[...]... role and importance of moral discourse within a naturalized conception of morality and moral knowledge At the one extreme is the view that the biological underpinning of morality explains all its relevant features; at the other is the view that principled moral discussion and linguistically expressible deliberation about moral choices are essential to and completely definitive of our human experience... Dame University Press, 1994) Somewhat analogously, before appealing to circularity/regress considerations to defend the a priori character of moral principles in section II of the “Groundwork,” Kant famously argues in section I that an action has moral worth only if done from duty, from a recognition of the requirements of morality He explains in the Preface that “in the case of what is to be morally... provided by moral naturalists The objections, he explains, are especially important when understood in the context of naturalized moral epistemology, but can also be answered within that context His answers draw, in part, on Goldman’s reliabilism, and lead him to suggest a way moral naturalists may answer the fundamental question of naturalized moral epistemology Why, given the way we think morally and... and given the truth conditions for moral judgments provided by naturalists, would our moral beliefs have any tendency to be true and our forms of moral reasoning have any tendency to yield true beliefs? Margaret Urban Walker distinguishes between two approaches to naturalized moral epistemology One prioritizes scientific knowledge as the source of our understanding of moral knowledge; the other places... well Moral knowledge is the product of moral expertise or know-how acquired by learning over time how to recognize a wide variety of complex situations and how to respond to them With the aid of parental instruction and commentary and much social experience, we slowly generate a hierarchy of moral prototypes, prototypical moral situations and responses, from a substantial number of relevant examples of. .. and understanding of morality The authors in Part II defend positions between the two extremes, focusing on the contrast between biologically grounded moral know-how and the cultural expression of morality in moral discourse 24 Introduction In Part I, David Copp defends moral naturalism against four objections focusing on the divergence between the apparent content and character of our moral judgments... significance of moral discourse for locating what is distinctively moral in human morality or for the role it plays in making moral progress possible First, moral reasoning, decision-making, and problem-solving are quintessentially a communal and collaborative affair for which linguistically formulated moral principles, however summary, are essential tools in the co-operative exploration of moral space... that moral “intuition,” or non-inferential spontaneous moral belief, can qualify as knowledge Some naturalists might be prepared to adopt the quite different strategy of disregarding objections of the kinds I will discuss on the basis of the metaphysical attractiveness of ethical naturalism But such a strategy is not compatible with a naturalized approach to epistemology As we will see, naturalized epistemology. .. corresponding moral expectations be like? It is easy, of course, to think of Darwinian stories about how certain native moral dispositions might have evolved, such as a disposition to aid someone in need or to do what’s required in a cooperative undertaking Notice, though, that these are cases at best of tendencies to moral action rather than moral knowledge We can imagine attending moral feelings and moral. .. the list of moral virtues, he suggests in Humean fashion, is chiefly utility Of course, there is no reason why exemplary epistemic irresponsibility in the case of moral judgment should contain exactly the same features as it does in the case of perceptual judgment Nor is there any reason why the epistemic virtues and vices of moral judgment should be exactly the same as those for other areas of knowledge . Journal of Philosophy University of Calgary Press 2500 University Drive NW Calgary, Alberta Canada T2N 1N4 National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Moral epistemology. class="bi x0 y0 w1 h1" alt="" Moral Epistemology Naturalized edited by Richmond Campbell and Bruce Hunter © 2000 Canadian Journal of Philosophy University of Calgary Press Calgary, Alberta, Canada ISSN. can’t succeed. 1 A naturalized moral epistemology is simply a naturalized epistemology that concerns itself with moral knowledge. Since Quine introduced the concept of naturalized epistemology over three