ON KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTIFICATION OF MORAL BELIEFS

Abstract

As in epistemology, the debate between internalists and externalists about belief justification could also be applied in moral cases. We might imagine, for instance, situations in which an agent acquire moral beliefs by luck or by accident, cases where we can not say that he would be allowed to keep these beliefs. A typically externalist position would be to assert that the epistemic status of an agent's moral beliefs does not depend on what is available to that agent. By challenging the need for evidence, defended by internalists, epistemic externalism cast doubts on an epistemological tradition that goes back to Descartes. In other words, we can be justified without knowing it. Although the relationship between the problem of knowledge and moral beliefs is not new, moral epistemology, understood as a branch of metaethics, is still a field not much explored. After a brief introduction to the problem of moral belief justification, I will comment on an interesting analogy of the famous chicken-sexter case.