The Biological Basis and Ideational Superstructure of Morality

Abstract

If moral epistemology can be naturalized, there must be genuine moral knowledge, knowledge of what it is morally right for someone or even everyone to do in a particular situation. The naturalist hopes to explain how such knowledge can be acquired by ordinary empirical means, without appealing to a special realm of moral facts separate from the rest of nature, and a special faculty equipped to detect them. Various learning mechanisms for acquiring moral knowledge have been proposed. Most, however, have the following deficiency: What they actually explain is moral acculturation with respect to accepted or author-preferred moral norms, not the acquisition of moral knowledge. Of course, an additional premise to the effect that accepted moral norms or author-preferred norms embody moral truths would deal nicely with this problem, but at the expense of the distinction between opinion and knowledge, or true belief, in which epistemologists are necessarily interested.