What happens to “knowing” and moral responsibility when we stop talking about vague context and start asking which alternatives actually matter?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. He is core faculty in the Duke Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and has several other appointments. His work focuses primarily on ethics, epistemology, neuroethics, the philosophy of law, and the philosophy of cognitive science.
2. Interview Summary
The interview ranges across several of Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s projects, starting with his defense of ‘contrastivism’ in epistemology. After a brief intro situating him at Duke University and his public-facing work on argumentation (including material hosted through Coursera), he argues that talk of “context” in contextualism is often too underspecified to do real explanatory work: different audiences, purposes, and stakes can all be in play at once, making it unclear what “the” context even is. Instead, he recommends making the relevant ‘contrast class’ explicit—saying, in effect, “I know this rather than those alternatives,” without pretending we’ve precisely fixed a context (while noting attempts like David Lewis’s rules-based approach).
From there the conversation shifts to ethics and moral psychology: why heuristics can be both evolutionarily useful and systematically misleading, and how you can sometimes detect unreliability even without settling the “right” moral theory. In particular, he emphasizes ‘framing effects’ (including order effects) as a way to show that people’s moral verdicts are sensitive to morally irrelevant presentation differences—evidence that the underlying heuristic isn’t tracking the truth, even if moral truths exist. That general methodological theme then gets applied to large-scale collective action problems like climate change, where he presses a “timing” style argument: in many everyday cases (the “joyride,” the warm shower) it can look like an individual abstention merely shifts emissions in time rather than preventing harm, and he contrasts this with contexts (like certain votes) where a specific decision-point can matter. The same structure comes up when discussing vegetarianism: health-based reasons sidestep the collective-action worry, environmental reasons run into it, and harm-to-animals arguments raise different issues—illustrated with the “roadkill” test case and questions about whether your choice can realistically change demand.
Later, he branches into two more “concept-clarifying” case studies. On color, he sketches a view inspired by Aristotle’s ‘healthy’ analogy: just as organisms are primarily healthy while foods and cholesterol levels are “healthy” derivatively (as causes or signs), wavelengths of light can be the primary bearers of color while objects get called red/blue in virtue of how they produce those wavelengths—while acknowledging complications like structural color in fruit and pushing back on the idea that dispositional/reflection accounts avoid the same underlying problems. On argumentation, he offers an epistemic take on ‘begging the question’: an argument is defective when it relies on premises that can’t be justified independently of assuming the conclusion, and he connects this to the broader project of teaching people to diagnose and evaluate real-world reasoning—motivated by concerns about political and moral polarization and developed in his popular book Think Again: How to Reason and Argue and related courses.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:39 - Contrastivism
04:34 - Contextualist response
06:40 - Contextualism with contrast classes
08:47 - Benefits of contrastivist view
10:17 - Stakes vs. knowledge attributions
12:40 - Purpose of theorizing about knowledge
15:10 - Moral intuitions and debunking arguments
19:49 - Heuristics
21:25 - Demonstrating moral heuristics
25:42 - Individual obligations and global warming
30:23 - Does the response overgeneralize?
33:17 - Are all contributions to warming morally wrong?
35:23 - Individual and collective rationality
37:43 - Application to animal ethics
44:43 - Difference in degree vs. kind
45:30 - Roadkill
47:34 - Light theory of color
52:40 - Criticism
58:18 - Dispositionalist approach
1:00:13 - More theory
1:01:00 - Begging the question
1:07:10 - Epistemic view
1:09:05 - Arguer vs. audience
1:12:23 - Relevance to contrast classes
1:14:33 - Begging the question a matter of degree?
1:18:09 - MOOC
1:24:25 - Conclusion
