ABSTRACT
It is far from obvious that there is any such thing as a moral fact, and that if there are no moral facts then it immediately follows that there can be no moral knowledge. Part of the worry about moral facts is that they don’t seem to be objective in a way that ‘real’ facts, like scientific facts, are. For example, one’s moral judgements seem to largely reflect one’s cultural upbringing. If one holds that there are no moral facts, then one is a moral expressivist. Moral expressivists hold that moral statements do not express facts but rather perform a very different role instead (e.g. expressing one’s support for a certain action or one’s desire to stop certain actions from taking place). Even if one rejects moral expressivism and argues that there are moral facts, it still doesn’t follow that there is moral knowledge since it could be that it is impossible to know these facts. The differences between a moral discourse and a scientific discourse might give one grounds for thinking that this is the case. For example, whereas scientific disagreements seem to be in their nature resolvable, moral disagreements often appear completely intractable. Assuming that there is such a thing as moral knowledge, we then explore what the right epistemology of such knowledge might be. The first proposal we consider was a classical foundationalist theory which held that we had a priori knowledge of basic moral principles which, when coupled with our empirical knowledge of the particular circumstances of the case in hand, enabled us to appropriately form moral judgements about what to do in specific cases. One problem with this view is that it seems to over-intellectualise what is required for moral knowledge. The second proposal we consider is coherentism. This view held that there are no foundational moral beliefs, and even one’s beliefs in moral principles would be open to revision if suitable counter-evidence were to come to light. The final proposal we consider is a type of virtue epistemology which allowed that we could, in certain cases, directly gain moral knowledge – even though one had no independent rational basis for one’s belief – just so long as one appropriately employs one’s epistemic virtues. Such a view may be problematic in that moral knowledge – unlike, say, perceptual knowledge – does seem to essentially involve the possession of appropriate supporting reasons.
