Yunglong Cao
University of California, Irvine
Most of us tend to believe that we know certain moral propositions are true. Torturing for fun could be one such example. Such moral propositions can qualify as moral knowledge as they make the case of justified true beliefs. But does this give us the same epistemic confidence to claim that we have a moral understanding of such propositions? In the literature, two kinds of accounts exist in the context of moral understanding: the ‘non-reductionist’ and ‘the reductionist.’ The former argues that moral understanding is distinct from moral knowledge (Hills, 2009). The latter argues that moral understanding is a species of moral knowledge (Sliwa, 2017; Riaz, 2014). I will appeal to two arguments to defend a ‘non-reductionist’ account of moral understanding. The first argument is based on ‘epistemic asymmetry.’ Hills (2009) argues that an agent cannot gain understanding through moral testimony. Hills (2009) argues that this is because of the epistemic asymmetry that is occurring due to differences in cognitive attitudes. The second argument is based on the factivity constraint (Kvanvig2003,2009, Elgin2009). To develop my second argument, I have considered Kvanvig’s discussion on kinds of understanding- ‘propositional’ and ‘objectual’ understanding.’ The former kind can be attributed to the sentences that take the form ‘I understand that Y.’ The latter kind is attributed to the sentences that take the form ‘I understand X, where X is a body of information (Kvanvig, 2009). In the case of objectual understanding, there is a possibility of falsehoods at the periphery (Kvanvig2009; Elgin, 2007; Zagzebski, 2008). However, it is also argued that there can be cases where falsehood is at the core, and it does give understanding (Elgin2009). Objectual knowledge, on the other hand, is factive. Hence, the objectual understanding is non-reducible to objectual knowledge.
I propose to apply the ‘quasi-factivity’ argument to the case of objectual moral understanding. The overarching aim of this paper is to demarcate moral understanding from moral knowledge, as reducing moral understanding to moral knowledge diminishes the scope of epistemic achievement of moral understanding.
Chair: Marvin Thinschmidt
Time: September 11th, 18:20 – 18:50
Location: SR 1.005, online
SOPhiA 2026 