Abstract

Most philosophers endorse our epistemic practice of evaluating beliefs and methods of inquiry as justified or unjustified, rational or irrational; far fewer, though, think our practice of moral evaluation is viable. I contend that this difference in attitude toward epistemic and moral practice reveals an underlying double standard. I argue that the standards set by influential moral anti-realist arguments are not met by our practices of epistemic justification, and that the adoption of these standards would therefore force us to abandon such things as the distinction between rational and irrational arguments, science and pseudoscience, and the like; hence, these standards are too stringent, and ought not be adopted. In addressing J. L. Mackie's charge that moral properties would have to be queer things in virtue of their "to-be-doneness", I argue that epistemological properties are no less queer, and give a positive account of the connection between moral judgment and moral motivation that avoids the worry. I then turn to Gilbert Harman's argument that moral facts neither figure in the best causal explanations, nor are reducible to causally efficacious facts. I concede this, but argue that the same is true of epistemic and social facts, and that pragmatic reasons justify our continued participation in such discourse. I next address the contention that the constitutive role of emotion in moral discourse renders morality problematically local. I argue that emotion plays no constitutive role in morality, serving only evidential and epistemological functions which entail no incommensurability. Finally, I borrow from recent accounts of normativity to suggest that all normative discourse is of a piece, and that there is no in principle distinction between moral, epistemological, semantic, and other types of normative discourse. This suggests that these sorts of discourse all stand and fall together, and that morality is therefore just as hardy as epistemology and the like.