 2016 - 2017 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 0618-3005-01 | Moral Knowledge? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| FACULTY OF HUMANITIES | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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University credit hours: 4.0
Course description
Most of us would agree that genocide (for instance) is morally wrong. But how do we know it’s wrong? More generally, how can we ever know, or at least be justified in believing, that some acts are right or wrong, good or bad, just or unjust, and so on? Are such truths self-evident? Do we perceive them by a special moral sense, akin to sense perception? Are they known a-priori, similarly to e.g. mathematical knowledge? In the course of examining these and other views in moral epistemology, we shall encounter various skeptical challenges to the very possibility of knowledge and justification in the moral domain. These skeptical arguments are based on the evolutionary aetiology of human morality, the status of moral testimony, and the (in)existence of moral experts.