Courses taught:

• Argumentation analysis, semantics and logic (autumn 2023 and spring 2024)
• Epistemology (autumn 2023 and spring 2024)
• Metaethics (autumn 2022 and spring 2023)

Seminar teacher, supervision, TA-ing:

• Population ethics (autumn 2016 and spring 2017)
• Introduction to logic and philosophy of language (autumn 2013, University of Oslo)
• Introduction to metaphysics and philosophy of mind (spring 2014 and 2015, University of Oslo)

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Debunking Debunked?: Challenges, Prospects, and the Threat of Self-Defeat

  2023. Conrad Bakka.

  Thesis (Doc)

  Metaethical debunking arguments often conclude that no moral belief is epistemically justified. Early versions of such arguments largely relied on metaphors and analogies and left the epistemology of debunking underspecified. Debunkers have since come to take on substantial and broad-ranging epistemological commitments. The plausibility of metaethical debunking has thereby become entangled in thorny epistemological issues. In this thesis, I provide a critical yet sympathetic evaluation of the prospects and challenges facing such arguments in light of this development. In doing so, I address the following central question: how could genealogical information undermine the epistemic justification of moral beliefs? 

  In Part I, I begin answering the central question by extracting explicit and implicit epistemic principles from three popular debunking arguments. These arguments, due to Gilbert Harman, Richard Joyce, and Sharon Street, generate principles concerning ontological parsimony, explanatory dispensability, epistemic insensitivity, lack of epistemic safety, unexplained reliability, epistemic coincidences, and explanatory constraints on rational belief. Having set out the principles tasked with explaining how genealogical information undermines, Part II of the thesis seeks to evaluate whether debunking arguments built on them succeed. To this end, I consider two types of challenges faced by such arguments. 

  First, there are strategies that attempt to block global moral debunking arguments. I argue that one popular such strategy, the so-called ‘third-factor strategy’, has been misunderstood. When understood correctly, it is of no help in answering debunking arguments. I then flesh out an alternative and more promising strategy for blocking such arguments. I then turn to internal challenges facing debunkers, particularly those who rely on ‘explanationist’ principles. I argue that explanationist debunking arguments, as well as most others, fall prey to one or more of four internal challenges: the implausibility of first-order epistemic principles, the threat of overgeneralization, the threat of self-defeat, and the need for costly metaepistemic commitments.

  I conclude that current debunking arguments fail to establish that no moral belief is justified. By analyzing why existing arguments fail, I develop two conditions of adequacy that debunkers must satisfy in order to navigate the internal challenges successfully. I end by suggesting future directions that debunkers should pursue to rehabilitate the prospects for global moral debunking arguments.

  Read more about Debunking Debunked?

• Unbelievable Errors: An Error Theory about All Normative Judgements, written by Bart Streumer

  2020. Conrad Bakka. Journal of Moral Philosophy 17 (2), 245-248

  Article

  Read more about Unbelievable Errors: An Error Theory about All Normative Judgements, written by Bart Streumer

Show all publications by Conrad Bakka at Stockholm University