From the perspective of at least some of our valuing practices, the advance of the sciences can seem to constitute a threat. The question I take up in this dissertation is whether or not naturalism--understood as the picture of the world and of ourselves bequeathed to us by the sciences--should be understood as a threat to our moral practices, to moral living. On the account I defend, the knowledge we gain from empirical inquiry need not undermine moral living in toto, (...) although a naturalistic mindset does raise some possibly dangerous questions for particular inherited moral norms and ideals. In defense of my claim that the examined life need not destroy the moral life, I develop a social view of morality. On this view, both moral authority and moral justification are viewed as fundamentally social phenomena, and morality itself as a tool for social living. With a case study on the development of the ethics of care, I illustrate ways in which a concern for empirically truthful representations of humanity can also dovetail with liberatory political concerns. That is, I defend not only the claim that moral living can survive critical scrutiny, but also the claim that it can be enriched by this scrutiny--that the truth can be transformative. Expansive moral ideals, such as those humanist views that see progress in the expansion of our moral vocabularies and institutions, are compatible with a naturalistic outlook, I argue. However, a strong defense of humanist views, according to which such ideals flow unproblematically from the nature of reason or from the history of ethical practice, does not seem possible. A weak defense of humanism, which connects the ideals of humanists to more widely held values, seems more promising. In working socially and politically for their cause, I contend that humanists in some sense have the truth on their side: sexist, racist, classist, or otherwise inegalitarian views regularly trade in falsehoods and obfuscation. Empirically truthful accounts of particular inherited norms and ideals thus continue to be dangerous, at least for those invested in the continued existence of the corresponding institutions. (shrink)

The three integrated articles of this dissertation are concerned with the epistemic status of moral intuitions. The first article argues in favour of moderate moral intuitionism, the view that while any successful moral epistemology must be intuitionist to at least some extent, it must also take intuitions to be fallible. This is accomplished by synthesizing work by Robert Audi and George Bealer into a view of moral intuitions which is capable of overcoming some major contemporary objections against intuitionism, particularly from (...) Sharon Street and Peter Singer. The next article raises a more powerful objection to intuitionism, applying feminist ethics and moral epistemology to suggest that powerful social forces impair our ability to distinguish mistaken intuitions from reliable ones. This objection is addressed with an argument, based on work by Michele Moody-Adams and Cheshire Calhoun, to the effect that the possibility of moral knowledge and resultant responsibility allow us to retain the capacity for making this important distinction between intuitions. Nevertheless, as George Sher argues, there is still reason to think that the intuitions we rely on to shape and justify our moral beliefs contains important mistakes which negatively impact the reliability of our resulting moral judgements. This major problem, that of distinguishing helpful from harmful moral intuitions, is the topic of the third article. Henry Sidgwick attempted to develop a decision procedure for this purpose in The Methods of Ethics, positing four major criteria, the fulfilment of which would confer the highest possible level of certainty on an intuition. Sidgwick's four tests are evaluated primarily with reference to contemporary feminist scholarship, and though they constitute a promising start to a rigorous intuitionist moral epistemology, they are also wanting in a number of ways. The article improves the epistemic status of Sidgwick's tests with a hybrid Sidgwickian-feminist theory, reinterpreting his tests as values to be respected but which allow flexibility and even tension. While this approach may not be able to confer the same level of certainty as Sidgwick's, it is more respectful of the complexities and nuances of a more reliable moral epistemology. (shrink)