Epistemic Autonomy for Social Epistemologists

Abstract

On the one hand, it seems as though an important way of acquiring full-fledged moral knowledge is this: starting as young children, we simply adopt the moral beliefs that are presupposed by the thoughts and practices of those around us. Certainly, a great deal of our knowledge about other subject matters comes to us in this way: for example, it seems safe to assume that most of our geographical beliefs are acquired from testimony. On pain of sweeping skepticism about geography, it seems we should say: provided that the relevant beliefs are true, and the sources reliable, these beliefs count as knowledge. And in general, one might expect that the standards for knowing would not vary across subject matters. On the other hand, there is a longstanding philosophical tradition of thinking that moral knowledge is special: that it must be arrived at autonomously. R.M. Hare, for example, wrote: “… a man who is faced with … a [moral] problem knows that it is his own problem, and that nobody can answer it for him.” Hare was an anti-realist, but the conviction that one must arrive at answers to moral questions autonomously is shared across the realism/anti-realism divide: some evidence for this is that the method of reflective equilibrium is the favored answer to the question of where moral knowledge comes from, among realists and anti-realists alike. In this essay I attempt to reconcile the sense that moral knowledge must be arrived at autonomously with the apparent fact that much of it is social.