Two Sources of Morality

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This essay emerges from consideration of a question in the epistemology of ethics or morality. This is not the common claim-centered question as to how moral claims are confirmed and whether their mode of confirmation gives us grounds to be confident about the prospects for ethical discourse. Instead, I am concerned with the less frequently posed conceptcentered question of where in human experience moral terms or concepts are grounded—that is, where in experience the moral becomes salient to us. This question was central to moral epistemology in the form it took among thinkers such as Locke, Hume, and Kant, and it remains of the first importance today.

The question calls for a naturalistic genealogy of moral terms and concepts. I assume that we are not possessed of an irreducibly moral sense whereby irreducibly moral properties might be revealed to us. I also assume that we human beings have no nonnaturalistic faculties of perception and cognition, and that in any case there is nothing nonnaturalistic that such faculties might register. The question, then, is what it is about naturalistic experience—what it is about experience of the kind that raises no particular worries for a scientific view of the world—that can occasion moral conceptualization and create an opportunity for the useful deployment of moral terms.

The analysis that one offers of moral terms or concepts will sometimes point to a genealogy in this sense. If one offers a noncognitivist analysis in which moral evaluation is conceived of as a species of attitudinal expression or projection, for example, then that will point to a distinctive story as to what it is about experience that occasions such evaluation.