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This chapter discusses the philosophies of Harman and Mackie with a view to highlighting six claims of central concern: (1) whether issues of objectivity should be raised ‘reflexively’ at the meta-level of enquiry; (2) whether the best account of objectivity will essentially vindicate itself in its own terms; (3) the reducibility of moral properties figuring in moral explanations; (4) whether moral explanations are ever the best explanations of belief; (5) the appropriateness in this context of a causal theory of knowledge; and (6) whether the concepts deployed in morality are to a certain extent local or perspectival in the sense of tied in to our particular sensibilities. It is argued that the framework of minimalism about truth is the best way of prosecuting debates over objectivity.

This chapter develops an application of contextualism in the specific case of moral knowledge. The overall aim is the final vindication of a contextualist account of moral justification that supports a cognitivist interpretation of morality. It explains how contextualism compares and contrasts with the dominant coherentist model of moral epistemology in contemporary ethics, namely, an understanding of Rawlsian reflective equilibrium as a coherence theory of justification. It argues that contextualism can be seen as arising from Rawls’s methodological assumptions, if one retains the assumption that considered moral judgements retain a direct source of moral justification even when they derive further warrant from their embedding in a context of justification.

This chapter argues that the bare possibility of moral knowledge in particular cases is already enough to ensure the availability of a certain sort of ‘hedged’ moral principle called a ‘default principle’. Default principles are consistent with holism about reasons because they claim that a given action has a given moral property only if no further feature of the situation explains why it does not. One obvious worry about this proposal is that default principles are vacuous (trivially true). This worry bears interesting parallels to worries about ceteris paribus laws in science. It is argued that once default principles are properly understood, this worry is easily met. The key point is to distinguish there being an explanation for a moral property’s absence from its absence being explained by some feature of the situation.

This chapter explains how a contextualist can argue for rationality both within a tradition of moral enquiry and, equally importantly, across such traditions. An essential part of the latter task is reiterating why, in some cases, an apparent challenge to our ethical outlook does not constitute a challenge at all. The work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor are considered, in order to argue that in so far as their tradition-based models of moral reasoning are plausible, they instantiate contextualism.

This chapter argues that the recent attempts to use Chomsky-style arguments in support of innate moral knowledge are uniformly unconvincing. The chapter proceeds as follows: Section 1 sets out the basic form of the central argument in the Chomskian arsenal — the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument, as well as the conclusions about domain specificity and innate propositional knowledge that are supposed to follow. Section 2 distinguishes three hypotheses about innateness and morality: rule nativism, moral principle nativism, and moral judgment nativism. Sections 3–5 consider each of these hypotheses. It is argued that while there is some reason to favour rule nativism, the arguments that moral principles and moral judgment derive from innate moral knowledge don't work. The capacity for moral judgment is better explained by appeal to innate affective systems rather than innate moral knowledge. In the final section, it is argued that the role of such affective mechanisms in structuring the mind complicates the standard picture about poverty of the stimulus arguments and nativism. For the affective mechanisms that influence cognitive structures can make contributions that are neither domain general nor domain specific.

This chapter claims that the subject matter of moral theory is morality, and that morality is a socially embodied medium of understanding and negotiation over responsibility for things open to human care and effort. Morality is found in practices of responsibility that are not modular with respect to the rest of social life, and that are apt to reflect social differences, including gender, race, and class differences typical in human communities. Feminist ethics, drawing on the work of Carol Gilligan, alleges bias in moral theory and challenges moral reflection and its basis in intuitions when the social perspectives of moral philosophers go unexamined. Contemporary Anglo-American ethics follows a theoretical-juridical model of morality. The chapter introduces an expressive-collaborative model that combines critical and normative reflection on claims to moral knowledge with a significant empirical burden in ethics. It concludes with a new Postscript on recent developments in moral theory.

In this essay, I examine feminist analyses of moral knowledge and consider their implications for the possibility of knowing through testimony in the moral realm. I frame my questions in terms of epistemic responsibility, considering whether feminist analyses of moral knowledge indicate circumstances in which we should rely on others’ moral testimony rather than depend solely on our own moral assessment. Feminist analyses of moral knowledge that draw attention to the important role of moral perception suggest some concerns about moral knowing through testimony, yet also suggest that testimony may be very important in the moral realm. I reconcile these two directions of feminist thought, clarifying what we should expect from responsible moral knowers who remain epistemically dependent. I conclude that if we are to make sense of obtaining moral knowledge through testimony, while avoiding certain undesired ramifications of the analysis, feminist considerations of moral testimony must be embedded in a broader understanding of various forms of our epistemic interdependence. Deferrals to moral testimony must be assessed within the context of certain practices that either engage our critical agency even as we defer, or not. I suggest that these conclusions help identify and remedy some shortcomings of the standard nonfeminist testimony literature, which has thus far had little to say about the moral realm.

This chapter traces the emergence of a theoretical-juridical model of moral theory in the work of English utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick's masterwork, The Methods of Ethics. Through a series of theoretical exclusions and distinctions among morality and ethics, Sidgwick constructs the idea of a pure core of moral knowledge that can be captured by a compact moral system that is formally and practically superior to the supposed diversity of methods in commonsense morality. Sidgwick exhibits unusual self-consciousness in asking whom a scientific ethics is intended to serve, and with unusual candor defends the view that utilitarianism is best understood not as a replacement of commonsense morality for common people, but as the instrument of an exceptional few who may for utilitarian reasons not publicize their use of it.

Chapter 2 focuses on moral knowledge and examines the epistemic component of autonomy that supports a cognitivist, objectivist, and Kantian realist interpretation of right. The argument is set up against contemporary challenges to the very idea of moral knowledge. It addresses two main questions: how we know right and wrong, and how we can justify such knowledge on Kantian grounds. The central moral concept discussed in this chapter is ‘right’; that is, a ‘thin’ concept that captures core features of Kant’s term of art ‘duty’. It is shown that ‘right’ is knowable and that propositions that contain it are true without the need to refer to any facts. In his universalizability formulation, Kant gives a definition of ‘right’ that is also at the same time a test for ‘rightness’. It is argued that Kant adduces epistemic support for the formulation from analysis of ordinary moral ideas, whereas justification follows an a priori path. The a priori justificatory procedure, as reconstructed here, offers us an insight into the practical employment Kant envisages for pure reason.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief description of the aim of this book, which is the development of a contextualist approach to epistemology. This is followed by a discussion of the theoretical foundations of this contextualist approach. An overview of the chapters included in this volume is also presented.

In ”Epistemology and Ethics,” Noah Lemos suggests that moral epistemology is mainly concerned with “whether and how we can have knowledge or justified belief” about moral issues. After addressing skeptical arguments, he considers how the moral epistemologist and moral philosopher should begin their account of moral knowledge. Lemos favors a particularist approach whereby we begin with instances of moral knowledge and use these to formulate and evaluate criteria for moral knowledge. After relating his approach to concerns about the nature of the epistemic justification of moral beliefs as dealt with by foundationalists and coherentists, Lemos responds to arguments against particularist approaches in moral epistemology. Specifically, he addresses the claim that our moral beliefs must receive their justification from an independent moral criterion developed from nonmoral beliefs.

If moral knowledge requires deductively assured conclusions about particular cases, then to block an infinite regress there must be intuitively evident first principles of complete generality to serve as the foundation for particular judgements. But if, with Peirce and Austin, this model of knowledge is rejected, it can be allowed that what is inferential knowledge and what is immediate varies with context. Then it can be explained how to use particular judgements of which are sure to be checked against proposed general principles, and use undoubted general principles, in other situations, to correct or complete knowledge in particular cases. No intuition of any context-independent foundation is needed.

This chapter examines the moral claims of absolute music. It argues that absolute music shares with many other human activities the propensity to produce, in human beings, a kind of ecstasy that might seem appropriate to describe as character-enhancing, consciousness-raising and, therefore, in some vague, perhaps attenuated sense, morally improving, while it lasts. However, being just one of many such activities, absolute music seems to lose that special, magical connection to morality that goes back, one suspects, to its Pythagorean and Orphic roots.

This chapter explores how simple perception, whether moral or not, does not entail belief formation, but its non-doxastic character does not in the least preclude its presenting perceivers with much information about the object perceived. That perception does this explains in good part why it can both justify beliefs appropriately connected with its content and ground knowledge about its object. But if, in perceiving an object, a person processes information—as is widely held among psychologists as well as philosophers—one may wonder whether perception is in some way inferential. Understanding perception requires pursuing this question, and that in turn requires clarifying what constitutes inference. The chapter also examines how perception and inference differ and how each may yield moral knowledge.

This chapter explores the relation between moral and religious knowledge and shows how even the pious can grant that the former is possible independently of the latter. The chapter also explains how ethics and religion can be integrated in a reflective person who takes account of the multiple sources of moral and religious insight. In doing this, it outlines a divine command ethical theory which does not fall prey to the famous Euthyphro problem is soluble, and it shows how it is possible to grant moral authority to religion and, for theists, to God, without denying it to non-theistic sources.

This chapter explores how one might attempt to reconcile two widely held ideas about morality that stand in prima facie tension with one another. The first idea is that moral knowledge — whatever else is true of it and even whether it exists at all — is not empirical knowledge. If there are moral truths, then the most fundamental of those truths are, like the truths of pure mathematics, available from the armchair. The second idea is that lack of experience can be a handicap in the acquisition of moral knowledge, and that experience of the world often proves crucial in its attainment.

Presents and tries to defuse some classic arguments for moral scepticism, and against the possibility of moral knowledge. Considers the regress argument, an argument from relevant alternatives, and a vicious circle argument, and tries to show why we can continue to justifiably believe moral claims even in the absence of a decisive means of undermining these sceptical arguments.

Develops a version of reliabilism about moral knowledge, in an effort to explain how we can have knowledge of all‐things‐considered moral verdicts. Considers a number of objections to reliabilism, and seeks to show how we might begin the task of identifying reliable moral belief‐forming processes.

This chapter provides a comparison between moral and aesthetic knowledge and other aspects of the similarity between moral and aesthetic cognition. The connections between aesthetics and ethics are especially important for understanding moral perception and moral intuition. There is aesthetic perception, as opposed to mere perception of an aesthetic object, just as there is moral perception, as opposed to mere perception of a moral phenomenon. One may also find aesthetic disagreements that, even more than moral disagreements, challenge the view that normative domains have objective standards. The chapter shows how singular moral knowledge is like singular aesthetic knowledge in resting on a response to properties which ground the truth of the normative propositions known.