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The typical moral cognitivist holds that specifically moral beliefs — beliefs with explicitly evaluative moral content — can, and often in fact do, play an essential explanatory role. While admitting that specifically moral reasons have a place in the explanation of actions, the moral conativist refuses to allow seemingly cognitivist appearances to settle the question of their character: for the moral conativist, what may seem to be practical moral beliefs are in fact specifically moral desires, desires whose contents distinguish them from other desires. The moral cognitivist claims to catch moral reasons within the net of his cognitivist theory of reasons for action. For the moral conativist, specifically moral reasons can be understood only within the framework of a conativist theory of reasons for action. In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume presents two arguments designed to support moral conativism and to subvert moral cognitivism in any of its forms.

This chapter presents a diagnostic account of the state of play in the epistemology of testimony, and proposes a virtue epistemological non-inferentialist alternative. This account depends on arguments substantiating a parallel between the moral cognitivist account of virtuous perception, and a proposed account of epistemically virtuous perception that the virtuous hearer possesses owing to a well-trained testimonial sensibility. He perceives his interlocutor as more, or less, credible in what she is telling him.

People engage in pure moral inquiry whenever they inquire into the moral features of some act, agent, or state of affairs without inquiring into the non-moral features of that act, agent, or state of affairs. The first section of this chapter argues that ordinary people act rationally when they engage in pure moral inquiry, and so any adequate view in metaethics ought to be able to explain this fact. The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation is to provide such an explanation. The remaining sections of the chapter argue that each of the standard views in metaethics has trouble providing such an explanation. A metaethical view can provide such an explanation only if it meets two constraints: it allows ordinary moral inquirers to know the essences of moral properties, and the essence of each moral property makes it rational to care for its own sake whether that property is instantiated.