"Recognizing that a complete recent ownership history may not be obtainable for all archaeological material and every work of ancient art," the museum directors' group says, its members "should have the right to exercise their institutional responsibility to make informed and defensible judgments about the appropriateness of acquiring such an object".
With this commitment private judgment remains defensible even if there is a low probability that its exercise will produce true beliefs, so long as no other better method of tracking truth is available (which also becomes proportionately less likely as one's scepticism increases).
The fact that he now wants to dismiss his acidic writings suggests he lacks character as much as he lacks good judgment and defensible values.
I once heard him say that he thought his work would endure, not only because he believed his judgments were defensible, but also because he had gone to a good deal of trouble to teach himself to write well.
If Barr's decision was based on judgments such as these, it might be completely defensible.
Whether this feature is objectionable depends on whether there are realistic cases in which (i) intervention-based criteria and criteria based on other considerations come into conflict and (ii) it is clear that the causal judgments supported by these other criteria are more defensible than those supported by interventionist criteria.
Whether one regards the verdicts about these cases reached by causal process accounts or by interventionist accounts as more defensible, the very fact that the accounts lead to inconsistent judgments shows that interventionist approaches are not trivial or vacuous, despite their "circular", non-reductive character.
Yes, it results from a series of judgment calls about various methodologies and, yes, one can argue that each decision is "defensible," at least in isolation.
One might say instead that attributions of integrity involve the judgment that an agent acts from a moral point of view those attributing integrity find intelligible and defensible (though not necessarily right) —and that this formal constraint does have substantive implications.
Were our actions defensible?
This reluctance is defensible.
