Against Moral Deference

Is there a problem if you form the belief that capital punishment is morally wrong by deferring to a reliable moral expert? While deferring to your professor about facts concerning physics seems fine, deferring about the morality of capital punishment triggers negative intuitions. In this thesis, I examine these intuitions and investigate whether there are any non-epistemic reasons to not defer about moral matters. I construct and defend a new variety of moral deference pessimism, the view that there is something problematic about forming and sustaining moral beliefs, or about acting, on the basis of moral testimony. My account proposes that recurrent moral deference, i.e. moral deference that happens repeatedly, is pro tanto bad insofar as, and to the extent that, it interferes with the exercise and development of our capacity for practical deliberation. This interference occurs as instances of practical deliberation are being replaced with deference. Thus, when we defer, we do not exercise and do not develop our capacity for practical deliberation. This is pro tanto bad because this capacity has instrumental and extrinsic final value. My investigation starts with moral deference, but my practical deliberation view is able to offer a more comprehensive account, which covers other kinds of deference that seem suspicious, such as prudential and aesthetic deference. As such, this project aims to provide a systematic account of the pro tanto non-epistemic badness of deference, that is in broad accordance with our intuitions, both in morality and beyond.