Approving on the Basis of Moral and Aesthetic Testimony

Abstract

While there is a vibrant debate over whether believing or acting on the basis of moral and aesthetic testimony is ‘defective’, most grant that approving on the basis of normative testimony is verboten. The main goal of this chapter is to defend such affective responses to normative testimony and it does this by arguing that philosophers have relied on the wrong comparison cases: we need to compare minimal contrastive pairs, and better and worse cases of approving on the basis of normative testimony; and once we do so, it is clear that such testimony gives us some reason to approve, and sometimes strong reasons to approve. A subsidiary goal is to show that if approving on the basis of normative testimony is not defective, this should make us optimistic that normative testimony gives us (strong) reasons to believe and act, while making the ‘fishiness’ of these responses harder to explain.