What Is Moral Testimony? Taking Someone's Word About Right and Wrong

In nearly every area of life, deferring to someone better informed is the rational thing to do, and nobody thinks less of a person for accepting a doctor's diagnosis or a mechanic's judgement without independently verifying it. Moral questions feel different, and a person who says they oppose something because a trusted friend told them to is generally regarded as having got something wrong even if the friend is right and the position is correct. The puzzle is that the usual reasons for deference apply equally, since moral questions are difficult, since some people think about them more carefully than others, and since nobody has time to work everything out personally. Either the reaction is a mistake to be corrected, or there is something distinctive about moral belief that makes deference inappropriate there and not elsewhere, and philosophers have defended both conclusions.

Several accounts of the discomfort have been developed and each has difficulties:

• •Understanding matters, since a moral belief held without grasping the reasons cannot guide action in new situations
• •Virtue requires the right motivation, and acting well because told to lacks something that acting well from understanding has
• •Moral views are constitutive of who a person is in a way that factual beliefs are not, so borrowing them is a kind of abdication
• •Identifying reliable moral advisers requires the very judgement that deference was meant to replace
• •There may be no moral expertise to defer to, which is a claim about the subject rather than about the deferring
• •The discomfort may simply be a prejudice, defensible on none of these grounds and best abandoned

The reaction is not uniform and the exceptions are informative. Almost everyone accepts deference for children, who are taught moral views before they can evaluate them and are expected to adopt them on authority. Deference is also widely accepted where the moral question turns on facts the adviser knows better, since the disagreement is then factual rather than moral, which suggests much apparent moral deference is not moral at all. Religious traditions build on moral authority explicitly and many people within them regard deference as appropriate rather than defective. Professional ethics involves taking guidance from bodies with more experience. And people consistently defer to those with direct experience of a situation they have not faced, which is arguably the strongest case for it. These exceptions suggest that the discomfort attaches to a narrower target than the general principle, possibly to adopting a view while remaining able to examine it and choosing not to.

Judgements of taste face a structurally similar problem and comparing the two clarifies both. Someone who says a piece of music is excellent because a respected critic said so is generally regarded as having missed the point, in much the way the moral case feels defective, and the explanation seems clearer there, since the value of aesthetic engagement lies partly in the experience of it and a borrowed verdict delivers nothing of that. That suggests one account of the moral case, namely that the value lies in the working out rather than only in arriving at the right answer. The comparison also reveals a difference, since nobody has an obligation to reach correct aesthetic judgements while the moral case involves genuine stakes for other people, and an agent who defers and consequently acts rightly has produced a better outcome than one who reasons independently and gets it wrong. That asymmetry is why the two cases do not resolve identically.

The question is not merely academic, since a great deal of moral life involves taking positions on matters one cannot personally investigate. Complex policy questions have moral dimensions that depend on empirical detail most people will never master. Historical and cultural situations distant from one's own experience are hard to judge independently. Testimony from people who have experienced something one has not is widely and reasonably treated as carrying weight, and the argument that it should is essentially an argument for moral deference under another description. Against that, the same structure can be used to avoid responsibility, since deferring to an institution or an authority has historically enabled people to hold positions they would not have reached alone and to disclaim responsibility for them. The practical conclusion most philosophers reach is that deference is sometimes appropriate and that the reasons for it need stating rather than assuming.

Deferring to an expert is ordinary everywhere except on moral questions, where it strikes people as defective even when the adviser is right. Explanations appeal to understanding, motivation, identity and the judgement needed to pick an adviser, and each has difficulties. The exceptions, including children, experience-based testimony and factual disagreements, suggest the discomfort attaches to a narrower target than the general principle.