Card 3.1.3 · Root III — Ethics and Axiology
Moral Epistemology
How would you check whether a moral claim is true?
This question asks how moral knowledge would be possible — by what route anyone could come to know that something is wrong.
On this card
Where it sits
Under 3.1 Meta-ethics. Borders 2.2 Sources of knowledge, 2.3 Structure of justification.
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The rival answers
| Position | Route to moral knowledge |
|---|---|
| Intuitionism | Some moral truths are self-evident to a mature mind |
| Reflective equilibrium | Revise principles and judgements against each other, in either direction, until they cohere — an equilibrium Rawls holds to be revisable, never final |
| Moral perception | We perceive moral features much as we perceive other features |
| Empirical naturalism | Empirical inquiry into the natural facts that, on naturalist accounts, constitute or ground moral properties |
| Revelation-based | Revelation is treated as a source of moral knowledge beyond or alongside unaided reason |
| Skepticism | Moral knowledge or justified moral belief is unavailable, globally or in some domain |
Where do you stand?
How would you check whether a moral claim is true?
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Key figures
| Figure | Dates | Tradition | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| W. D. Ross | 1877–1971 | Analytic | Prima facie duties known by intuition |
| John Rawls | 1921–2002 | Analytic | Reflective equilibrium as method |
| Mencius | trad. c. 372–289 BCE | Chinese | Moral knowledge from extending natural responses |
| Mu'tazili theologians | 8th–early 11th c. | Islamic | Reason as an independent route to moral truth |
| Wang Yangming | 1472–1529 | Chinese | Innate moral knowing (liangzhi), not dependent on study |
Talk about it here
Conversations about this question in Meta-ethics:
- Existentialism can ground an ethics, and Beauvoir showed how 6 replies
- Was the abolition of slavery a moral discovery or a moral change? A teacher’s test case 6 replies
- Strong moral intuitions count as evidence, in the same way that perceptions count as evidence 6 replies
- The Mu’tazila were right: reason can know that injustice is wrong before any revelation 6 replies
- Reading group: Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), chapter one 5 replies
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Connections
→ 3.1, 3.1.1 · ↔ 2.2, 2.3, 2.2.5, 3.2 · ◇ intuitionism, reflective equilibrium, moral perception, empirical naturalism, moral skepticism · ○ Axial Age; Modern; Table 5
→ depends on · ↔ borders: genuine overlap, neither prior · ◇ answered by: points from question to answers · ○ appears in: points to the timeline and the comparisons
The full card is in the book
In The Coordinates of Thought this card goes on to a worked example that sets the answers against one case, and to where the question touches daily life — page 135.