ABSTRACT
What is moral knowledge? How can such knowledge be possible? Here an argument will be put forward for a kind of moderate moral realism which also entails a certain kind of moderate free-will realism. The central premise of this argument is that any kind of realism requires a certain kind of moral realism: that to be a conversant human being, capable of engaging honestly in any kind of human (and possibly non-human) activity, it is necessary to express (or embody) a kind of belief in the possibility of moral truth. What this ‘hinge morality’ does not require, however, is moral certainty, and the qualification of moral knowledge into proper degrees of certainty will be very important not only for this argument for moral realism but also, more broadly, for the nature of wisdom and goodness itself. It is only by understanding the ability to simultaneously both truly believe and be uncertain that moral knowledge can be correctly understood and wisdom achieved.
