Lifetime Career Award from the Human
Behavior & Evolution Society.
Joanna Demaree-Cotton is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Yale University. Her
research focuses especially on how empirical psychology can shed light on the moral and
epistemic status of judgment-forming processes. Recent work examines whether framing
effects affect the reliability of moral intuition and asks how psychology can help us identify
distorting influences on intuitions used in philosophical argument.
Alan Goldman is Kenan Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the College of William &
Mary. He is the author of eight books, the most recent being Reasons from Within and Phi-
losophy and the Novel. Emulating Beethoven, Schubert, and Dvorak, he is currently working
on a final ninth major work on pleasure, happiness, well-being, and meaning in life, topics
suitable for an old man.
Ricardo Andrés Guzmán is Associate Professor of Economics at the Centro de Investi-
gación en Complejidad Social (Center for Research on Social Complexity) at Universidad del
Desarrollo in Santiago, Chile. He is interested in the intersection of behavioral economics and
evolutionary psychology, moral philosophy, and the application of computational methods for
understanding social change and history.
J. Kiley Hamlin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia
in Canada. Her research aims to help tease apart the roles of nature and nurture in humans’
social and moral lives by examining the developmental foundations of humans’ tendency
to evaluate others as prosocial or antisocial and to engage in cooperative and uncooperative
behaviors themselves.
Alison Hills is Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor at
St John’s College. Her recent research has focused on the intersection between ethics and
epistemology. Her book, The Beloved Self, was published by Oxford University Press in 2010.
ix
