Search Results

Common sense morality is in a better epistemic position than Egoism, for those who accept common sense morality can modestly vindicate it – they can defend it to their own satisfaction – whereas most Egoists cannot defend Egoism, even modestly. The key to this defence of morality is the importance of moral understanding. What are the implications of recognizing that the focus of moral epistemology should be moral understanding rather than moral knowledge? Moral philosophers already act as if they are aiming for moral understanding, but there are many unanswered questions about moral understanding that need to be addressed in the future.

What is it to understand why a moral proposition is true? Moral understanding, in this sense, differs from moral knowledge (both knowledge that p is true and knowledge why it is true). Moral understanding involves a number of related abilities and is more similar to ‘knowledge how’. Moral understanding is important, moreover, because it is a vital component of morally worthy action: doing the right thing on the basis of moral knowledge (even on the basis of knowledge why an action is right) is not sufficient for the action to have moral worth.

If you want to have and to use moral understanding in a way that could result in morally worthy action, you must not place your trust in moral testimony, defer to moral experts, or suspend judgement in response to moral disagreements. This is significant for the epistemic rationality of responses to disagreement and to testimony, because one of the functions of beliefs about moral matters is to play a role in morally worthy action. If this were their only important function, it would not be epistemically rational to trust moral testimony or to suspend judgment in response to moral disagreements. However, the epistemic rationality of moral beliefs is more complex, because moral beliefs have another function: they play a role in morally right action too. Yet it is still typically not epistemically rational to suspend judgement in response to moral disagreements.

This chapter applies the arguments of previous chapters to the domain of moral belief. The chapter defends the existence of epistemic authority in the moral domain against objections from three directions: (1) there is no moral truth to be discovered, (2) there are no moral experts, and (3) taking a moral belief on authority conflicts with the autonomy of the self. However, the chapter identifies limitations of moral testimony for moral motivation and moral understanding. These limitations reveal the importance of moral communities for the transmission of practically useful and praiseworthy moral beliefs.

This introductory chapter presents a discussion of Blake's ‘Auguries of Innocence’ and ‘The Fly’, and of an extract from Shakespeare's Henry IV Part One. It illustrates the claim that not all philosophical persuasion takes the form of academic argument; that literature can be more effective in this role; that moral understanding involves having one's sensibilities aligned with genuine value, so as to be able to see it right; and that science cannot tell us what to value, or how to construct a moral taxonomy. The chapter compares the appreciation of value in nature with the appreciation of value in art, and questions the idea that human life is of supreme value, just in virtue of being human.

This chapter explores a number of philosophical issues raised by the possibility of arriving at moral views by relying on other people. I defend the Moral Inheritance View, according to which a person whose earliest moral views are inherited from her social environment might very well have substantial moral knowledge even before she is in a position to begin critically reflecting upon or reasoning about those views. More generally, I argue that other people are in principle potentially rich sources of moral knowledge. To the extent that we have reservations about the propriety of forming moral views by relying on others—as opposed to through the exercise of our own autonomous judgment—what is legitimate in those reservations does not derive from its being impossible to acquire moral knowledge in this way, but rather from other sources.

Discussions of virtue often center on the non-cognitive aspects of virtue. But as this chapter argues, there is something special about the virtuous person’s cognition as well. How is this special element is to be understood? One common suggestion is that the virtuous person has knowledge of what to do. But a person can have knowledge by testimony. Intuitively, such a person lacks virtue. The chapter argues that what is characteristic of the virtuous person’s way of making moral judgments is not knowledge but moral understanding. Hills gives a number of reasons for this: moral understanding helps the agent who has it do the right thing reliably; a grasp of the morally relevant factors helps an agent in a complex situation achieve her goals without violating any moral norms; the agent with moral understanding is better able to justify her actions and give advice.

J. David Velleman’s account of emotion as the glue that unifies stories and endows them with meaning is rejected in favor of Jenefer Robinson’s account of the role of responding emotionally to narratives in imparting moral understanding. Robinson’s view is used to expose some pitfalls of emotionally responding to a former child soldier’s story—Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone—and to explain how that text counteracts emotionally overwrought misinterpretation. Two episodes in Beah’s story are apt to provoke imaginative resistance, but a careful reading of his text defuses these responses. Beah’s morally open-ended text is defended as superior to the moral didacticism of an episode in Rousseau’s Emile.

Developmental psychologists have long been interested in conceptual change theories of the nature and the development of certain fundamental human capacities, including our understanding of objects, of number, and of intentional agency. How well does this theory apply to morality? There is some evidence for an innate core of morality, and surely our moral understanding develops over time, both in individuals and within societies. And so the prospects seem promising. This chapter provides a state-of-the-art summary of research into the innate foundations of morality, relating this to the conceptual change framework outlined by Susan Carey and her colleagues.

This chapter sketches a transcendent human rights conception, the distinguishing feature of which is its acknowledgement of human cognitive and moral fallibility. It begins by setting out Kant’s division of the domain of ordinary morality in general, treating his systematic approach as emblematic of his general philosophical non-foundationalism. It then sketches a non-foundationalist interpretation of innate Right before turning to the idea of human rights as a critically transcendent idea of pure practical (moral) reasoning. It concludes with some remarks on what is distinctive about the proposed transcendent human rights conception.