The particular and the general : essays at the interface of ethics and epistemology

This dissertation consists of three chapters exploring the nature of normativity in ethics and epistemology, with an emphasis on insights that can be gleaned by comparing and contrasting debates within those two fields. In chapter 1, I consider particularism, a relatively recent view which holds that, because reasons for action and belief are irreducibly context-dependent, the traditional quest for a general theory of what one ought to do or believe is doomed for failure. In making these claims, particularists assume a general framework according to which reasons are the ground floor normative units undergirding all other normative relations. However, I argue that the claims particularists make about the behavior of reasons undermines the very framework within which they make those claims, thus leaving them without a coherent notion of a reason for action or belief. Chapter 2 concerns a problem arising for certain theories that take the opposite extreme of particularism and posit a fully general theory of what one ought to believe or do. In the epistemic realm, one such theory is process reliabilism. A well-known difficulty for process reliabilism is the generality problem: the problem of determining how broadly or narrowly to individuate the process by which a given belief is formed. Interestingly, an exactly parallel problem faces one of the most dominant contemporary ethical theories, namely Kantianism. I show how, despite their seeming differences, process reliabilism and Kantianism possess a markedly similar structure, and then use this similarity in structure to assess the prospects that each has of ever solving its version of the generality problem.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Berker, A. Selim

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Judith Jarvis Thomson.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41702

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/41702