The Science of Man and Wide Reflective Equilibrium

The view that morality is a matter of divine commandments, and the view that both correct value judgments and moral principles can be derived from knowledge of the "function" of man are currently in eclipse. There have been "naturalist" writers who thought that the very meaning of value/moral statements can be expressed in an "empiricist" language and that such statements can be confirmed by the methods of empirical science. But, partly through the influence of Moore, this project has been abandoned. A recent proposal for solution of the problem of moral/value knowledge has been "ethical foundationalism," according to which ethical principles can be appraised either by appeal to self-evidence or a nonsensory form of intuition of some sort, or at least by coherence with the ethical beliefs we actually have. One recent writer says we "experience wrongness,"1 a view difficult to comprehend, the question what such an experience would be like being baffling. Some writers take the "basic data" of ethics to be just value or moral beliefs (exactly what is meant by "belief" is not specified), especially "spontaneous beliefs,"2 and say that "beliefs are our evidence."3 The beliefs, of course, are facts requiring to be explained. It has been suggested that a full explanation of them would require the postulation of "moral facts" in some sense. So it has been said that the belief "That's wrong," formed while observing a cat being doused with gasoline and then ignited, can only be explained by reference to the actual wrongness of the act. But, in fact, we need no such thing: the native sympathy of the judge, conjoined with his observation of an event of this kind, suffices. It may be held that while individual "ethical beliefs" are not evidence for ethical principles in the way in which observations are evidence for scientific theories, one can make such a claim for a whole coherent set