Deferential Diagnoses
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Title: Deferential Diagnoses
Abstract: Deference to nonmoral testimony is thought to be unproblematic, while deference to moral testimony is intuitively fishy. Much of the debate, then, proposes a candidate problem with moral deference or attempts to vindicate moral deference as equally unproblematic. I propose a different tack. Deference to nonmoral testimony is not unproblematic; it goes wrong in a variety of different ways that I identify and describe in the paper. Thus, the so called “optimists” are, in a way, vindicated: moral deference is not categorically different from nonmoral deference; both can go wrong. But though moral deference goes wrong in all the same ways that nonmoral deference goes wrong, it goes wrong in those ways more often than nonmoral deference. Thus, the “pessimists” about moral deference are also vindicated: moral deference is much more likely to go wrong than deference in any given nonmoral domain.
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