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A child who recoils from witnessing cruelty and judges it... — Carmelics

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Challenges→A child first being taught simple moral principles does not yet have a justification for those principles based on self-evidence

A child who recoils from witnessing cruelty and judges it wrong may be directly apprehending a moral fact, with the teaching merely directing attention rather than conferring justification.

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Reasons For

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Reason for

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1.Moral intuitions about suffering appear cross-culturally and develop before explicit teaching, suggesting direct perception rather than social construction.
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2.If all moral knowledge required teaching, we'd need an infinite regress of prior teachers to justify the first moral claim.
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3.Perceptual experiences (visual, auditory) reliably track objective features; moral responses could similarly track objective moral properties.
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Reasons Against

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Reason against

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1.Children's moral recoils correlate strongly with culturally-specific upbringing; identical situations elicit opposite responses across societies.
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2.We lack epistemic access to 'moral facts' comparable to sensory perception, and no consensus exists on what moral properties even are.
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3.Evolutionary explanations adequately account for child's aversion to cruelty without positing objective moral facts.
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Key Terms

Moral fact(as used in metaethics): Something about right and wrong that some philosophers believe exists objectively, similar to how facts about the physical world exist.
apprehending(epistemology): Grasping or understanding something mentally—recognizing or becoming aware of it.
conferring justification(as used in epistemology): The act of giving or providing a good reason or proof for believing something is true.
directing attention(contrasted with justification in this statement): Pointing someone toward something they can already perceive themselves, rather than creating new knowledge from scratch.
moral realism(Used interchangeably here with moral objectivism): The view that moral facts are objective — that is, that moral claims can be true or false independently of what any individual or culture believes

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Truth & Knowledge1 linked Skepticism1 linked

Related

A child first being taught simple moral principles does not yet have a justifica...Children's moral recoils correlate strongly with culturally-specific upbringing;...Evolutionary explanations adequately account for child's aversion to cruelty wit...If all moral knowledge required teaching, we'd need an infinite regress of prior...

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Moral intuitions about suffering appear cross-culturally and develop before expl...Perceptual experiences (visual, auditory) reliably track objective features; mor...

Details

Type: claim
Perspectives: 2 (1 for, 1 against)
Edits: 1 edit

We lack epistemic access to 'moral facts' comparable to sensory perception, and ...