Abstract

The work of Gabriel Marcel is retrieved and set in relation to the question of moral epistemology. I begin by surveying Marcel’s long-running critique of a false dilemma with implications for the nature of our knowledge of values. According to this dilemma, a person’s knowledge of something is either objective, and therefore transcendent but impersonal, or it is subjective, and therefore personal but immanent, reaching only one’s inner states. Applied to the knowledge of values, this false dilemma leaves philosophy with a choice between accounts of value-knowledge as scientific/objective knowledge or value-knowledge as self-knowledge. Building on Marcel’s critique of this false dilemma, I suggest a program for a Marcelian moral epistemology that identifies the comportments by which human person are receptive to values and hence to knowledge of values. Two examples of such comportment are discussed in relation to the problem of value-knowledge: exigence and fidelity.