Susan Haack’s Foundherentism And The Double-Aspect Of Moral Judgments

Abstract

The present article aims to characterize the foundherentist theory defended by Susan Haack to later reflect on how the ‘state-content’ distinction, which is responsible for conferring a double aspect to this theory, may contribute to the understanding of moral judgments. The characterization of both foundherentist theory and Haack’s critiques of foundationalism and coherentism is guided by her book Evidence and Inquire: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (1993). The reflection on moral judgments, especially within the scope of moral epistemology, seeks to lend support to the hypothesis that a wider moral cognitivism, which considers different kinds of moral knowledge, can be thought of as a double-aspect theory. The main advantage of this approach is that the state-content distinction helps to clarify more adequately how moral motivation connects with moral judgments and, consequently, to moral knowledge, avoiding the ‘belief’/‘non-belief’ dichotomy. Among the many details that this explanation needs to fill in order to become a complete metaethical theory, there is an important objection to be answered, which is related to the alleged irrelevance of content of a motivation that accompanies the mental states that we tend to regard as moral judgments. It will be argued that it is possible to glimpse an answer to this objection in the debates about normative reasons and motivating reasons, especially between Bernard Williams (1979) and Derek Parfit (1997).