Abstract

The provenance of “naturalized epistemology,” so called, is too recent for the hand of Quine not to be still heavily upon it. But like its older relative, “naturalism,” it is an idea rich enough to be coveted, and protean enough to be claimed, by diverse comers with different things in mind. While Quine's version of naturalized epistemology of science inevitably furnishes the backdrop for current discussion of naturalizing moral epistemology, it is important to pause over what “naturalized epistemology” can and should mean in ethics. To what extent is Quine's example of an epistemologyofscience that helps itselfto sciencethe model for understanding knowledge of and in morality? Does it require a view of moral knowledge as reducible to, or in a fundamental way furnished by, science? Or a view of moral theory as sciencelike in some way? I argue that the appropriate analogy is instead a holistic and reflexive epistemology of morality that helps itself to moral judgments and standards seen as answerable to the experience of the kinds of shared lives they make possible and necessary. This approach neither privileges nor rejects wholesale what scientific inquiries might have to say.