“A kind of science-envy is often visible in much of what analytic philosophers have had to say about the question of evidence in ethics… In some cases, however, what deprives us of the truth is not scientism, but other forms of prejudice.”

In the following guest post, Sophie Grace Chappell, Professor of Philosophy at The Open University, discusses what counts as evidence in moral philosophy, how methodological norms have excluded certain forms of evidence, and why this is a problem.

This is the first in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.

(Posts in this series will remain pinned to the top of the homepage for several days following initial publication.)

[photo of cases painted by Robyn Rich]

Ethical Evidence, Ethical Experience, and Shamelessness
by Sophie Grace Chappell 

Scientists, we’re told, start by compiling data, e.g. observations of the positions of the stars and planets over time, and then construct a theory that makes sense of those observations. Some philosophers say explicitly that they see the moral philosopher’s job as analogous. The scientist’s task, they tell us, is to build a scientific theory, a structure of laws or lawlike generalizations that neatly fits and explains the scientific data; likewise the moral theorist’s task is to build a moral theory, also consisting of laws or generalizations, that neatly fits and explains the moral data.

This story is bad philosophy of science. There are some examples in science where what is going on is, at least in part, something like this points-to-pattern model of science (if you want a ruder name, call it the Rorschach-ink-blot model): we do a survey and find a correlation, and then confabulate a generalizable reason for that correlation. But there are plenty of other examples in science where what is going on is nothing like this. Much science is not about developing a theory at all, but about monitoring and measurement, e.g. of atmospheric CO2 or mean global temperature; or it is about invention, e.g. making a COVID vaccine or a rechargeable battery or a solar-energy panel. And even where the scientist’s primary aim is explanatory theory-building rather than measurement or new technology, her explanations need not be general in form: the explanations provided by Newton’s laws, and the explanation why transition metals are conductive, are general in ways that the explanations of the Wall Street Crash and the San Andreas Fault simply aren’t.

The points-to-pattern model of science fails because it fails—ironically enough—to account adequately for everything that actually goes on under the aegis of science. A points-to-pattern model of moral theory seems even less likely to succeed. For a start: what, if anything, could it possibly mean to talk of the moral data?

“If anything”: I have myself sometimes said that “Nothing in ethics stands to general normative truths as data stands to theory in science.” I now think that is true, but understated: not that many things stand in that relation in science either, not at least if the relation is construed as the points-to-pattern model.

There is still a good question in the offing: “What is evidence in ethics?” This is a question that ethicists should ask themselves more. A bit of methodological consciousness-raising can get us away from the points-to-pattern model that, despite everything, seems all too often to be our implicit, and so uncriticized, method in ethics. Reflecting on the question may also dispel a kind of misplaced methodological guilt that ca haunt ethicists. The move from evidence to theory is supposed to be a move that begins from the facts, and ethicists have been inoculated against the very idea of “moral facts”. Facts, they think, are one thing, and values quite another.

For sure, though, philosophers have found all sorts of different (and not necessarily competing) accounts of evidence in ethics: thought-experiments and isolation tests and the method of cases, “toy” models and intuition-pumps, heuristics, and the various methods that call themselves experimental philosophy.

Two particularly important answers have been “intuitions” and “harm and benefit”; both deserve comment. My comment on the first is that philosophers’ conceptions of “ethical intuitions” have ranged from the grossly implausible to the completely trivial, with surprisingly little in the middle of the range. No one should agree that there is a special and mysteriously automatic source of directly-cognized non-inferential moral knowledge called “intuitions”. Everyone should agree that, if people just want to call our unsystematic but reflective moral beliefs “intuitions”, then they may.

My comment on the second is that too many ethicists have shied away from taking evidence of harm and benefit as evidence for ethics because, apparently, they are afraid of appearing to be consequentialists. For one thing, this seems an oddly naïve affirmation of the consequent: I can trot without being a horse, and I can use consequentialist methods without being a consequentialist. For another, taking harm and benefit as ethical evidence, evidence for moral verdicts, is not a consequentialist method anyway. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Anscombe, Foot, and Williams all use this method, and no one is more clearly non-consequentialist than them.

With or without the points-to-pattern model of moral theory, a kind of science-envy is often visible in much of what analytic philosophers have had to say about the question of evidence in ethics. This bias is noticeable in my list above; two items that the list should certainly contain, but doesn’t, are wow-moments, epiphanies, and stories, narratives (especially first-person ones).

I have written a book about the first of these categories (Epiphanies: an Ethics of Experience, OUP 2022). One thing that I hope is plain from that book is how much of our ethical reflection and justification in real life does not take a scientific form so much as a poetic or aesthetic one. Whatever the metaphysics of value may be, its epistemology, for us, is very often an epistemology of being presented with values, being struck by values, perhaps even being overwhelmed by them, in the way that we are struck or overwhelmed by beauty, or the otherwise dramatic, in art or nature.

The second category, that of narrative, overlaps and is continuous with the category of epiphany: most epiphanies have their full meaning only within some narrative structure, and many, perhaps most, ethically significant narratives are about—or are—epiphanies. Though some scientific explanations are clearly narrative in form, as with the San Andreas Fault, still narrative too is more naturally seen as an aesthetic or artistic category than a scientific one.

We have then a wide variety of types of evidence in ethics, and simple-minded science-envying prejudice should not be allowed to blind us to that variety, or to rob us of the epistemic opportunities that this variety creates for us.

In some cases, however, what deprives us of the truth is not scientism, but other forms of prejudice.

A particular priority is rightly given to some forms of first-person narrative as ethical evidence. It is so, for instance, with racial oppression. On the subject of slavery in the ante-bellum Confederacy, no one has more right to speak than the slaves themselves. What they say is—ceteris paribus—overriding as ethical evidence. If their owners and drivers say that being slaves didn’t really hurt them, or that being bought and sold or branded or beaten or robbed of their children didn’t really do them any harm, and so wasn’t wrong or bad, then the slaves or ex-slaves are uniquely placed to contradict this. (If they can speak at all; of course they might be too broken in spirit to have anything to say about their own predicament, or they might have gone Stockholm-syndrome about the terrible injustices that have been done to them.)

There was then—and there is now—a kind of obscene impertinence, a kind of epistemic and political shamelessness,[1] in the spectacle of comfortable affluent whites holding forth to each other about racial oppression, e.g. to deny that it existed (and exists), without giving any kind of hearing or platform to those who were and are actually oppressed; often, indeed, while actively excluding them. Shamelessness is the hallmark of this kind of exclusionary discourse; and sometimes that shamelessness can itself be a serious obstacle to those who are working to redress these kinds of epistemic injustice. As I have written elsewhere:[2]

There is a scene in the fine 2016 film Denial where Deborah Lipstadt and her lawyers are constructing their defense to a libel action brought against her by the Holocaust denier David Irving. To show, against Irving, that there was nothing fake about the Nazis’ mass murders in 1941–5, Lipstadt wants to go into the witness box herself, and she wants Holocaust survivors to testify too. Her lawyers dissuade her. It is not that she and the survivors do not have a convincing story, and one that any decent interlocutor would be ashamed and embarrassed to deny, dispute or question. The point is that Irving will not be convinced—nor ashamed, nor embarrassed—to carry on with an aggressive and skeptical cross-examination of frail and vulnerable old people who, both psychologically and physically, have lived out the rest of their lives in the shadow of the hellish nightmare of Auschwitz.

In Wittgenstein’s famous phrase [Philosophical Investigations I, 257], “see how much stage-setting must already be in place” before a “rational debate” can even begin. See, too, how some of the key stage-setting is ethical. We presuppose certain minimal standards of truth, rationality, and openness to evidence in our interlocutors… it is very difficult to discuss proofs of the reality of anything with people who will not accept the same standards of proof as any reasonable person accepts in any other debate… it is also very difficult to debate with people who do not accept the same standards of shame.  

To my mind, the trouble with a lot of the contemporary “transgender debate” is that it too is shameless. A lot of it consists of cisgender people who are intensely ideologically hostile to the very existence of transgender people, talking to each other about trans people. This happens on social media—of course—and on YouTube; it happens in arts and literary and philosophical festivals; it happens (ad nauseam) in press and parliament; it happens in philosophical journals; it happens in churches and revival meetings; it happens in government-commissioned reviews of health policy. Those who actually are transgender have no effective voice whatever in these discussions, which monotonously and consistently and systematically treat them as objects, obstacles, a problem to be eliminated as soon as possible—or indeed as a threat of some kind, a shadowy “woke mob” full of violent and perverted extremists. And if trans people try to resist this fusillade of demonizing lies, or to gain a voice in such forums, they are cold-shouldered, excluded, denounced for being “biased”, ignored, ridiculed, abused, and quite often actually threatened. All of this, it seems to me, is an abuse of the norms of ethical evidence which is both shameless, and also a terrible shame.

That is why I have written a book—Trans Figured—that aims, among other things, to present its readers with just the sort of first–person narrative that, I argued above, should have evidential priority in such debates. To what extent will it get a hearing from those who are so intent on silencing the voices of transgender people? Well, epiphanies do happen. I live in hope.

[1] See also my ““Epistemic and political shame”, in Paul Katsafanas, ed., Fanaticism and the history of Philosophy, Routledge 2023. Online draft at (99+) Epistemic and political shame | Sophie grace – Academia.edu.

[2] Sophie Grace Chappell, Trans Figured: on being a transgender person in a cisgender world (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024), p.35.

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