1 PRECIS

Moral Knowledge addresses, and argues for answers to, a wide range of questions within moral epistemology, including questions about the sources of moral knowledge, the strengths and weaknesses of the method of reflective equilibrium as an answer to the question of where moral knowledge and justification come from, questions about moral testimony and moral expertise, and questions about the relation between experience and moral knowledge. It also discusses questions about the vulnerabilities of moral knowledge: how fragile it is as compared to other kinds of knowledge, and to what extent moral views are vulnerable to being “debunked” by empirical discoveries about their etiological histories. While the discussions of the specific topics in the book are relatively self-contained, there is a working hypothesis that both unifies and informs the more specific proposals: namely, that moral knowledge can be acquired in any of the ways in which we acquire ordinary empirical knowledge, and our efforts to acquire and preserve such knowledge are subject to frustration in all of the same ways that our efforts to acquire and preserve ordinary empirical knowledge are. In other words, any source of ordinary empirical knowledge is also a potential source of moral knowledge, and any threat to our ordinary empirical knowledge (or our ability to acquire such knowledge in the first place) is also a threat in the moral domain.

Rather than attempting to argue for this sweeping hypothesis directly, I focus on potential pressure points, areas where the hypothesis seems least plausible, and where the chances for its falsification seem (both by my lights and by the lights of many others) relatively high.

Chapter 2 argues that, while the method of reflective equilibrium as it is standardly characterized embodies genuine and important insights about moral epistemology and moral inquiry, it does not have the kind of epistemological significance that has sometimes been claimed for it. I argue that neither the pursuit nor the achievement of reflective equilibrium is necessary for having such knowledge: ordinary people who have never engaged in reflective equilibrium reasoning nevertheless have moral knowledge. Neither is impeccable application of the method of reflective equilibrium sufficient for conferring positive epistemic status on the resulting beliefs: given standard formulations, the method is consistent with a great deal of good reasoning about morality, but it is equally consistent with a great deal of bad reasoning about morality. Thus, on its standard formulations, the method of reflective equilibrium undercharacterizes good moral reasoning. I argue that one reason that this is true is that the method takes as starting points “considered judgments,” and subsequently yields an account that is both overly inclusive and overly exclusive.

A more promising version of the method would take as starting points moral judgments that already have some substantive positive epistemic status or standing: for example, pieces of moral knowledge, or at least, things that we justifiably believe about morality prior to engaging in the method of reflective equilibrium. An upshot is that, on its most defensible interpretations, the method of reflective equilibrium takes for granted that we have some moral knowledge (or at least, justified moral beliefs) that we do not arrive at via application of the method itself. But if the ability of reflective equilibrium reasoning to deliver new moral knowledge generally depends on our already having substantial moral knowledge from other sources, then the method itself is not a promising answer to a kind of epistemological challenge about how we are able to acquire moral knowledge in the first place.

This chapter also offers an explanation for why the method of reflective equilibrium is so popular among moral philosophers as an account of their “best practices”: namely that the reflective equilibrium process is a correct description of what happens when a philosopher critically reflects upon her moral views. The description is correct, though incomplete, insofar as it undercharacterizes the reasoning in question, by leaving out the positive normative characterization of the initial starting points.

Chapter 3 explores the social aspects of moral knowledge. The chapter begins with the idea that, in the usual case, the fact that a person will have at least some substantial moral knowledge by the time she is in a position to engage in anything like reflective equilibrium reasoning is guaranteed by the fact that she will have absorbed some such knowledge from her social environment. According to what I call The Moral Inheritance View, one way of gaining full-fledged moral knowledge is through the manifestation of our natural tendency to adopt the beliefs that are held by those around us, or that are presupposed by common practices. An upshot is that, contrary to what many have supposed, being able to justify a moral view acquired in this way by citing the reasons in virtue of which it is true is not a necessary condition of knowing it.

I go on to argue that while there are philosophically significant differences between moral and non-moral deference, the fact that someone else holds a moral view can, in some cases, give us a good reason to adopt that view as our own, even where the reasons to defer do not involve differences in non-moral information. Contrary to what some philosophers have claimed, I argue that even if it is true that ethics is not the sort of subject matter about which there could be a theoretical science, and even if it is true that morality is an a priori domain, there still may be circumstances in which it makes sense to defer to another person about moral matters.

But although deference to another person about moral matters can be perfectly appropriate, it doesn't follow that there are no philosophically significant differences between moral and non-moral expertise; the view that deference is sometimes appropriate is consistent with skepticism about moral expertise, given a natural understanding of what would be involved in treating someone as a full-blooded moral expert. I appeal to David Enoch's distinction between “transparent” and “opaque” evidence to argue that there are two significant respects in which holding a moral belief on the basis of opaque evidence is suboptimal, which do not carry over to the non-moral case. When a person holds a moral view on the basis of deference to someone whom they regard as a full-blooded moral expert, they typically lack understanding of why that view is true. But we generally expect people to be able to provide reasons in favor of the moral views that they espouse, and when one's belief that the action or practice is wrong is based on opaque evidence, one is not in a position to discharge this burden. Moreover, a person who holds a moral view on the basis of opaque evidence is not in a position to fulfill an important ideal associated with moral agency: the ideal of doing the right thing for the reasons that make it the right thing to do. Moral deference does not put one in a position to fulfill this ideal even when it delivers moral knowledge.

The final section of this chapter discusses the epistemology of moral expertise. Arriving at views about the reliability of others with respect to moral questions typically requires one to engage in substantive moral reasoning and judgment of one's own. Thus, those to whom we would attribute an unusually accurate sense of right and wrong will tend to be people whose sense of right and wrong overlaps strongly with our own, as measured by agreement with respect to specific moral issues. On the other hand, we generally will not judge that someone has a superior sense of right and wrong when it frequently leads her to make judgments that conflict with those that we are disposed to make. In the moral domain, we typically lack an independent basis for attributing genuine expertise that is comparable to the independent bases that we frequently possess in many other domains. Nevertheless, the fact that one is a member of a moral community, and thus is in a position to compare the moral opinions of others with one's own, can contribute to moral knowledge both by affording evidence for or against those opinions, and by providing feedback that can be used to condition or calibrate one's capacity for moral judgment, so that future exercises of that judgment are more likely to deliver knowledge.

Chapter 4 defends the view that experience and observation can contribute to moral knowledge in any of the ways in which they contribute to ordinary empirical knowledge. More specifically, I argue that experience contributes to moral knowledge in at least four ways: by enabling moral beliefs, by triggering moral beliefs, by confirming and disconfirming moral beliefs, and finally, by sensitizing moral judgment.

Perhaps the most controversial of these claims will be the claim that moral beliefs can be confirmed and disconfirmed by experience. I argue that even the most fundamental moral truths are susceptible to being confirmed and disconfirmed by observational evidence, because observational evidence can make one's overall view less coherent, and in a given case the most reasonable way to respond to this incoherence might involve adjusting one's confidence in a moral view as opposed to (or in addition to) adjusting one's confidence in one's non-moral views. For example, suppose S believes that her neighbor is a good person who would not engage in behavior that is seriously morally wrong, and S believes that Φ-ing is seriously morally wrong. When S learns that her neighbor Φs, it may be rational for her to respond by decreasing her confidence that ΦF-ing is wrong. Relatedly, in the moral domain, an important source of misleading evidence is this: people who are morally upstanding in other respects might engage in a practice or behavior that is in fact seriously morally wrong, in a social context in which its wrongness is not generally recognized, and this may increase rational pressure to agree that the relevant behavior is permissible. This mechanism can pose formidable practical difficulties for would-be moral reformers, who seek to convince other members of their society that some common behavior or practice is seriously wrong.

When I say that experience contributes to moral judgment by sensitizing it, I mean that experience plays a role in refining or honing one's judgment to the point that subsequent exercises of that judgment are sufficiently reliable to count as knowledge. I argue that the hypothesis that experiential conditioning plays a significant role in influencing our moral judgments offers an understanding of fundamental moral disagreement that is superior to standard cognitivist alternatives.

In Chapter 4, I also argue that attempts to account for basic a priori moral knowledge either in terms of intellectual seemings or else in terms of self-evident propositions are vulnerable to objections. An improved account of basic a priori moral knowledge combines elements of the intellectual seemings approach and the self-evident propositions approach. On this account, self-evident propositions are those propositions (if any) whose intellectually seeming true to a subject can be explained by their truth, and basic a priori moral knowledge arises when the truth of a moral claim explains why it intellectually seems true to a person who believes it on the basis of that seeming.

Chapter 5 summarizes the central claims of the first four chapters, and concludes.

中文翻译：

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道德知识概要

1 概要

道德知识解决道德认识论中的广泛问题并为其提供答案，包括有关道德知识来源的问题，反思平衡方法的优点和缺点，作为道德知识和正当性问题的答案来自，关于道德见证和道德专业知识的问题，以及关于经验和道德知识之间关系的问题。它还讨论了有关道德知识脆弱性的问题：与其他类型的知识相比，它有多脆弱，以及道德观点在多大程度上容易被有关其病因学历史的实证发现“揭穿” 。虽然书中对特定主题的讨论相对独立，但有一个工作假设既统一又为更具体的建议提供了信息：即，道德知识可以通过我们获得普通经验知识的任何方式来获得。知识，以及我们获取和保存这些知识的努力会受到挫败，就像我们获取和保存普通经验知识的努力一样。换句话说，任何普通经验知识的来源也是道德知识的潜在来源，任何对我们普通经验知识（或我们首先获得这种知识的能力）的威胁也是道德领域的威胁。

我并没有试图直接论证这个全面的假设，而是关注潜在的压力点，即该假设似乎最不可信的领域，以及其被证伪的可能性（根据我的观点和许多其他人的观点）相对较高的领域。

第二章 认为，虽然反思均衡方法的标准特征体现了关于道德认识论和道德探究的真正而重要的见解，但它并不具有有时所声称的那种认识论意义。我认为，追求或实现反思均衡对于拥有这种知识来说都不是必要的：从未进行过反思均衡推理的普通人仍然拥有道德知识。反思平衡方法的完美应用也不足以赋予由此产生的信念积极的认知地位：给定标准表述，该方法与大量关于道德的良好推理是一致的，但它同样与大量不良的道德推理一致。关于道德的推理。因此，根据其标准表述，反思平衡方法低估了良好道德推理的特征。我认为，这种情况成立的一个原因是，该方法以“深思熟虑的判断”为起点，随后产生的解释既过于包容又过于排他。

该方法的一个更有前途的版本将以已经具有某种实质性积极认知地位或地位的道德判断为起点：例如，道德知识，或者至少是我们在采用该方法之前有理由相信的关于道德的事情反思平衡。结果是，根据其最有道理的解释，反思均衡方法理所当然地认为我们拥有一些道德知识（或者至少是合理的道德信念），而这些知识并不是通过应用该方法本身而获得的。但是，如果反思均衡推理提供新道德知识的能力通常取决于我们已经从其他来源获得的大量道德知识，那么该方法本身并不是对关于我们如何能够获得道德知识的认识论挑战的有希望的答案。首先。

本章还解释了为什么反思均衡方法在道德哲学家中如此流行，作为对他们“最佳实践”的解释：即反思均衡过程是对哲学家批判性反思其道德时所发生情况的正确描述。意见。该描述是正确的，尽管不完整，因为它忽略了初始起点的积极规范特征，从而低估了所讨论的推理。

第三章探讨道德知识的社会方面。本章开头的想法是，在通常情况下，当一个人能够进行反思均衡推理之类的事情时，她至少会拥有一些实质性的道德知识，这一事实是由以下事实所保证的：从她的社会环境中吸收了一些这样的知识。根据我所说的道德继承观，获得成熟的道德知识的一种方法是通过我们自然倾向的表现来采用我们周围的人所持有的信念，或者是常见实践所预设的信念。结果是，与许多人的假设相反，能够通过引用正确的理由来证明以这种方式获得的道德观点是正确的，并不是了解它的必要条件。

我继续认为，虽然道德和非道德尊重之间存在哲学上的显着差异，但在某些情况下，其他人持有道德观点的事实可以给我们一个充分的理由将这种观点采纳为我们自己的观点，即使在某些情况下推迟的理由不涉及非道德信息的差异。与一些哲学家的主张相反，我认为，即使伦理学确实不是那种可以存在理论科学的主题，即使道德确实是一个先验领域，但仍然存在在某些情况下，在道德问题上尊重他人可能是有意义的。

但是，尽管在道德问题上尊重他人可能是完全恰当的，但这并不意味着道德专业知识和非道德专业知识之间不存在哲学上的显着差异。尊重有时是适当的观点与对道德专业知识的怀疑是一致的，因为人们对将某人视为纯道德专家会涉及什么有自然的理解。我利用大卫·伊诺克（David Enoch）对“透明”和“不透明”证据的区分来论证，在两个重要方面，基于不透明证据持有道德信念是次优的，这并不适用于非道德案例。当一个人基于对他们认为是纯道德专家的人的尊重而持有道德观点时，他们通常不理解为什么这种观点是正确的。但我们通常期望人们能够提供支持他们所拥护的道德观点的理由，并且当一个人认为某种行为或做法是错误的基于不透明的证据时，一个人就无法承担这一负担。此外，一个基于不透明证据持有道德观点的人无法实现与道德能动性相关的重要理想：出于使其成为正确之事的原因而做正确之事的理想。道德尊重并不能让人们实现这一理想，即使它提供了道德知识。

本章的最后一节讨论道德专业知识的认识论。在道德问题上达成关于他人可靠性的观点通常需要一个人自己进行实质性的道德推理和判断。因此，我们认为对是非观念异常准确的人往往是与我们自己的是非观念强烈重叠的人（以对特定道德问题的一致程度来衡量）。另一方面，当某人经常做出与我们倾向于做出的判断相冲突的判断时，我们通常不会判断她具有优越的是非感。在道德领域，我们通常缺乏独立的基础来赋予真正的专业知识，这与我们在许多其他领域经常拥有的独立基础相当。然而，一个人是道德共同体的一员，因此能够将他人的道德观点与自己的道德观点进行比较，这一事实可以通过提供支持或反对这些观点的证据以及提供反馈来促进道德知识。它可以用来调节或校准一个人的道德判断能力，以便将来的判断练习更有可能提供知识。

第四章捍卫了这样的观点，即经验和观察可以以任何方式对道德知识做出贡献，就像它们对普通经验知识做出贡献一样。更具体地说，我认为经验至少以四种方式对道德知识做出贡献：通过促成道德信念，通过触发道德信念，通过确认和否定道德信念，最后，通过使道德判断敏感。

也许这些主张中最具争议性的是道德信念可以通过经验来确认和否定的主张。我认为，即使是最基本的道德真理也容易被观察证据所证实和否定，因为观察证据可能会使一个人的整体观点变得不那么连贯，而在特定情况下，应对这种不连贯性的最合理方法可能涉及调整一个人的信心以道德观点相对于（或除此之外）调整一个人对非道德观点的信心。例如，假设 S 认为她的邻居是一个好人，不会从事严重道德错误的行为，并且 S 认为 Φ-ing 是严重道德错误的。当 S 得知她的邻居 Φs 时，她的反应可能是理性的，即降低她对 ΦF-ing 是错误的信心。与此相关的是，在道德领域，误导性证据的一个重要来源是：在其他方面道德正直的人可能会从事事实上严重道德错误的做法或行为，而在社会背景下，这种做法或行为的错误并不普遍存在。承认，这可能会增加理性压力，要求同意相关行为是允许的。这种机制可能会给未来的道德改革者带来巨大的实际困难，因为他们试图说服社会其他成员，某些常见的行为或做法是严重错误的。

当我说经验通过使道德判断变得敏感而有助于道德判断时，我的意思是经验在完善或磨练一个人的判断方面发挥着作用，以至于该判断的后续练习足够可靠，可以算作知识。我认为，经验调节在影响我们的道德判断方面发挥着重要作用的假设提供了对基本道德分歧的理解，这种理解优于标准的认知主义替代方案。

在第四章中，我还认为，试图根据理智的外表或不言而喻的命题来解释基本的先验道德知识很容易遭到反对。对基本先验道德知识的改进解释结合了理智看似方法和不证自明命题方法的要素。因此，不言而喻的命题是那些在理智上对某个主体来说似乎真实的命题（如果有的话），可以用它们的真理来解释，当一个道德主张的真实性解释了为什么它在理智上对一个主体来说似乎是真实的时候，基本的先验道德知识就出现了。一个基于这种外表而相信它的人。

第五章总结了前四章的中心主张并得出结论。