Ontological Entanglement in the Normative Web

Abstract

Terence Cuneo has recently argued that we have to be committed to the existence of epistemic facts insofar as they are indispensable to theorizing. Furthermore, he argues that the epistemic properties of these facts are inextricably ‘ontologically entangled’ with certain moral properties, such that there exist ‘moral-epistemic’ facts. Cuneo, therefore, concludes that moral realism is true. I argue that Cuneo’s appeal to the existence of moral-epistemic facts is problematic, even granting his argument for the existence of indispensable epistemic facts. I conclude, therefore, that Cuneo’s argument fails to justify moral realism.

Moral Realism and Expert Disagreement

“…If the response is that doing so only opens the door to epistemic facts rather than to moral facts, the door to epistemic facts, in turn, opens the door to moral facts via 'companions in guilt' style arguments, which give reasons to think allowing objective epistemic facts paves a path to objective moral facts. While there are objections against these sorts of epistemic 'companions in guilt' arguments, which attempt to show epistemic facts and moral facts are dis-analogous (Cowie 2016, Winokur 2017 and thus moral realism cannot be argued for by appeal to epistemic realism, there is nothing about the argument from expert disagreement that shows there to be a meaningful dis-analogy between epistemic and moral facts. In other words, it is incumbent on those who would advance 'inference the best explanation' style arguments for anti-realism to also deal with 'companions in guilt' style arguments, as they do not provide independent reasons to think allowing as much normativity as they do does not pave a plausible path to objective moral facts.…”