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814 BOOK REVIEWS principle elaborated in the Development of Doctrine. But the conclusions Ferreira draws in defense of Newman do sure justice to Newman's own aim. "Can you believe something you cannot absolutely prove?" You can, and it is not intellectual dishonesty. Candler School of Theology Emory University JEREMY E. MILLER What Is and What Ought to Be Done: .An Essay on Ethics and Epistemology . By MORTON WHITE. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Pp. 131. White's theory of ethics consists in the application of " epistemological corporatism" to moral beliefs. Like some other contemporary philosophers , he wants to avoid the semantic approach characteristic of earlier analytic philosophy. The proper questions are epistemological (5, 6) and the proper epistemology is corporatism, the view that in the face of challenging evidence we do not affirm or deny one particular belief, but we are at liberty to revise other assumptions (17, 18, 27). So far White is with Quine, but White insists against Quine that we do not always make all of our convictions liable to revision, only more limited " bodies of belief" (19). Thus White argues for limited instead of total or holistic corporatism (20). Corporatism in morality means that we do not test normative beliefs in isolation but we test them in conjunction with descriptive beliefs. We test batches of beliefs and in principle any of them can be rejected (15). Our beliefs, expressed in premises and arranged syllogistically, may sometimes lead to conclusions we reject, and the rejection may lead us to deny or amend a descriptive or a moral belief which was part of the argument (29). For example, (1) Whoever takes the life of a human being does something that ought not to be done. (2) The mother took the life of a fetus in her womb. (3) Every living fetus in the womb of a human being is a human being. Therefore, (4) The mother took the life of a human being. Therefore, (5) The mother did something that ought not to be done (30). Now suppose, says White, that one was inclined heretofore to accept the premises of this argument, but one finds one cannot accept the conclu~ BOOK REVIEWS 315 sion. One might be led to revise the major normative premise (1), but one is just as free to change the descriptive premises, including the claim that a fetus is a human being (30-31). We are free to deny or alter a descriptive premise in order to believe that the mother did not do anything she ought not to have done. White does not deny that one may extract the descriptive premises of a mixed normative-descriptive argument and test them corporatistically. One may also isolate the moral premise and test it in some other mixed normative-descriptive argument. What one may not do is to test the normative premise, parallel to the way in which the extracted descriptive premises can be tested, apart from some mixed argument. Descriptive premises can be tested on their own (albeit corporatistically), but normative ones cannot. The reason for this asymmetry is that normative beliefs presuppose descriptive ones (33). Thus there is no way, parallel to the extraction and independent testing of descriptive premises, that one can isolate and test the major moral premise. How do we test mixed arguments~ White's claim is that we would reject or affirm a conclusion insofar as it accorded with our moral feelings, just as ::

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