Abstract
It can sound absurd to report that you have forgotten a moral truth. Described cases in which people who have lost moral beliefs exhibit the behavioural and phenomenological symptoms of forgetting can seem similarly absurd. I examine these phenomena, and evaluate a range of hypotheses that might be offered to explain them. These include the following proposals: that it is hard to forget moral truths because they are believed on the basis of intuition; that moral forgetting seems puzzling for the same reason that forgetting what you approve or disapprove of seems puzzling; and that moral truths matter too much to us to be easily forgotten. I conclude that the best explanation for the phenomena is a non-cognitivist one: moral forgetting seems puzzling because moral judgements are attitudes of a sort that cannot be lost through forgetting (e.g. desires).
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 2889-2911 |
Number of pages | 23 |
Journal | Philosophical Studies |
Volume | 173 |
Issue number | 11 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Nov 2016 |