Kulp - Knowing moral truth : a theory of metaethics and moral knowledge

Knowing Moral Truth

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham Boulder New York London

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To my wife, Akemi Odomo

There are many people over the years with whom I have discussed matters dealt with in this book; I have profited greatly from their insights. The following stand out as especially meriting my appreciation: Mane Hajdin, Michael Hickson, William Parent, William Prior, Robert Shanklin, and Artur Szutta. In particular, I want to thank Robert Audi for his inspiration and for his penetrating commentary on various parts of the book in earlier forms. I also wish to thank audiences at the University of TexasSan Antonio, the University of Gdansk, Poland, and Santa Clara University for helpful commentary on presented papers which bear on many parts of this book.

In addition, I wish to thank Santa Clara Universitys Markkula Center for Applied Ethics for their generosity in awarding me a Hackworth Faculty Research Grant for work on this book. I also wish to thank Santa Clara Universitys Office of the Provost, for awarding me both sabbatical leave and for a course release under the Santa Clara University Faculty Research Course Release Program. The universitys assistance has been invaluable to this project.

I also gratefully acknowledge permission to quote from several of my previous publications. My thanks to International Philosophical Quarterly, for permission to quote from my article, Disagreement and the Defensibility of Moral Intuitionism, International Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 56, issue 224 (December 2016): 487502. Also, for quotations which are here used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc, I wish to thank both Jill Graper Hernandez and the Continuum International Publishing Group for allowing me to quote from my article Moral Facts and the Centrality of Intuitions, in The New Intuitionism, edited by Jill Graper Hernandez (New York and London: Continuum, 2011): 4866. And finally, I wish to thank Springer Publishing Company for permission to quote from my article, The Pre-Theoreticality of Moral Intuitions, Synthese Vol. 191 (October 2014): 3759778.

Last but hardly least, I wish to thank my wife, Akemi Odomo, whose constant support was the sine qua non of writing this book.

On the morning of December 14, 2012, twenty-year-old Adam Peter Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and began shooting the schools occupants. By the time Lanza died at the scene of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, twenty-six people lay dead or dying. In addition to Lanzas death, six of the schools staff members, most of them teachers, were killed. Their names are:

Rachel Davino

Dawn Hochsprung

Anne Marie Murphy

Lauren Rousseau

Mary Sherlach

Victoria Soto

Twenty of the schools children were also shot to death. Their names and ages are as follows:

Charlotte Bacon, 6

Daniel Barden, 7

Olivia Engel, 6

Josephine Gay, 7

Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6

Dylan Hockley, 6

Madeleine F. Hsu, 6

Catherine V. Hubbard, 6

Chase Kowalski, 7

Jesse Lewis, 6

James Mattioli, 6

Grace McDonnell, 7

Emilie Parker, 6

Jack Pinto, 6

Noah Pozner, 6

Caroline Previdi, 6

Jessica Rekos, 6

Avielle Richman, 6

Benjamin Wheeler, 6

Allison N. Wyatt, 6

Nancy Lanza, mother of Adam Lanza, was the twenty-seventh victim. She was found dead at the family home, with four gunshot wounds to the head. The police believe that she had been shot while sleeping.

As of this writing, this incident remains the third largest mass-killing of its kind in US history.

There are many ways to think about these killings. We might look at it psychologically: What psychopathy might have induced Lanza to murder these people, in particular the small children? We might look at it sociologically: Were there any especially strong societal stressors that conduced to Lanza behaving this way? Legal issues: Should the shooter be judged criminally insane? Political issues: Would a change in gun laws have prevented this event from happening? And we can certainly look at it morally.

Lets assume that Lanza was in possession of his senses when he committed this slaughteran assumption admittedly difficult to confirm because Lanza killed himself before a psychiatric examination could be performed. That is, lets suppose that Lanza chose to do what he did, and therefore was responsible for his actions. At first blush, there could scarcely be anything more straightforward than that what Lanza did was morally wrong in the extreme. Similar moral judgments seem applicable: impermissible, unjustifiable, contemptible, abhorrent, cruel, vicious, perverse... the list is long. A central thesis of this book is that what appears to us at first blush is in the end, after rigorous analysis, quite correct: Lanzas behavior is a paradigm case of moral wrongness.

Who in the world could think otherwise? Well, there are a lot of people who, officially at any rate, think otherwise: thoughtful people, in fact. But these people assuredly dont represent the views of the proverbial man in the street. The average person would find the Sandy Hook Shootings not only deeply upsetting, but profoundly morally wrongand would point to the immorality of the event as (at least part of) the cause of their upset. Indeed, they would consider this act wrong no matter where it occurred, when it occurred, or who performed it. It is wrong, period. And I emphasize that this judgment is enshrined in the criminal law of any nation with which I am familiar. But it is at this juncture that our average person parts company with some of the intellectual cognoscenti. For some of these experts would find the act morally wrong only in some restricted, qualified respect, not wrong,